Building a Multi-Million £££ Cleaning Brand - Jack & Charlie Rubin | Midnight Podcast Episode 38

In the hand sanitizer days. We were told about three days before we were going in the Sunday Times. We were like, you're going in India night. She makes a specific point. Please don't be out of stock because her readers get pissed off. I was like, yeah, it's cool. Like we've got a couple thousand bottles. Like, how big is it gonna be? It's Sunday Times, our tool came out online at 12 o' clock at night. I think by like 12:15, we'd sold out.

It was ridiculous. I've never seen anything like it.

Right, then back with another episode at the Midnight Pod. I think one episode, like 40. At this point, it's getting quite mad. We've just hired an editor and an assistant for the pod. I was just saying shit's getting real. We have Charlie and Jack from Purdy and Fig on the pod and we spent like half an hour just off camera as usual, chatting. And for once we're on gin instead of red wine today, even though it's a Wednesday, about your story. And I'm getting little bits of it, like we only very briefly, like Internet met on Twitter, like what, three days ago, something. And I was like, fuck, I need an episode this week. It sounds like a good one because I've seen your brand but I'd never seen you. And that's the magic of Twitter, which I realized, I think I'm starting to realize as well. Yeah, said you and just joined it. Even though your head, your head shot on Twitter is like a fucking Amazon. So I was trying to work out, is this guy really LinkedIn? Yeah, but yeah, I guess first question, we'll dive into a billion things as usual. There's never any like actual agenda to it, like, what's the story with the brand? How did it get started? And I guess maybe a bit of background, like what you were doing before. And then there's probably loads of different ways we can look at this and go into the whole story because it's an interesting one.

Sure, Jack, you wanna kick it off?

Go ahead, mate.

So Purdy and Fig make we. Well, we make, manufacture and sell online refillable natural non toxic cleaning products for the home. So it's a liquid concentrate, about 20 mil. You pour it into your bottle for life. You add tap water at home and you've got your multi surface cleaner spray. So it's kind of a product you use every day. Big, big market. And there's all sorts of obviously other categories that we'll be going into in the future, but kind of at the moment that's our main product line is a multi surface cleaner padding fig. Been trading about two years. We kind of kicked off during the pandemic but we'd actually been kind of working on the products for about three years before that. Yes, it's been about five years of work today but I think it's culminated in a really exciting launch of the cleaning products which is in January. And we've grown from basically nothing in terms of cleaning revenue to about 200,000amonth now within four and a half months. So yeah, it's been, it's been, that's been exciting. I think obviously we hadn't put the work in.

So you weren't selling for the 18 months prior to that?

Not cleaning, not cleaning products, no. We had a hand sanitizer which we launched in February 2020 which we've got a story about, we can go into but we were selling that. We got hooked on the crack cocaine of hand sanitizer for a year and then we finally got round to, to launching the cleaning products which. So from a base of zero in terms of that product lines revenue from zero to 200,000.

Well, the cleaning products, always the plan.

Yes. Yeah.

How did two young guys get into cleaning products?

So a mum was making. Our mum was making cleaning products in the garage with her friend.

Yeah.

And she was like teaching. They were just natural products making from like bicarb vinegar, citric acid, that kind of thing. And she was just teaching her friends how to make it in like workshops, just very casually. And then we notice like these friends would be driving like an hour on the weekend to come pick up more cleaner. We were like why are they doing this? And it turned out like these products, even though they're quite simple, they use essential oils, they smell really good and they were non toxic so they didn't have a whole bunch of synthetic fragrance, chemicals, chemicals, fractals in them that most cleaning products have. So we're like that's, that's really cool. Like there's something really exciting here. Like people were coming to workshops and so we kind of chatted about helping out and launching the brand with them and then. And then yeah, basically the hand sanitizer opportunity, it was like February at the beginning of COVID if you can remember back to them.

It's gone so quick.

And yeah, like we were like, we had this hand sanitizer, it was really good. Came out the workshops that our mum was running and we were like, why don't we just make that? It's super Easy to make. We're like six months off launching the cleaners anyway, so let's, like, make that and sell it and we can build a brand a bit, get some revenue, get some customers and launch the cleaning products. Those customers?

Yeah.

So we were like, let's try and get. Hold some alcohol. And Charlie, like, Charlie's always been a hustler. Like, he managed to hustle, like, a thousand liters of alcohol just from a whole bunch of suppliers. Like, siphoning off, like, little bits of ineos. Like million liter orders. Yeah, just, like, getting a thousand liters here, whatever. Like 100 liters here, 100 liters there. And we managed to get enough to make our first batch, like, 10,000 units. And we sold them within, like, five days. Like, we had an order from this company in Australia. I was like, yeah, we want 10,000 units at, like four pound a unit. And we were like, holy shit, we've got. We like, this is. We're gonna ride this way, baby.

So.

So what? Yeah, so then we basically bought, like, a lot more alcohol with the money.

Was that purely B2B?

No, we had. We launched the site and, like, had family and friends buy, but we hadn't, like, built a proper acquisition engine yet.

Yeah.

So it was just a few B2B orders and. Yeah, go on.

No, I just remember there was two moments. There was one I was standing in. So you had to get everything delivered somewhere. And I was like, I have nowhere to go. We have, like, huge tankards of stuff being delivered. Bottles, pallets. I was like, I have no. So we got them delivered anyway. I'm standing in the. In the, like, where the cars are parked. And then we had to buy another 20,000 bottles. And I, like, never bought that many bottles before. And I was called up. I just called up Jim, I don't know whether to buy these 20,000 bottles. Like, it's like, half our capital. And, like, what if we can't sell the product? And he was like, mate, there's ever gonna be a time right now. We'd sold those bottles within three days.

Yeah, yeah.

It was also the.

We had, like, deliveries at the beginning where we were, like, making the product overnight in the garage all night.

You're making it yourself?

Yeah, like filling with a Chinese filling, machine labeling. Yeah. And then we'd make, like, a thousand units and we delivered to a pharmacy and we, like, five grand. And we once delivered it to this pharmacy and they were all leaking, like, when they arrived because we made them overnight and we're quite tired, like, we hadn't screwed.

Did these smell nice, by the way?

They smell really good. They're really good product people love.

We won an award. We own like best hand sanitizer.

Yeah. ITV award.

Oh, shit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like we went on itv, went on BBC News, like, because we sold a million, we ended up selling a million units hand sanitizer in like eight months. So this is all the beginning of the story where like we were like capping it and we're delivering it and it was like leaking and the pharmacy was like, have you guys been up all night like making this? And we were like, yeah. And he was like, right, okay. Still took it because it was that low, like that low on.

We were getting 11x ROAS on Google. Yeah, yeah, Like a pound. And then.

Oh, and Facebook. And then Facebook was more. Facebook was like 75p cost per purchase, average order by £17. We were like, this is insane. Holy shit. And then. But then basically Facebook blocked hand sanitizer. You couldn't sell it.

Shopify shut us down.

But this, this product was fucking good. Right? So when a product is that good, and it really was at the time when there wasn't a lot of hand sanitizer out there and this is like a nice smelling spray and everyone was doing these horrible gels and we were.

Like, spray, much better.

And this is before sprays were even a thing.

Yeah.

So we just had this traction from like pr. Indian Light, which is this massive Sunday Times journalist wrote an article about us. We did like 75k in one day.

It was the same brand name, by the way, at this point. Yeah, Silperdy and Fee.

All the same brand name.

Yeah.

So we built this like over some PR stories and then some like, you know, good, good, some good marketing. I built, built a direct consumer operation, built supply chain and like that business ended up doing, yeah, a lot of units. And we didn't make any money.

No, not really. Not really.

But we made a lot of days, wasn't there?

We made a lot of mistakes. Yeah. With the margin. Yeah. So like what you learn about direct consumer when you first start, it's like your margin, product margins. Great. And you're like 75%. We're laughing. And then when you like start actually working with a fulfillment center, you've got pick pack fees. You've got like the cost of managing so many skus because we ended up building $0.03. And then we had, we had refills. You had 20 mil. 50 mil to 50 mil. We had all these different things.

We built A whole business around hand sanitizer, which wasn't the plan at all. The plan was like, let's sell a few bottles, make some cash.

Yeah. Not we. Yeah.

So just going back to get the time out of my head. So the three years prior to the hand sanitizers was that you said that was like time you spent before you launched anything?

Yes.

What was that time I spent on. Was that you. You involved or just your mum still?

That was Mum. And Charlotte, who's her. Her partner. Who Charlotte Fig. Who the company is named after.

Who still Pussy, I was gonna say. I thought it was like pets or something.

No, two people. So Purdy and Charlotte, both absolutely critical to what we're doing now as well. They're very much, very much cool. Part of what we're doing still. We work together.

Starting to make sense now.

Okay, so Purdy and Charlotte were running, basically running these workshops teaching people about natural cleaning for a few years before we got involved. We were kind of about. We were sort of say, oh yeah, we like the smell of this. We come to some workshops, learning a bit about the market. But we had other businesses. I was running a classic car auction platform and Community, which is now based in la, which is growing really well. We're going really nicely. Jack was in grocery Delivery back in 2015 before anyone. Yeah, way before. Like three years, four years. Well, yeah, about the same time gets it.

I think actually 2016 and we were like 50 minute delivery before. 15 minute delivery was a thing.

Oh, you found it.

Yeah, yeah.

There's so many mini stories to the story now.

Yeah. Raise a lot of money. Yeah. We both raised money for it and built these. Built these tech companies. Yeah.

So we've kind of. We weren't. We. We were on the sides of what mom and Charlotte were doing thing and then we, for various reasons, both personally and career wise was like, let's join forces and launch Purdy and Fig together.

Yeah.

Right. And that's. That was like October 2019. Yeah. Not foreseeing the shit show from Feb 2020. That was gonna.

Yeah. So I quit my job. I like quit my job. Charlie left.

His.

Left what he was doing. We were like in. We were in Purdy and Fig. So at that point when we couldn't launch the. Like the cleaners were a bit difficult to launch.

Yeah.

That's how the hand sanitizer came into it.

So going back, I try and be chronological to an extent.

Yeah.

It's hard at least in my head to my OCD before all that then. So you had the tech styles, etc. Did you go to uni? What was the story there? Just like going back to like 18 onwards.

Yeah, I went to uni, left school, went to uni and I had a Indian tent business at uni. So I would import canvas marquees from Rajasthan that were printed with like these beautiful blocks. They were saying block designs and sell them to people with big gardens and rent them out as well. And did that in the summers and from my desk at uni and spent most of the end of my terms out in India trying to get stuff made and having friends hand in essays and being like, this is way better than uni. And like, why am I actually at uni again?

Doing philosophy.

Yeah, studying philosophy.

Did you finish it?

Yeah, finished it, finished it, finished it. Studying philosophy. And then I went to work for a bank for the summer afterwards. And that was not me, not my cup of tea. So I actually then went to live in China for a year.

This is a colorful story already.

I love this, which was really an amazing place to live and amazing country, really interesting place.

Mandarin. And a show was filmed about Charlie in China by the Chinese national state television channel.

That sounds like someone going, disappearing.

Yeah. And they filmed a show about a quarter of foreigner abroad and it was about Charlie traveling around China as like this 20 year old who spoke like limited Mandarin.

Yeah.

And like this show's like got like tens of millions of views on YouTube in China.

That's funny.

Yeah, that was funny. And then you worked for an investor in London, kind of making seed investments with him, helping manage his portfolio. He's involved in Purdy and Fig. And then I launched Classic, which is the community and auction platform with Frank or David. And then Pudding Pig. Yeah.

And that was like a million million member community of classic cars.

So why are you not still involved in that?

Well, it's a good question.

I mean, Dave, if Dave listens to this podcast, I'll probably laugh, but because I always blame my girlfriend. I blame my girlfriend who we've now bought a house together. And I would say if only, you know, you made me, you made me stay. I would have gone to L. A because the business is an American community. So Dave moved to LA and was. And I basically didn't move to L. A And the business was not going to function as it needed with a co founder from London.

He's still on the board and so.

Still involved in the company, but not day to day. But the company's gone from strength to strength, so that they're amazing. They've sold $5 million worth of classic cars in the last few months and they're, they're scaling now. So yeah, it's really exciting for them too.

How about you? So I got very interesting backgrounds.

Dissimilar. I mean I, I had like an e commerce company when I was like 13. So selling, selling tea online.

Yeah.

Try import from China, like one of those classic things you just build from your bedroom. And that actually did quite well. But eventually we got shut down by. We got shut down and sued. Threatened to be sued by Google when I was like 14. Yeah I was like, that was quite stressful because I was like getting. We had like adsense.

Remember Adsense?

Yeah.

And at school I was getting all my mates like click on the ads on AdSense and I was making quite a lot of money for it. Like classic. Yeah. Like low level fraud. Yeah. And Google I sent this email being like, you owe us like 700 quid and we're suing you. And I was like, shit. So shut that one down. And then I had a second business at uni which was a business called Carvitage. So we pay students to have adverts in the car which, which was cool. Did that at uni for a couple of years and then left uni and launched. Well, I joined a management consultancy like Charlie and just didn't really like. Bank management consultancy, same kind of thing. Didn't really love it and met a guy at the firm I was working at and launched Ping with him which was our 15 minute delivery grocery app which we kind of raised lots of money for. Launched it at my university then in London and like, yeah, did well but it was just like pretty early in the space. Like wasn't as much like nowhere near as much money going into it. Quite an expensive model where you have to invest a lot in customer acquisition up front and basically just didn't have the experience or the cash to build it in the way it should have been built.

Yeah.

Then and like if I. It's a shame because it's like if I did then we would have built like an incredible business. But I guess you don't have the experience to have.

Yeah. Could have been the early get era gorillas.

Right.

There's so many now I don't even know.

I was like, I was like 19 and 19, 20 and you just don't actually know what you're doing at that age really. Like you're kind of very true. You're kind of trying to work it out but you don't actually have the Experience all the critical thinking, I don't think, to like work through the problems.

In front of you. Fundamentally, those businesses which are where you look at them, need in a lot of capital investment and you've also got to go and raise that money. Yeah. It's also hard for a young person to go and raise 50, 100 million quid, which is, you know, unless it's a code, as this is a tech business and you're a coder, you're a genius coder. It's like, okay, fine but so I left.

I left that business before I kind of saw it was never gonna work and I left. I had this job offer from a firm that like a venture capital firm that we had been like built a relationship, but built a relationship with. And so they offered me this job investing in seed stage companies and I was like, I don't think this is going to work. Said to my co founder, I really just don't. It's going to work. I jumped. So I left and joined that firm. But the business went on for like two years and struggled for two years and never really made it. And then. Yeah, padding fake.

Fucking hell. Yo fellas, Quick one. First bit of promo for pod. You may or may not have heard, I released a fucking E Comm course a few months ago. Basically spent like six months making it because I was in between businesses. As you probably know. If you follow my shit, I must say, 12 hours long. It's fucking quality content. I was gonna drop it like 1500 quid with some bullshit guru y webinar and all that rubbish. But as you know, it's not my main thing. I'm working on a new brand right now. Very, very fucking much in the trenches. Which is why I think it's actually a better course than everything else out there. Built on real experience of my brands in the past and my current one. I think it's super, super valuable. If you're interested in Ecom, you're already in E Comm and you wanted to get into Ecom. 0 to 1. Starting a brand from scratch then definitely worth investing in. Link is in the bio of this video or podcast, Spotify, Apple Music, wherever the you're listening or watching and enjoy the rest of the pod.

We're brothers though, so we always said we were going to, you know, want to do some businesses together.

Yeah. And we're going to build an empire together. Yeah.

Who's older? I'm older.

What's the age difference?

The age difference is five years. I was gonna make a joke about being lots old around the West.

He's 31, I'm 26.

I'm 26 as well. I feel fucking old. Christ, I've got a twin brother, but we're nothing alike. So I can't relate to going into business with my brother. Yeah, we're non identical, but I doubt he even watches this, to be honest.

So, yeah, we're very lucky.

I think I always take the piss out of him for being 31. You're 32 in October, mate.

I'm like, it'll come fast for you. Trust me. That period 28, 31 goes so fast.

I think the same about, you know, 2022-26.

26.

And like, I think it gets quicker as you get older. My parents used to say that.

But also with COVID Yeah, co is such a shame. Two years, like two. That two years of covert's gone real, real quick.

Yeah, great.

Yeah. Honestly, thinking back two years, a lot has changed. Yeah. Like so much it's probably for everyone.

So what do you think's gonna. I mean, slightly off topic, but what do you think is gonna happen to like, you have the COVID boom in. In terms of E commerce and direct consumer, do you think like obviously retail, percentage of retail to E commerce, like staying pretty flat now. Do you think it's gonna kind of stick it where it's at, keep rising? What do you think the post Covid like ecom situation is?

Yeah, it's interesting because in 2020 I was running two econ brands and it was definitely the COVID boom. All my mates were on econ brands. I could see it. I had like my biggest ever months, like. Yeah, almost exactly two years ago, like May, May, June 2020. And then Neon beach went fucking wrong. And that's. That's history. But I think, I think a lot of people that haven't built like kind of what we were saying off camera, haven't built like legitimately good operations out all the drop shippers and TikTok people that and some of which have been on this podcast, a lot of them on Twitter who are maybe less experienced like I was when I was 21. Drop shipping with mad numbers, not, not saving money, not investing in Ethereum, all this shit. I think good brands will continue to grow because ultimately it's irrelevant whether it's E commerce or retail. It's ultimately just the brand. And you know, you happen to be econ focused because that's where your customers are. If that's where they are, if they weren't there you go Somewhere else. So I find it funny when people say like, this dog's been crazy. People will say on Twitter like, I do E Com. Like, and I'm always like, no, I don't like saying I do E Comm. It's like I call myself like a brand builder. It's just I used to say that like Ecom because it's kind of like when you're getting started, it's like the buzzword or whatever. Everyone wants to be in Ecom. Shopify. Like I do Shopify. What do you fuck you mean? That's just the platform that you happen to sell your shit on.

Yeah.

But ultimately you're building a business. It just happens to be in the E commerce space. So if it's a good business, a good product, a good experience, which proper brands are, then I think it's fine.

Do you ever think about the sort of Unilever of the future in the DTC space and what that looks like? You know, who.

Yeah.

Who's gonna be the next big like disruptive conglomerate? Yeah. And, and what's their, what's their strategy?

Well, I mean you look at something like the Hook Group.

Yeah.

And their market cap's gone from 8 billion to less than a billion in the past year or something. Yeah.

So along with a lot of things like that, along a lot of public.

Yeah, the same story. All that sort of. Yeah. I think the next Unilever, I mean, I think, you know, I would like to sell my brand to Unilever in three years for 500 million quid when they realize that psychedelics are the next big thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's interesting. I don't know if big groups like that will continue to be the big group that buys out all the up and coming trendy brands or if someone's going to go and build the next big group.

Well, because right now at Purdy and Fig, we run our own manufacturing in house. We're about to bring our fulfillment in house. Yeah. So we're basically our supply chain is UK based, controlled in house. You know, the stock we purchase, like nothing. So what I'm trying to say that that's a, that's a very scalable foundation to run 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 20 brands from. Because you actually own the means of production, you actually own the infrastructure that services the brands. You're never paying for someone else to do the stuff that your brand needs to do to, to, to like fulfill customers.

And so, but, and also the bigger that factory gets, the more, the bigger that factory gets. The more efficient it becomes and the better economies of scale you get.

So I, we, you know, I think we're quite keen on as a strategy for growth longer term. Not just like sales growth, like empire growth.

Yeah.

Actually building the infrastructure that you need to scale econ brands.

The thing we realized when we're doing the hands down and when we had the margin issues was the, your margin actually builds your business. If you've got a high mod, it's when you have low margin months and you'll trade like a hundred thousand and you're like I've got 30k from that, let's say a low bargain month. Like, well if you can't make, you actually really can't make money doing that. Really hard to make money doing that direct to consumer especially. And if you can build those margins and focus on, well that's what Charlie's whole focus is. But focus on those efficiencies and that supply chain. It's so powerful because that's all basically net contribution you can use on marketing at the end of the day. Pour that into growth.

Yeah. I mean there's an interesting debate about like in house stuff and like outsourced. Like for example, I was having like a debate with someone on Twitter the other day. So it's fucking Twitter. And I've never, I've always used third party warehouses, three PLs. And that's what I'm doing now. And I can't see that changing because in my mind the shit I should focus on is nothing to do with that. I should benefit from the economies of scale of a big fulfillment expert that knows all that shit. Nor do I want to do that shit. I want to focus on fucking ramping the shit out of this. Out of the sales.

Yeah.

Which is what I'm good at. But yeah, it's interesting. I wonder like when, at what point does if, and does that make the business more valuable if it's all in house, especially like manufacturing, like fucking are you literally. You're talking like tubs of fucking liquid.

Yeah, we do all our own buying of ingredients. We store them, we mix them.

We've got, we've got like a, like a 10 foot long automated filling machine labeling cabinet.

Yeah, Semi automated, like two people operated and we fill up 10. We can fill up to 10,000 bottles a day. Fill at the moment like 2 to 5,000 a day. And yeah, we do all of that and then we pack our own boxes for our ecom deliveries as well. So we really have a full end to end operation in house. Already we're just adding the courier collection on at the end soon, which is historic. We haven't done because last mile and like, customer delivery is so important. So having a really sort of smooth operation as regards to customer gets their order than 24 hours of delivery. Amazon built the whole business effectively off that in some ways. Well, the whole brand anyway.

And our three PR was like, seriously fast. So we would get orders delivered.

Literally.

24 hours after people.

You're currently using 3PO?

We are, yeah.

Yeah.

Just the last. The last bit. We're using Synergy.

Oh, no. Synergy.

Yeah. Okay.

Yeah, My mate. My mate uses them. I spoke to Gary before.

Yeah.

Small world. Yeah, yeah.

They're good, though.

I've never used them.

Who's your mate that uses them?

I think. Trying to think if I can't say. Fred from Tsunucci.

Oh, yeah, we know Fred.

We did some.

That's funny. Jewelry.

He's like one of my best mates. Is he?

Shut up.

We built.

I lived with him for two and a half years.

You joking?

We built a whole thing for them. The tech thing.

Such a small world for Synergy as like an interface.

Because he used to use James and James, who I used to use, who I'm, by the way, now switching to as of this week because I launched with another 3PO. It was fucked up massively. They don't know yet. They will know now. But you know Fred. Yeah, you met him.

Yeah, A couple of chats on Zoom. Because we built a tech. Tech interface for them between their Shopify store and Synergy. Yeah. To help pick products, the bundles. It was like a bundle builder.

Yeah. Which is now an app that we have. A Shopify app.

Yeah.

I think they replaced, actually. I don't think in the end it worked that well for them, from what Shashi told me, because they replaced it.

That's so mad.

Yeah.

You've met.

I remember that they. They smashed it. They absolutely killed it.

Yeah.

As far as I. Yeah. I'm not going to comment on the numbers. I know, but the. They are big.

Yeah, yeah, we saw them.

Now he's yet to come on the podcast. He's been a highly requested guest. We spent two and a half years living together in the trenches. Then he got really rich and my business went bankrupt.

He had like a. Cool.

He's an investor in my thing now.

Is he nice.

So is Ollie, actually.

So Ollie and Joe.

Yeah.

So I got a load of my mates to invest in my thing.

That's smart. That's smart.

Yeah. That's Funny.

Such a small world, this D2C community.

It is, isn't it?

I mean, like, everyone in this fucking community watches this pod. I swear they're all going to be on it.

Yeah, yeah. The bundle app was quite funny because it was like we were having this issue of, you know, you're not selling any bundles yet, but, like, it's quite difficult for the fulfillment center to read the orders from Shopify.

Yeah.

When you've got, like, lots of different skus put together, picked on, on tap. So we built this app that, like, made it really simple for the. The film center read, which they used and a few other things we used as well.

So while just briefly on that, then why would you move from synergy to doing it in house? Like, is it. Is it purely a margin thing?

Money.

Yeah. I mean, three PL's or you can dive into it.

I mean, basically our. Our business is low. Aov. High ltv. And so our orders are. Our fulfillment fees are quite high percentage of our order. So, like most. Com. Most good companies will have 6 or 7% fulfillment fees. Right.

Fulfillment delivery at least. Maybe I'm getting ripped up.

Yeah, well, yeah. I mean, a good target to get to like 6 or 7% odds, like 20, 22 or something. Because. Because we're low AAV and we're subscription.

Oh, okay.

And so I was gonna say, if.

You'Re 6%, that's mad.

Yeah, no, we're 22 right now, so we can shave. We can shave a pound off per order, which is 10. Like 10 margin.

Yeah.

My gross margin. Or is it 10%? Yeah, 10 gross margin. Like, that's big for us. So the whole. The whole factory came about because we couldn't, like, physically make the products any other way, because every cleaning manufacturer we spoke to were like, we will not use these ingredients. These are cosmetic ingredients. They do not work in our machines. We refuse to do it. We were like, right, how are we going to do that? Let's buy a fitting line. And so that's kind of how it came about.

Yeah. Sick.

Yeah, isn't it?

It's come about very organically.

It was just like, we need to buy food line. All right, can we find 20 grand?

Well, actually, even taking a step back further than that, it was in the hand sanitizer days. We were told about three days before we were going in the Sunday Times. We were like, you're going in India night. She makes a specific point. Please don't be out of stock, because her readers get pissed off if they try and buy the Product. You're like a nice problem. Yeah. I was like yeah, it's cool. Like we've got a couple thousand bottles. Like how big is it gonna be? It's Sunday Times. It was like after we came out online at 12 o' clock at night. I think by like 12:15 we'd sold out.

It was ridiculous. I've never seen anything like it.

We were like okay, okay. So we haven't got enough product obviously. Can't turn off shopify store anyway. So we had a delivery of finished product from a filler in Liverpool coming in because it's cheap to get stuff filled up in Liverpool. And they were like oh sorry mate, Dettol have come in or some big clients come in and we're like it's gonna be a couple of weeks. I was like I haven't got a couple of weeks. I already owe like 20,000 bottles right now.

You let people pre order effectively.

Yeah, we were just like we'll be taking the orders. We'll get, get. We'll get it done.

Yeah.

So what do we end up doing?

All the liquid. I just said ship me all the liquid. I bought 100 pound filling machine off Amazon and I called like 4 people and was like, I need you, I need Charlie.

These four people spent like literally four days in a garage. I'd say 17 hours a day just filling it out and filling bottles every second of every day.

A kind of video.

The other day it was some future documentary.

That's great. And then, and then Jack. Not this Jack, another Jack. Who's one of the guys that was there for that experience.

One of those four guys?

Yeah, he's now our production manager in the factory. He was like.

That was his job interview.

Yeah, exactly. Those four days.

How long can you stay? Like how late can you stay?

We were sitting around doing it. We were like this actually like we can so do this guys and it's quite fun. Yeah, yeah. So then we bought a filling line. Well anyway, then we try to get clean products made in certain ways that wouldn't do it. So we're like well let's do ourselves. So then we built the packing team because we realized the three pl we got lower fees if we put everything in the box first rather than them putting everything in the box because you're paying for that time.

A starter comes with like three refills. A bottle for life. A cloth thing in a box.

So then once you get that operation pumping you realize the extra money you're paying to literally put a label on a box. Is silly money to be spending. You could easily do that yourself. So that's what we're now finding. But it's very, very important. So all the processes around it and all the kind of courier collections and the accounts, they have to all be in order. So it's like completely an operational piece of execution. So it's like we're kind of ready now where we can scale and do the same about the same time. So that's the kind of the final piece of the jigsaw that's coming in. And then we'll basically own our own supply chain which is.

Yeah.

Which tools is pretty cool.

Yeah, that's cool. Do you think coming from this is quite like Sophie, a pretty stark contrast from having like selling your soul to like the corporate world potentially, which a lot of people. I nearly did that. I did work experience in M and A wearing a suit in Mayfair when I was 19 and I was like, fucked out. Never again. But then, then you obviously went into like somewhere in between, which is like a different sort of startup where you raise a load of money but necessarily make any money ever until you get acquired.

Yep.

Or you die. And now obviously you're building a solid econ ecom business. Like why did you decide to commit to this? Were there other opportunities, like outside ecom, also in ecom. But you decided it. We're gonna go into like cleaning stuff that smells really good aimed at middle aged women. It's a great story.

It's a great question. I was thinking about it.

Well, it all started because me and Charlie sat down at a pub over Christmas and we were having a drink and we were like, I was hating vc. I was like, I was hating. I was like all these pictures. I was saying like 20 pictures a day, like coming through my email and then like 73 pictures of founders. And I was like, I just want to be on that side. I don't want to be on this side. I want to be on that side. Like, what am I doing? I'm like 20, I'm like 23. Like get me on that side. And we, I said this Charlie and we're like, okay, we're going to do something. Like if we join forces with the way we like talk about things, we just think we're going to be able to solve any problem. It'll be sick. Let's just do it. So that decision was made, wasn't it? We were like, we're going to do something. And then I. Our mom, who's like insane, like she's an incredible Person who has always been so ahead of her time on every trend you can imagine. She was like doing it 10 years before. I can't even tell you. And she had these products and we were like, they're so good. We know they're so good. And we knew that a great product was a foundation of everything. So you don't have an opportunity to launch a business where the product. You can read our reviews. Like, there's four and a half thousand five stars.

Yeah. So that's impressive.

There's a lot. And people love the product. Like 90% people stay on subscriptions like they love the product and it's because it's a fucking good product. And we could see that. And we were like, that's. And we cared about the things. It was our mums. And we were like, just makes sense.

Unless you have a different perspective. That's right. I think. And then, you know, why is it set up like it is now? We could set things up very different if we chose, if we wanted to. I think the people. The people are a big part of it as well. You know, you kind of. You go with enjoyable. So you kind of build things around people as well. You don't just build things around. We're not like robots where it's like, oh, you know, not everything's a cost benefit analysis or. Yeah, 5% here.

It can feel like that sometimes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, you got to make money at the end of the day, but.

Yeah.

It's not just about that, is it?

Yeah. Like, we jump on a call with my mom and her best friend and we're like, laundry next year. Right. What we got? What we got? Like, where we at with it? They'll briefly. They'll tell us. And that's great. And they keep working on it.

Yeah. On the good product point. And I've got so many fucking questions now because so many areas. I think the problem with like the whole, like E Comm community, which is more like dropships and stuff. I was kind of saying before, which I used to be. It's a great way to get started when you're like 19 or whatever, but I think. I think people fundamentally forget that.

Yeah.

Like, the product needs to be good. And like, I didn't get that right in the past with. When I first launched my jewelry brand, for example, which is probably something I never actually spoke about. I launched it. The product ended up being delivered to the three POs, like October 2019, 2018. And it wasn't what I thought it was. It was like Way shittier quality. And I had to fucking cancel everything and start again like five months later, which is much better quality. But like. And then I guess with the fucking neon sign thing, the product was good, but then the customers, customer service was shit because shit was taking six weeks and then eventually fucking 7,000 orders disappeared at 300 pound a piece. So that was a problem.

Yeah, yeah.

So like obviously product is the first thing, but service as well.

And I think I'll never forget watching, I never know how to say his name but Moz Ali and in an interview where he said he launched native and the repeat rate was 30% and he had his like his AOV had a CPA like all that was set, but the repeat rate was 30%. He was like, it's good. That's a decent repeat rate on pay as you go.

Yeah.

But not bad over like, let's say I don't know what the time frame was to be fair. But then he went in and did another round of product development and he spoke to the customers, learned about the product and solved the problems. And then this V2 product had a 50% repeat rate and he said the economics of the business completely transformed from a 20%, from a 30 to 50% lift. You suddenly had so much more capital to put into growth. Your CPA targets can change. That opens up whole new channels for you. Like if you want to do direct mail or different advertising channels because your CPA targets increased, then that builds a whole marketing funnel and it can be that simple. It's like small margins are going to make that difference. I think a lot of people make the mistake of thinking, I've got my product, the repeat, the repeat rate is a repeat rate and there's not much I can do about it. But we found with the cleaners and the hand sanitizer both that if you talk to the customers, find the problems and solve them, it does like massively move the dial on that repeat, right?

Yeah.

And it's definitely worth doing. I don't think.

Is it fundamentally a subscription business? Yeah, that's how I've set this thing up.

I know. So how many people are buying? I saw that. And what's the subscription take up rate?

So since Launch it's been 15%.

Fifteen percent, yes.

Which, I mean, I don't know that's good or bad. I mean obviously I was surprised that anyone was subscribing until. Because you can buy it one time and then it's 20% cheap on a subscription. Yeah, I'm already changing a lot with the subscription offer, because I want to test like quarterly billings for pay up front, obviously, all that sort of shit. There's loads you could do with it, but ultimately if someone subscribes at 40 quid a month, roughly, which is what it is for a year, do you want. Is that your fucking TV is like 500 quid?

You want subscribers?

Yeah, yeah, 100%. I want that to be like Huela or Athletic Greens.

Are those subscribers coming on first order or. They're coming having tried the product.

Well, it's only when you launched five weeks ago, so first order. Yeah. It's only this week we started to have rebuilds on subscription, so. So the ROAS blended. It's already gone up this week, noticeably. Five weeks in, we're only spending like a grand a day on ads because I'm limited on stock.

That'll be so nice. And that builds. That is going to be so nice.

Yeah.

When you have that.

But that's the thing I'm already noticing, like the product reviews have been like relievingly good because there's always a bit of like. I think the product's good, but the market will tell me.

Yeah, yeah.

There's been probably 5% of people have been like. The most common complaint actually has been. I don't think it works. Like, it's not making me. I don't know. Because part of the problem with branding it in that way is that you're. There's an element if people probably over expect that. They think they're going to have a trip almost. But it's like it's a legal product that's regulated. There's only so much you can feel. But yeah, we get reviews now being.

Like, my home's not transformed to a spa because that's all like on all our landing pages.

A refund. Even though they love the product.

I know, I. You're like, yeah, your home doesn't smell like it. Like your home's not transformed to a spa. Like there's a bit of kind of.

There's not a receptionist now in your car.

Yeah. You're not going to get a massage mate next to wor.

Yeah, it's very true.

But it's so true because that's like the metric I'm looking at most is well and will be going forward is people buying it again.

Yeah.

Because then it becomes. Especially with one SKU. For now, it's almost like a SaaS business.

But bad because I just think my view on product is that the best products make you. It sounds really obvious. It's not actually very profound, but it's really true that good products make you want to use them. They make you want to do the thing if you've got a great pair of shoes, you want to put those shoes on, you want to go running, you want to walk around them. If you, you know, you see our product from. Well, this is what customers say is what I feel when I use our products is I want to actually wipe the surface. I want to actually clean, actually enjoy it. Yeah, it's so simple. It's like the ipod made you and this was the best of, I'm looking at the moment, which is from the guy who created the ipod with Steve Jobs and he was like, it made you want to listen to music. It was like that simple. And I just think there's something that's really, really simple but true. And it applies to any product, whether it's a piece of art, whether it's a, if it makes you enjoyable to do that thing, you're going to use it, you're going to like it, going to want to buy again. And that's like at the heart of it ultimately. So there's no any anyone can, can work on that. You don't have to be like, you don't need to go to uni, don't need to have anyone can work on that.

Well, so many products are commoditized and like that's what we saw in cleaning. So many it goes down to like cost cutting and just getting the job done of the product and it completely loses any of the magical. Yeah, like why do you actually everything you live your whole life trying to look for basically like nice experience and comfort and then you've got this horrible like Dettol cleaner that makes your home smell horrible and you're like, you hate using it. It's like, it's like for an extra pound. That experience could be so different and there are so many industries where that applies. I think like so many consumer products where that applies. It's just like supermarkets have completely changed the mindset of the product. And actually for our category it was the ad agencies and the, the 50s and 60s that made housewives feel like they had to make their homes like sparkling with antibac bleach based products. After war they had this like massive industrial. The industrial revolution led to a lot of chemicals and petrochemicals being used in cleaning and like it's as simple as that. And that's what drove the, the innovation in cleaning and like the development of cleaning and then like, hang on, why is everyone using products that are horrible? And I know we're going back to our product here, but, yeah, it's all kind of part of the thinking. Right.

I want to change topic briefly then, before, because there's so many different things I want to discuss. I want to come onto the whole fundraising thing. I mean, I don't know how much you want to or can talk about that, but we're gonna dive into that because I have gone down that route with my new brand. I literally noticed, just because on your LinkedIn, the fucking Crunchbase link, that you raise some money when, why and how did you do that?

How did you get on Crunchbase?

It was on Crunchbase. It was on the LinkedIn page. Because I was looking at your company and employees and shit. I'm on Crunchbase. You can put on yourself. Yeah, you can put on 100 million. I think they might have to verify.

That, but no, I don't. Yeah. Jack, when you talk about fundraising. Yeah, because you've obviously got.

Yeah, well, we both.

Previously.

Yeah, we both got experience. I mean. Well, I guess, yeah, we've raised a fair amount of money, actually. Probably. What?

What, in our lives?

Well, no, in this business. Yeah, probably a couple million quid.

Yeah, probably.

Which is cool. Investors are funny. I mean, we're so. We've had some bad experiences and like, the wrong investor is a complete shit show. A complete and after shit show. Because if they don't understand what you're doing and they understand, like, the fundamentals of how you're going to build your brand and hack cost money sometimes to do at the beginning, then you can have like someone down your neck who's got actual control in your business and when it comes down to it, can influence other investors. They can influence decisions through, like voting and stuff.

They can undermine your confidence and.

Yeah, massive confidence. So we, we were on a roll after Hansan and we wanted to push on and keep growing and we had an investor who. Who really knocked our confidence. So I won't name obviously, and like.

Essentially, were they on prior to hand sand?

They came in during the height when we needed cash in hand san. We brought in some cash because we were like. It was like ridiculous and we need like half a million. Half million quid. And we brought in half million quid and he was the main guy and the. Was behind that. And we met him pretty cold. We didn't really know him and it wasn't a good fit and at a time when we should have pushed on and we if we done so, things would have been probably a lot further ahead than where we are now. We push, we pulled back and we started like reducing spend, even though the fundamentals are good. We reduce spend, we reduce overhead, we cut back, we, we change our ambitions.

And why, when you just had cash injection?

Well, we, we didn't have as we had a slight margin issue which left us with slightly less cash than we thought we were going to have.

Yeah, yeah.

But it was more that the, the growth plan that we had kind of had people on board with, thought we were going to be executing, required more cash and we, we weren't then going to get that cash.

In terms of getting that investor on, though, were you selling them a vision on hand sanitizer, cleaning stuff?

But we hadn't, we hadn't even developed them yet. Yeah, it was still handsome. Yeah, but, but they also did invest in a business that was handsome. This was early on in covert, where we didn't know how long this thing would be going on for as well. So we've had that experience and then like the other side of it is we've now got investors who are on our board, we've got a chairman. We just, we just close around, like to keep, like to go much bigger. And it's great. Like, everyone's aligned, you can invest. Everyone understands like unit economics of what you're doing and the investment required, especially in subscription. Yeah, so. So it's great.

Yeah.

So did you eventually buy the original guy out or what?

No, not yet.

What we actually did was we, we managed to get a chain. He never watched it, so it's fine. But he managed to get.

You have to speak about decals.

That's fine. Anyway, the point in fundraising I think generally is, yeah, it's really important to kind of, you know, do your DD on the person because it's very tempting. And I don't know who will be listening to this, you know, who hasn't raised money before? So I don't know how much, I mean, how much interest it is to people. But you do. You do your DD on an agency, if they're going to work for you, do your DD on a supplier. Like, it's really easy. It's actually way easier to take someone's money than you think into a business and like, you don't really think about. And yeah, you know, you know, I'll probably do it again. I'll probably make the same mistake that.

I'm doing right now.

I'll do it again. Because it is really hard when you know when you want money and then to be like, oh, you kind of feel a bit precious. Oh. But I don't know if I really like you. I'm not really sure like you get it. Like you're like, fuck off, just take the money if I can get on with it. But at the same time you've got, you're getting married to that person for. Effectively.

So.

Yeah. And they're part of your business, like an actual part.

So all your investors to this one, are they all angels? We got funds involved.

We got all angels and one fund that's closing shortly.

Yeah.

Finishing dd, which should be fun.

Yeah.

So we're just close. We're just closing around. Which is a big part of the two minute I mentioned which is all going to be coming in.

Right. And on the subscription side then, because that's the converse, that's the plan I've had for my business and it'll probably be another conversation I have in a few months time with my current investors and we're already kind of talking about it because obviously the beauty of subscription is that the LTV is potentially massive.

Yeah.

But if your CAC's higher than your one month payment then you have a problem in the short term, basically.

Correct.

So how is that, how has that been for. For your business and how is it now? And like in terms of just the basic economics of your situation.

Yeah, I'm happy to. I mean it's really thing we spent a lot of time on so. Well, if you're, if you're. You've got to really look at it with a cold, a cold heart in terms of the numbers because you. It's easy to trick yourself when it comes to unit economics that it's better than it is.

Yeah.

So once you actually take out that margin and all the costs associated with delivering that product, it's, it can look very different to.

Yeah.

To when you kind of say this. Kid yourself. Right.

Any econ brand making 10% net, like actual net is doing well.

So. So looking at net contribution on the order is like really important. And actually work out what the net contribution is from a customer after their first order and then after two months, three months and etc. So then the second thing you need to do is you need to actually measure how that works, how that plays out and get hard data on what your contribution margin, what your contribution over three and then six months really is. And then you can form your CAC ceiling or your CAC target based on that. And I think that's that's really, those steps are really important to go through and the general rule and, and what we've got an Advisor who's built £100 million worth of subscription businesses. Naked Wines and what else he done love Film Charles Terror. Not a subscription. But he like really built a lot of great businesses and grays and he's like six months you want to be, you want to be like, that's the absolute limit for payback, net contribution payback. And three is great for a subscription. And then if you can get to a year with half of your original subscribers, that, that half will basically stay with you for three years. You can predict they will stay with you for three years. Broadly, I mean it might be different for different business. The churn will get really flat. And so at three, at three months, if you're breaking even great at six, it's okay, it's gonna be harder and then you're gonna have, if you can keep your subscribers and then your churn flattens out, you're gonna have a really good business. And then you need to be targeting 3 to 5x contribution margin on your CAC over that three years.

Yeah.

So that's like broadly the guidelines he set out for us, which was really helpful for us in doing a lot of our early unit economics work that we're, that we're proving out. And then from a cash situation, it's really, really hard because if you're low aav, especially like we are, you do need to have, well theoretically you need to have a fair amount of cash. If you're our CPA, I don't mind sharing. It is 15, blended is 15 pounds.

That's cheap.

But the, but the AOV is 15 pounds. It's actually 19 pounds.

So that is low. Yeah, that is low to be fair.

Yeah, it's good aov and we can dive into why it is a good cpa. It's dive into why. But that's still, you're still losing quite a lot of money. Like if you take into account VAT and mod and fulfillment and delivery and everything, cost of goods and everything and creative production, it's, it's. You lose fair amount of money. However, we know we break even on the second hit of the subscription. So that's after three months. So what we're now trying to plan for is from a cash perspective, if you can finance the inventory and the marketing on a 90 day term, you can get your second hit on the subscription before you pay for the customer.

Yeah.

And before any cost associated to the customer. So your cash conversion, it completely flipped and you're getting. You're essentially breaking on the customer. For our model, which is Great. Which is 90 days.

Is it quarterly billing model quarterly billing.

You're breaking even the customer and you've got the cash from the customer before you pay for the marketing spend. The way we're doing that is payment terms of Facebook 30 days and then a 60 day rolling credit on the spend which we're doing through some like Clear bank type stuff. And there's other, other ways credit cards.

You can literally as simple as using credit cards.

Amex is 54.

Yeah. Like unlimited my MX for years.

The business one gives you the gold one is like. Yeah, it's great.

So it's great.

So a bit of a ramble. But basically take those steps and then set some guidelines and be confident in your CPA target. Once you've got the data, be confident in it and then drive for growth towards that target. Like this is my ceiling. I will spend the money if I can because that customer is going to make money in this much time and then they're with me for three years.

And what you, what you might need up front, a little bit of cash before because you've got to build your revenues to a size which the clear banks and wayflyers and parkers of this world.

I spoke to Pipes the other day.

Yeah, we're talking pipe. Yeah.

I had a call with them yesterday actually and they said Mud Water, one of their new clients.

No way.

They shouldn't have told me that. But no, they shouldn't just weasel out of them.

But like then they become meaningful. So you might need a bit of cash up front but I think, oh.

Well, you need cash to prove out the economics.

Six months of numbers. But you need to sit in the conversation. Yeah.

So also you'll have with your suppliers, you'll probably have potentially no relationships with them. So you've got to build time to build them up and all that.

Yeah.

So you need a bit of cash. I think our learning is like you don't need to fund Ecom D2C companies even at scale with equity fund. With equity diluted funding, you don't actually need to do it.

No.

And you really don't. We, we haven't even fully worked through all the debt options but because of.

Shit like Wayflyer, Pipe, Clear Bank.

Yeah, yeah. Massive part of it.

Well, yeah, I'm just working on like working on supplier terms and working on that side of things, which is the bore, like not the.

Not as sexy Right.

It's not sexy, but if it means you can grow at the scale you want, get the stock in, not go out of stock and not get dilute your equity state, great.

I was having this exact same conversation with my supplier today. So when I put an order for 15,000 units in, I'm only five weeks in, but that's like half a bank account. So I just said to him, look, I'm your biggest fucking client in 12 months. You know it.

Nice.

So, yeah. And they want 80% up front first. Now we're down at 50%.

That's good.

Now I'm trying to get the unit price down and haven't fucking replied to me.

That's good. Nice.

But.

But I've done this shit before, so. Yeah, you have to pull every string where you can. I think it's about getting people on the side.

Like, the thing is, you've done that, you've done these businesses before and every. When you do them, you learn all these things. I always think it's. It's really unbelievable how much like learning is built on each other. And like every single thing you do is like, okay, those are three lessons. And especially from Pinger, I've got like. I referred. We refer to our previous businesses all the time. Like, yeah, just like. Oh, yeah, remember that? Okay. Don't do that again.

So based on what you just said about not needing XD funding.

Yeah.

Why did you go down the extra funding route? Because my argument to that, people said it to me as well. And my argument was it wasn't actually about the money. I didn't really need the money to get started at least maybe to scale in six months, whatever. But for me, it was actually because of the shit that happened in the previous business. I wanted to have people with experience on side. And it was also part of the whole strategic narrative, which is a term of my kind from Alex Packham, like setting the business up to get acquired by the right fund in three to five years. And I thought having the right investors who've got certain track records, like ones that I just mentioned, is like kind of social proof in a way. It's social proof not to customers, but to an acquirer or another investor.

I think I've. Honestly, we've only. I've only. Well, we've only just become smart to these new methods at the scale that we're at now.

Yeah.

So we'd already embarked on the equity route because it's like also cash up front and it requires less work on your actual business model. And Finances, which is not like our strongest suit. But Jack's actually worked out most of it so I think we're also discovering it. I've thought equity was the way forward but actually it's not for this kind of business. Tech business. Different. Different, different question.

Yeah, well, cash. There's two other points though. Cash. It all comes down to what you're using cash for. So if we're going to build our sales through essentially advanced cash flow, so a good cash conversion cycle, the cash we've got in the bank can be used on whatever we want it to be used on. And if you're building a brand that you want to get, if you're building a real brand, you want to be acquired or you want to become a national brand, you're going to have to invest in things that take a long time to pay you back. You can't always do everything direct response, put a pound and get two pound back and it opens up opportunities to do that. It also opens up opportunities like your team that you're building. So it's, we've always been pretty lean but the team you're building means much more than just like the efficiency of what you're doing right now. So you could, you could like get more efficiency maybe hiring an agency to all your creative right now. However, building a team that, that can develop and iterate on creative in house which is not as efficient now and will cost you cash up right now, could pay off in a year's or two years time by having this incredibly well trained team of people who understand your brand and understand all the learnings of all the creative ever produced by scaling with you. So you can't, you have to think short term and long term about all these decisions and the cash equity gives you the ability to make those kind of decisions which I think if you're building a real business, not like a drop, drop shipping thing that we discussed that that is really helpful, really powerful.

Yeah. So you just don't need equity funding for scaling, marketing and inventory purchasing basically. But you will need cash.

I guess it comes down to the difference in like OPEX and Capex which, which is only a term I learned like a month ago and yeah, just like stuff that's going to pay off long term.

I guess the better way to put it then maybe is you don't need as much as you think you do. You might need some equity funding. We don't need as much.

Yeah. But the other thing is you need a bit to prove out your model and then get, get the get the financing. So it's chicken and egg problem. Like classic chicken egg problem.

Right.

Yeah, that six months of data. You've got to, you got to have some cash to start. I mean I've never. The fully bootstrapped model is brutal. I mean it's slow. It's really slow and yeah. Do you want to do things a bit faster?

I guess.

Yeah, yeah, I definitely agree. So how does the business look day to day then now? So I guess two sides I think firstly like customer acquisition which you mentioned during our drink top up break. How does that look? Because that's probably the, the part of Ecom DTC that is spoken about most certainly on like YouTube and shit. Obviously we've covered some of the more in depth stuff as well.

Sure.

You said you're running all the ads and you said I have been. Who are now fucking sponsored by the way.

Pick up triple. Yeah, I check my triple. More than Shopify now. Yeah, so. So customer acquisition, like it's three. There's three parts for me. Well, well first is a formula. Right. So it's like your cost per click and your conversion rate. And it's like really? It's that simple? I'm working on those two, those two things for me it's like really simple. Stepping back a sec is like how do I best influence those things? Those two things. And it comes down to channel number one, like your channel you're using and how well it aligns to your customer. The second is the offer. For me I think the offer is the biggest lever most people don't pull. And if I was advising anyone who's even struggling with our customer acquisition but wants to supercharge it, I would tell them to start playing with offers like really hard and playing with offers that are custom built into landing pages direct to checkout. And then the third is creative and I put them in that order because I do think they're in order of importance. And you just got to constantly the problems in front of you compared to other industries I do not think are that big. Like if I compare the work in, in those three areas compared to other things I've worked on in the past, the problems are not that difficult to solve. It takes just understanding what you're doing and massively iterating, having iterative approach and creating like a foundation that you can move the dial on these, these three areas. And that's, that's been the secret to lowering CPA for us from 60 to 15.

60 to 15.

Yeah, from. From 60 to 15. And that is over only five months. And like, I think we can keep going down. I think we can get it down to 7 or 10 and then. And then 7, 6, 5. I mean, and that really does transform the business.

Maybe say something about how. Yeah, people have not how Facebook's changed and people need to adapt.

Spin that mic in a little bit.

Yeah, Facebook. I mean, Facebook. I mean, if you're a media buying, Facebook's changed a lot, as we all know.

Yeah.

But I mean, I think a lot of the old. A lot of the agencies are using old tactics still and try to hack the system. And it's really. You got to keep things really simple and focus on creative and broad audiences. Yeah. I'm sure everyone. That's quite a common thing that people are saying and it's genuinely true. We found way more success with broad. Like when we used to have agencies doing our ad buying, I would always compete against them in either in the same ad account or a different ad account.

Do that as well.

And yeah, it's like really satisfying. And. And because I can jump. I can jump on a call with them in a week and every week and they can like, feed me all this.

Yeah.

And I can be like, I'm spending three hours a week in here and this is my cpa and look at yours and like, you're fired.

Yeah.

And I. It's like that. That is quite powerful, I think, with agencies who do bullshit a lot. But all these agencies, they're. How can you be an agency trying to run people's customer acquisition and not do creative? I literally cannot understand that model anymore. It doesn't make any sense.

Yeah.

You're not adding any value. You've got to do. You've got to. If you want to control the result, you have to control the creative and probably control the landing pages and the.

Offers and interesting to be fair because, yeah, I've worked with so many agencies over the years as well. Spoken shit about a lot of them indirectly on here as well. The one I'm working now I think is good. But yeah, like, I'm still obviously doing. Doing all the creative and like. The creative. Yeah. Five weeks in. But like, I never tested as much creative and produced as much creative with any other shit I've done before than this.

Yeah.

And like, the amount of creative getting tested even at tiny scale now compared to where I want to be, it's just mad because, like. And yeah, the creative is the biggest fucking variable.

Crazy. For sure. And we're running. We're running three. I'm not, I'm generally not exaggerating here. We're running three to 500 creatives through our Facebook account a month.

Yeah.

And that, that, that is, that is genuinely the truth. And, and that's from. And the first agency I found that as I said, that has beaten me generally beating me on the ad account. And it took them three months and like we were patient and they've done it and they're absolutely killing it.

And are they producing? You say like agencies should control the creative.

Yeah.

Are they literally making the creative?

Yeah. So we, we double team it. So they have a system. Have you heard of kinship?

Yes.

So it's Taylor and Cody. Cody is the guy I tagged in that post that you. I said definitely heard of it.

Come on here.

Oh yeah.

So they're like doing well. American agency, they've got this incredible model where they, they, we pay for them to seed 500 influencers every month. Yeah, those influencers like 200 normally post. We get 100 pieces of creative but each, but 100 posts but each post is three stories normally. So 300p piece of creative and they iterate two or three versions of each creative like different beginnings and different books and that kind of thing. So we ended up having like broadly I think that's 605, 600 creatives a month. And they got a system through cost caps where they push all the creative into the ad account on the cost caps and they let Facebook find the best born creative. And it's like it's actually worked. It's actually worked and it's like incredible. And the CPA just keeps dropping.

Is that literally the only creator running then like no.

So then our team, we've got a team internally that produces probably 30 to 40 like unique assets, like unique videos that are actually different with different hypothesis and stuff every month which goes into the pile and we try and compete against the influencer content.

Yeah.

And my view is always I want to find our own creatives that are like properly on brand and if they can scale, which a lot of them do, then we're like serving, we're acquiring the customer and we're serving an on brand ad. But if we can find these like weird bits of creative like the influencers create that are short and snappy, that acquire customers for a good cost, great. Like that's all going to help.

And some of the weirdest bits of content when hilarious like the weirdest you can imagine.

Yeah, I've noticed that like really sus like TikTok videos that don't make Sense.

We've got one, we've got one which is an image of a fridge that's empty that's like with a, with a headline that's like.

It's not even got the product in it.

No. And it's doing like. It's doing like 14 pound CBAs. I'm like we're spending hours on creative every month.

Yeah, it's always like that. The most simple shit fucking wins some weird. So do you do all. Do you not outsource any in terms like freelancers, other agencies you're working with Pretty largely in house with everything?

Yeah, we've got a creative team. We've got. One of my best mates from uni is an architect. We've converted him into like an E comm designer and he like he's built a new website which is launching. He runs our creative studio. We've got like a one other person that does brand stuff like social media and that kind of thing and also PR and a few other things and.

Then yeah, we're basically control freaks so we have to do everything ourselves.

And then ops. Charlie runs like a very in house team.

Yeah.

As you know as we've spoken about.

And your mom is full time as well in the business.

They're not full time but a lot. They work a lot.

So how big is the internal team then?

11.

That's a lot of people.

But we think we built that team like that is going to run for. That's going to. We're going to triple on that team. So we kind of set the foundation well.

That's 11. But that's including like four people in the factory.

Yeah.

Where most people would have overhead in. In their gross margin. Like they would have a manufacturing cost per unit bill of X. Yeah.

To be fair it's interesting because like people ask me like how many people are in your team now? I'm like I feel like it's just me but it's not just me because the supplier I work with is effectively an in house R and D team like product dev and you could almost. The amount I pay them is probably like equivalent of two full time people on top of the actual product margin. I'm just paying them and that's their margin instead of mine obviously like an agency. I could probably hire two people for the cost of them. Certainly one good person. I've got nearly a full time creative person. He's technically freelance but we've worked together for years so he's basically full time. There's a customer service person who's working for free right now. Who actually, he's actually found me from the podcast. He's a podcast fan.

So if you're watching this shit, he.

Was like, please let me work for you for free. I was like, well, let's do it for a month. I'll pay after that. But he's. I want to learn. And I was like, yeah, what?

Great attitude.

Yeah, 100%. So. And yeah.

You got any else? We got three people in the Philippines as well, so.

I used to have 40 in the Philippines. I will do soon. Actually, maybe I won't do soon. I'm not opposed to the Philippines. I think it's a great place to get like process driven.

Yeah.

People.

Yeah, we found a great customer service person. Like, he's really good.

Really good.

Yeah, I've had some really good ones. But I guess my point is, yeah, I say I was just me, but actually if I took all the cost away from everything I'm outsourcing, I could probably have like five or six people in a room full time.

Do you outsource media buying creative at all?

So creative. I've spent like the past month nailing what I think is a creative system and Nice. And I think it's pretty solid. To be fair, I never got this right in the past, always slept on it. So the way it works, essentially I have a bunch of different like raw assets that like go into the system. I have my guy Brad, who's a Wizard, he did that 80s video.

Yeah.

Like two weeks and he loved every second. So yeah, he's a g. He then repurposes shit specifically for ads, you know, like adding text, whatever, like chopping out all that. And then, then it goes to the, to the media buyers, the agency, who then obviously test a load of and pretty much feedback on a daily basis what's working, what's not. And then I basically cycle it back in.

But I suppose like that's good.

The workload, the heavy workload bit, particularly in the start has been like, I'm literally coordinating with like UGC creators because I had so many agencies trying to pitch me on 400 pound a video and plenty of them are watching. That's way too expensive. I can go to a creator and pay 60 quid, which by the way, I still think is relatively expensive for a video that takes 10 minutes to make because I've done them myself and they take 10 minutes. But it is what it is. So I got a bunch of studio people. So I've got a guy that does like proper beautiful Macro photography, that sort of shit. Which actually doesn't always perform as well as ugc. But it still looks good like the website. And then I have like other stuff that's kind of on top of that. Like stuff I just test.

Can I tell what's worked really well? Starting to work really well for us with creative you just want like lots of different influx of sources like coming from different places. We've now got three influencers who are on the books. Very low retainer.

Yeah.

Like 300 quid a month or something and they're just pumping out like author own accord. So much greater for us.

Yeah.

That runs through ads and organic and it's really nice because like without having to think too much you just got this influx. Things you can test.

Yeah.

You've got your process that you're running which sounds really good. I love the sound of that. Like more scripted stuff and like thought about create like where you're actually doing a creative strategy job.

Yeah, that's great. Given any briefs to any UGC people yet? It's only today. I wrote a brief up based on the first month of day.

Scripted.

Not scripted. It was just try and do this because for example one weird thing I noticed this is kind of niche but every UGC person, I mean every single one was calling the product Space Goods not Rainbow dust. Like little things like that.

Yeah.

The brand name and product name not the same thing. So it doesn't really matter that much. But I imagine that will affect like conversion rates. They go on the landing page and it's like rainbow dust. What the fuck is this?

So testing like different angles and stuff.

Yeah, so many different things. So like and again I was writing this out today like us versus coffee. Like naughty psychedelic imitation.

Right.

Like unlock your best self. Blah blah blah. Like the whole price angle, like the whole all in one angle instead of 50.

Does it give you a physical lift? The product give you a physical reaction?

Yeah.

Like what? Like caffeine.

It's got a bit. So it's got a bit of caffeine in it. Which is one thing I've learned that a lot of people don't like or have avoid. Well people that commented saying I would buy this if it was caffeine free. Cause I like the other ingredients.

Are you gonna do a caffeine free version?

I'm gonna have to now. So I just made it for me.

So without the caffeine. Caffeine. Is there something without the caffeine stimulant or.

Yeah. So there's three different mushrooms in it, there's ashwagandha, there's macaroot, there's rhodiola rose and vitamin B5. There's basically a bunch of nootropics and.

Mushrooms and you feel it.

But very, very high dosages compared to most.

It actually gives you an effect. It's kind of like the Red Bull gives you wings type.

Yes. So the whole angle. The whole angle initially and it is fundamentally the angle is. It's illegal. My psychedelic microdose imitation.

Yeah.

So what angles have it? What angles ad wise have been working?

What's been working most is replace coffee.

Really.

To be honest, it's the most obvious, boring one I didn't want to do. It's what mud water do and I didn't want to do it. I wanted to play on the whole, I guess the broader angle on top of that is unlock your best creative self. Like that's what we're talking about. Headline brand message. The headline brand message is, yeah, we are for creatives like do create better, unlock your best self. That's what it's all about. That's the whole like ethos.

And how did you make the product?

How did I make it?

Yeah. How did you come up with the formula?

Literally just. I had taken similar stuff. I bought a load of competitor stuff. I. I didn't. I wasn't a scientist.

Yeah.

And then I just reverse engineered. I was like, well, that's good, that's good. I literally just. I was a lab rat for like six months on myself.

That's awesome.

And given it's a version one product, actually it came out well and it tastes amazing too.

Yeah.

I'm gonna try some.

Yeah, try some.

The only thing I personally don't like about it, and it's my own product, is it's like 29 calories per serving. And the reason, not that it's like fat or anything, but I, I do. I just fast every day until like 2pm so technically it breaks a fast.

Yeah.

And some people are funny about that, particularly people buying premium supplement products. That's the mind. They're like, well, if it breaks my fast, I can't take it.

So have you heard that in the feedback as well?

Yeah.

So that's all start. I mean if you can push that into V2, that feedback.

So I'm already working on a V2 of that. Yeah. And like a fruit version, which is a bit of a different.

And how are you setting up? How are you setting up? I think a lot of people don't talk to their Customers. How are you getting that feedback?

So a lot of it's because my fucking email and my Instagram and Twitter on the packaging. So that's the first thing in the bottom left. That's a really bad idea when we start scaling. But for now, for now it's fine. So that's probably the most prominent feedback source.

Yeah.

There's a card that comes with the order that also has my email on it.

Nice.

Encouraging people to give feedback.

That's very smart.

So that's actually the main thing. Other than that. That's really basic shit. Like hot jar exit surveys.

Yeah.

I've got a type form set up in Klaviyo and all that sort of. Of.

Yeah.

But I think the direct response where someone's gone out their way and obviously just comments and shit.

Can I say one of the biggest things we did was a big customer feedback exercise where we like, we did qualitative quantitative interviews and surveys and got a whole bunch of feedback on the V1 of the product. And it was, it actually transformed the marketing as well because we, we got like, we understood why people were loving the product and then we started. We're using all the feedback as angles and ads and then the feedback that came up most is the best performing angle by far and one we never expected. So just like it's a powerful.

Also someone told us not to go down that route because they basically said PNG and Unilever spend billions a year on scent.

Yeah.

Don't compete on scent.

Yeah.

And guess what? We're competing on scent.

Yeah. That's what people care about.

Single.

But it's what people like. Yeah.

You know, does it work? Does it smell good? Two main things. And then simplifying your routine is another massive.

Well, that's the one that's worked best and we never thought it would because our products. One is one product thinking your whole home. With the view that the multinationals have basically released seven or eight versions of the same product in order to increase basket value of their customers. Like here's a glass cleaner. Here's a wood cleaner. Here's a stainless steel. Here's a mold service. Here's a bathroom. Here's a limescale. Here's enamel and taps. Here's a window. It's like off.

Yeah. But also that was why I, I made that an all in one because I, I couldn't get my head around it. One of the competitors that you mentioned earlier, I'm not going to say they offer and I still don't get it. They Offer four different powders and then they also offer all four in one. Where's the logic in that? I don't get it. Like, sure, you just offer the fucking all in one.

Yeah. Why would you? Why would you.

Otherwise, why would you sell the other four for sure?

And that's all. That's all commercial. It's not actually for the customer.

Yeah, I just don't get it. So I always just build shit for me with. At least that's what I've tried to do.

It's another obvious thing. People say a lot, but I think it's true. Those early customers, you've got them now, they respond, the email being like, please, can I survey you? Like, we spend 10 minutes filling out boring questions. Like, for most people, not for us, obviously, but for most people, they'll do it and they'll sit on the phone for half an hour and they'll do it for 50 quid of free product. And you're like, jesus Christ. So they're. They're a massive resource. And we've got. Charlotte was in customer research as a career before this, so she has a full process and knows how to actually extract information from people, like, actually quantify it, which is amazing. But ultimately, even. Even chatting, even calling, you know, you get numbers on Shopify, even calling people for 10 minutes, like, they're like, oh, my God, the fan of the company's called me. They'll love it.

I start doing that. To be fair, I've done it a few times in the past.

It's a weird thing that we all put off. I. It consistently is the thing that I think people don't do enough is talk to their customers. And I don't. I don't know. Well, now I've had this experience. I can. I can. I can see what everyone who's done well says it all the time.

Yeah.

And you, like, hear it, you're like, yeah, okay. And then it kind of goes in one air, out the other, and you're like, they can't tell me anything.

You know what? I think partly that is the reason for that is because at least my experience in a lot of E commerce, I think other people would say the same is particularly when you can start shit, like from your bedroom, you forget that these numbers on a screen are real people. Whereas if you were running, I don't know, fucking cafe or something, you'd by default be speaking to your customers all the time. Whereas now it's like everything's become so completely, oh, we can be remote, blah, blah, blah, Everything's online. I don't fucking speak to anyone. Then you forget that they have real people.

We've got a weird thing which is that our customers are so forthcoming with feedback that the reviews tell us very quickly if something's gone wrong. So we noticed like in the last year, like two or three things have happened, as happens in every business. And we're like, that's an issue because I've seen it five times in the last three days. Because we have like 20 people are being a day.

Yeah. At the moment, 10% of our customers review on Trustworth.

Yeah.

Yeah. That's really powerful.

Crazy. I've probably written two reviews in my life.

We can't really understand why though.

We've never, we've never understood send an email.

We send the automatic email trust. But it does.

But everyone does that.

Ten, like it's. It's such a high number that we're like, why is that happening? It's not even. We're not doing anything. We're not genius.

Maybe our customer demographic. I actually think that's another thing with startups that, that the personal story and the kind of. With us, it's like a family business pitch and it's very personal. People really engage with that and I didn't appreciate how they do. I think it's the demographic of the age demographic. And yeah, I think people care. I think that group of people care more.

I say what we haven't done well yet and what I want to focus on soon is like using your social proof as effectively as possible throughout your site. It's actually really difficult to weave it in in like a smart way. We haven't done it well enough yet.

I think even just like I'm using the fucking Shitty Luke's review app. Just pictures are cunt holding that your.

Lovely customers that you love and appreciate.

I'm on there as well. Yeah. I definitely mean that is powerful, especially for a new brand. That's like people think, is this a scam, whatever. Like building that trust. Violence up. It's interesting you say about like the, the background, like having the whole family story and stuff because like obviously I've kind of like built this brand in public for like six months wherever I'm like Twitter and I do not want the brand to be about me because that's terrible idea long term.

What?

Well, because maybe it's not, but I just, I don't think it's as scalable if it's about me because anyone that doesn't like the fact that I'm A fucking young white male basically.

Tesla's pretty scalable then. Well their marketing strategy is surely.

Maybe I'm wrong. I just have this idea that it's not exitable if it's about me basically. Jim Malone, huh?

Joe Malone.

Yeah, well, yeah, literally it's not called Matthew Kelly, is it? So no, I guess we're one step away from that. But I think having that story to an extent like at least in the start helps because like yeah, most big brands have some sort of founder story even if it's like partially made up.

We're not even. It's. It's a re. I think the story is just a means to understand why, why the brand and, and with like yeah we've all read I probably already Sapiens but like that kind of thing about humans understanding stories intuitively. And I think I've looked at your. All your stuff you're doing and there is a clear purpose, there's a clear purse behind it that will be the same, that will be the same as a founder story from a garage. Family business from a garage. Yeah, ours ties in because it's like family business. Non toxic products in your home, donate your kids, breathe in non dogs. It all kind of works together.

We did actually start in the garage.

As well and we did start but, but, but the point is that like it can be, it can take many different forms. I think what you're doing well is you're building much more than just a direct response. Like I can acquire a customer for X pounds and get this much back. It's why are people actually engaged in the brand which is not what not most people don't do and what's going to build real value?

Yeah, because I just saw a particular like supplement space at least in my opinion. There's a lot of like very faceless, cold like almost like medicinal brands and I just want to have fun with it. Which is why I did the whole like 80s video and shit which obviously doesn't convert on fucking ads but it's on the website if people go and have a look like. Yeah, no brand that goes to the effort to make that isn't excited about their own brand.

We funded Feel at Feel at Fuel.

Huh?

Yeah, Feel. We are Feel. Oh yeah, we funded them.

What do you mean?

We funded them at Fuel when I was at Fuel Ventures.

Oh, you're at Fuel Ventures? Yeah, I fucking spoke to them.

Did you?

Yeah.

Well cool.

I can interview off the record. Yeah. Alex Packham who came on the pod, he's one of my investors. They Funded one of his rounds or they were involved in which one? Like Series A. Content Car.

Content Cow.

He sold Content Cow.

Yeah. He's been on the pod they sold to Adobe.

Yeah.

For a bit. A lot of money.

I was there when we brought content Car in. Yeah.

Oh man. Fucking small world. It's such a small world.

Yeah.

He's a beast. He's like kind of. He's like formally sort of mentoring me now as an investor as well.

That's cool.

Yeah, he helps a lot. Shout out Alex, go. Go watch the episode.

Yeah.

Did we wrap up that point? I want to come on to like your. Do you have like a clear plan for what you want to do with the business? And, and is there like a, an end goal?

I have absolutely no plan. Really? Jack has more of a plan than me.

But you have an exit.

I have no life plan. He's the philosopher.

Except I need to earn some. I need to add a shitload of money.

No, the plan. Well, the plan. The plan is scale counterclean, launch new categories. Laundry and then dishes scale internationally launch retail. That's the plan to build to 50 million broadly.

Yeah.

So 3 million this year, 10 million the year after and then hopefully 30 million after that. And that's broadly the three things we're going to do. Category new product categories, international, retail. And then the broader plan is we've got another business called Reuben Bros. Which is me and Charlie's personal business which is kind of partly owns the factory and we're gonna build that alongside as per big client and other. We've got other brands that are clients as well that we do filling for and build a manufacturing company and then spin that, use that manufacturing company that can produce hopefully a wide range of stuff to use our knowledge from this business to build as many high margin direct to consumer companies as possible as one group.

Sick. Why, why would you not focus on one? Because I find it such an interesting debate.

We are focusing on padding fig for the next like period of time.

Would you do that after you sold it? Are you talking like in the immediate.

Yeah, it's like a 30 year plan.

Oh, okay, right. That's a long. I'm talking like three five year plan.

No, three five year plans put in big. It's the 50 million per plan.

Yeah, yeah. And sell it when you get to 50 mil rev.

Well, most companies sell the higher your revenues. Like if you look at a chart of acquisitions, it's like past a 10 million mark on revenue in direct consumers. Like that's where every acquisition Is. And then if you move past 30 million, it's like the 80, 20 rule.

Yeah.

So 80. 80% are like, past that. So if you're trying to sell, you've got to be thinking really as a kind of. Just as a real logic, like past 30 million and. And definitely past 10. Like you're not gonna. You're not gonna sell, really, for a meaningful amount. Under 10 million in revenue. So, yeah, build a profitable business if it's going to be under 10 and take dividends and build another business after that. Right.

Not bad advice.

Yeah, I agree. I read so much about acquisitions, and I've had lots of advice from one guy in particular, Jimmy, who's also on the pod, who did sell his business. Hair burst. Way past 30 million.

Nice.

I can't comment on the acquisition amount, but the revenue is way past that. I think he told me. I think he officially told me that. I've already said that, but yeah, I mean, that was big.

So what was your. What was your advice about acquisitions?

What was like his, what you said in terms of. And I've read about this elsewhere as well, other people, like, you know, if you want to get a revenue multiple, which is where, you know, potentially make 100 mil, you need to be past 30 mil. Yeah. That's when like a big buyer will come in.

Yeah.

And they're not gonna pay any bit down multiple. They're gonna fucking pay revenue multiple. Potentially. If you're the next big thing doing 30 mil and you want to sell at the right time as well, because you read about this all the time, people thought they could get more.

And then, you know my friend. Well, yeah, my friend sold Luxy Hair. Alex Icon.

Oh, yeah.

Do you know him?

Rings a bell.

I don't personally, but, like, Alex, like, Luxy Hair was one of the great econ stories. Its conversion rate is like one of the best conversion rates around. And he sold like hundred mil. And that was. That was just a pro. That's like that. There are so many buyers. That was Pro X. Just like, we can take this business, improve the margin and grow into retail.

Yeah.

So there's all that. I mean, everyone, we're thinking, obviously you loved the idea of Unilever, PNG or whatever buying your business because it's like, that's on the front page of BBC News. But you're more likely going to be bought out by pro equity companies, your ventures, True Capital.

So many of them. Yeah. I've actually got a spreadsheet I made with about 300 potential buyers, which I Made before I launched the business.

Nice.

That's good.

It's really the wrong way to think about it maybe. But.

Oh yeah, people say that we got asked an investor meeting the other day, we got asked what's your exit plan?

I've also got an actual spreadsheet of scenario planning. I like my equity, my numbers, the numbers we need to hit to be our X, Y, Z valuation.

That's good. I think that's preparation basically.

Yeah. That's just come from like you got no plan getting it.

I got no plan but I'm not prepared. So you're going to be much more successful than me. Yeah.

Are you even equity, both of you.

Yeah.

And then the 30 year plan, build that massive brand, be the next year.

Yeah, that's. That is. Yeah. Long term for sure. For sure. Well once you've done this once also you realize like it's a, it's definitely a long term game once.

Yeah.

Once you've started to do it and understand it, it's all the values at the end. So like the idea of stopping anywhere near like the first 10, 15 years, you're removing all the value from what you're doing because it's like you get so much better that last 15 years you're gonna make three times the amount you made in the first. Almost 10x times. So exponential. Exactly.

Yeah.

Everything's compounding.

Yeah.

Well I want to wrap up with one final question that I've now started asking everyone. So fucking cliche but maybe you can share the answers if you give three bits of advice to your 18 year old self. Knowing what you know now in life and business. But I guess maybe more relevantly kind of business geared, what would it be? Give, give three between you. You have to think on the spot.

Trust your gut. Trust your gut. Always trust your gut. The amount of times I haven't, I've had a feeling and then I haven't done gone with that. And then I thought you that was the right answer. You knew it. You should have done that so many times. I can't count. So trust your gut. Definitely act quickly, act quickly. Don't hang around.

Is that number two?

Don't think too hard. It's kind of like. Yeah, it's a combination. Yeah, I guess it is. Number two, it's like don't think too much about things basically that will get.

Shit done kind of thing.

It's more. Yeah. Not just like for the sake of it sort of oh, let me sort of color 17 cells on an Excel thing.

But I don't Overthink.

It's so easy to overthink decisions. Yeah. The truth is, if you make a mistake, it doesn't actually. There's very, very, very few mistakes that are gonna. You can't rectify.

Especially like the Amazon double door decision. It's a decision you can. You can reverse out of from make it. If it's a decision that takes longer, then I don't.

What were the two that was.

So you've got Trust your gut. Yeah.

Decisions.

Yeah. Don't overthink it.

Yeah. You've got to give a third.

Don't think.

Have I. I'm trying to think about what I was like at 18.

Use triple wire.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't really. I don't actually have one that I can. I'm going to be proud of.

So shower more.

Yeah, yeah. Get in shape when you're 18. Stay in shape. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So invest in bitcoin.

That's probably a good one, to be fair. Yeah, probably is.

What's been the best answer to that question so far?

Christ, I don't know. I've forgotten. It's all on the spot. People wing it. You have to go watch every other 37 episodes. I guess. With that said, we'll wrap the episode up. Jack, Charlie, it's been a pleasure. This was an interesting episode. I mean, every fucking episode is interesting. They're always crackers. They crescendo to a nice ending. Always. Probably the first episode. We're actually not spoken about like girls and shit, but let that slide for another time.

We don't know any girls, I don't think.

Yeah.

As usual. If you're watching the pod, subscribe, leave a comment with your thoughts. Recommend to a friend and we'll see you in the next episode. Cheers for watching. Peace.

Sa.