What $100M E-Commerce Brands Know That The Others Don’t | Limited Supply

Quick question, how many emails did your brand send last week that said the exact same thing to every single person on your list? If your answer is more than zero, then you're leaving money on the table. Instant looks at what each shopper actually did on your site, what they browsed, what they carted, what price point they were looking at, and sends that email to that specific person to see. You're not using templates, and it's not a generic, you forgot something. The actual right message for that actual person automatically. Brands like ThirdLove, Neuro, and TRX are using Instant to drive 3 to 5 times more email revenue on a daily basis. Right now, you can get 50% off your first 60 days at instant.one/sharma. Welcome back to another episode of Limited Supply. I'm your host, Nick Sharma, and today we've got a fun episode. Uh, I've brought my friend John Coyle on and also my friend Bart, who you've may have seen, heard of Dad Gang or seen it, worn it. Anyways, we chopped it up for about an hour and a half and just went into all things e-commerce, AI, creative, you know, hiring team, all that kind of stuff. So give it a listen. It's a fun one. And let me know what you think. Let me know if you like these kind of more fun ones where I bring just people in the industry in and chop it up. Anyways, I'll see you on the next one.

Okay, so the main thing I get asked from brands right now is like, it's kind of some form of the question, what are they doing? Does that make sense? Mm-hmm. The brands that we all know, you know, the True Classic Tees, the Hint Waters, the Jolies, a lot of the brands that you have been involved with, like, what are they doing that I'm not doing? Oh, it's overnight, a big one that I'm getting asked a lot about right now. And some of these I know you, Nick, have some insight into. Some of them we have some insight into. But I think that's sort of the like theme of this episode is just, uh, what are the big brands really doing that, like, what's the differentiators that the big brands are really doing that, like, uh, those ones that get to $100 million really fast?

I mean, I personally think the, um, well, there's a couple things. Like, I've, I've thought a lot about, like, what are these brands doing differently, or, like, what made a brand succeed. A lot of times it's the right time, right place, to be honest. Like, they were just first to market, they were first to canvas the market, And so, you know, I was even thinking like on my walk here, I was passing a bodega and the bodega had a big window sticker of turkey cold cuts. And at the bottom third has the Boar's Head logo. Like no one else is getting that real estate again. Yeah. You know, they were just right time, right place. They happened to be there. And like that opportunity's no longer available. Some of the stuff that, some of the brands you named, I think do that well. But I think the other thing that they did really well compared to other brands that are still like competing in their category, but not able to get past a certain point or kind of falling flat at a certain point is a couple things. One is like they really stood out from not just being like a product business, but like a true brand brand.

Okay.

Like a really strong brand. It had a visual identity, a tone of voice, a personality, et cetera, right? And then I think the other thing that they did better than their competitors was a lot of times these fast-follow competitors, they skip out on product innovation or product quality, and it comes through. I've worked with brands where they get to, you know, $20 million online or $40 million online or, you know, $60 million like across all channels, they just can't grow because their product is not good enough to let it grow past a certain point.

Mm-hmm.

So, I mean, I think it comes down to like product and also just product innovation and then brand. And then, you know, underneath that you kind of have everything else, whether it's like new products being released, whether it's new formats of, similar products, whether it's, you know, like, you know, I just lost the thought in my head, but basically like some level of innova— oh, some level of innovation, but some level of brand maintenance, right? Like you're not always running 20% off promos every month to juice numbers. Yeah. You're like really building this brand strategically from the get-go. And so like those to me are like kind of the highest of level thoughts into what makes the difference between the brands. But then I think a lot of it, like that's the high-level thinking, the like in the dirt, is just, I just think these brands that you just named are way better at execution than the other brands that, you know, hit a certain point. Like their people are way smarter, they're way faster. You know, they're not cutting one ad from, they're not like working with an agency to cut 4 ads a week and then get 2 variations. They're using AI right now to cut 128 ads a week and figure out which one's gonna get to, you know, statistical significance.

Yeah. Yeah, I think,

and honestly—

I think they start out playing a different game a lot.

They totally do.

The ones that we're talking about, that's a different MrBeast.

Well, Lemmy is Kardashian, but still kind of similar example of like small team, right? Like a lot of these brands we're naming right now, insanely nimble teams and multifaceted generalists are doing things internally. They're not hiring a Facebook person and an SMS person and a, you know what I mean?

Yes. What I mean when I say they start out playing a different game is that they're not starting from zero. Like when you bootstrap an e-commerce, they're not starting like Bart started.

You know what I mean?

They're not like, I'm going to sell some hats in my garage. They're like probably raising a bit of money and hiring like a really high-level team right off of the bat.

Yeah.

Like you're saying, and it's a small team, but like really good people. So the way that we help our kind of businesses that listen to us, business owners that listen to us, is we actually take their questions.

Sweet.

So I'm just going to get right into one. It says, I have a brand similar to Eight Sleep, but in the home office category. So I'm guessing they're doing some sort of tech innovation around chairs or something.

Chairs, desks, sure.

I don't know what the brand is. We're running ads, we're testing creatives, we've been optimizing the funnel and the price points. It seems like brands like Eight Sleep just explode where we don't, it doesn't feel like we're exploding in that same way. What were the early days at Eight Sleep like? And, you know, what could I do better?

Yeah.

Without knowing exactly what he's doing, I guess.

I mean, I didn't work on Eight Sleep for a long time, but I met their team, like Alex and Matteo, in 2017.

Yeah.

And have kind of just known them since then and did a little bit of work along the way. But in my eyes, what Eight Sleep did that the other, that like a lot of other companies don't think about, one is like they attacked the middle of the funnel like nobody's business. Like if you go search Eight Sleep on Reddit, on YouTube, on TikTok, on Pinterest, Google, anywhere, it's populated with like the best reviews, the unboxings, the comparison videos, Like they just fill the middle funnel, and they did that really early on when they realized that for their price point, people were going to YouTube to look at reviews of the product, right? And so that like Eight Sleep Wall of Love, if you've seen that link, that was a thing that they started in '17 or '18 and just keep adding to every day.

Yeah.

And then the middle of funnel, kind of like wherever you search, there's good ratings, good reviews. And then the other thing that they did well is they were very strict about their performance marketing numbers, but they also, Alex, who's the other, who's the, you know, one of the co-founders, she's like a brand marketer. So she did a really good job positioning the technology and the innovation and the design system and even their partnerships they did, the collaborations. Like they don't partner with like a lame sleep doctor. They go partner with Taylor Fritz and, you know. Mm-hmm. like professional athletes to show that like, this is the impact it delivers. So from a brand standpoint, they built the brand really well, whereas almost every other player in the bedding space, or even furniture space, tends to play more on like function and then using that as their performance marketing.

One thing that, yeah, I also think to your point earlier about timing, I would say like Purple and, Who else? Uh,

really fast follows of the mattresses?

No, like, I would say like Purple and one other brand that I can't think of off the top of my head really sort of like broke the dam open on bed-in-a-box, you know what I mean?

Casper? Leesa?

Casper. Yeah. Yes, Purple and Casper really broke the dam open on bed-in-a-box. Like, nobody ever thought to order a bed online until you could buy one from Purple or Casper, right? And I, in my view, I don't know if I have the timeline right here, but in my view, I think Eight Sleep came on the tail of that. So it's like, we don't have to— people convince people to buy a bed online anymore. But to your point, it's like, but they innovated on the bed in the box, right? Like,

totally.

Now we're gonna do that. Like, it's hard to do a bed in the box. Like, their innovation was that they took a whole mattress and they stuck it into a box and they ship it to you. Now we're gonna do a really good one.

Yep.

You know what I mean?

And the guys who made a shitload of money are right in between.

Yeah.

Where they were like, oh wait, we, we don't even have to own the inventory. We'll just drop ship these folded mattresses after we get the money and collect it from the customer.

They made a per— a shitload of personal money.

Yeah, exactly.

Eight Sleep made a lot of enterprise value.

For sure, for sure. Yeah, Eight Sleep. Well, what's also cool about Eight Sleep and also admirable is they, like, it wasn't just, uh, it wasn't working out the gate. Like, they had a real couple years of finding product-market fit, but then once they found it, it completely took off.

I was gonna say, um, did you know them pretty well? Like, did they— were they first-time operators, or were they on a second round?

No, I think, I think they had sold.

I bet that's gonna be a common thread across all these.

For sure, for sure.

They're not first-time players.

Yeah, I mean, I remember too when there's another founder that I was talking to and he was just like, yeah, the second-time game is so easy. Like you just go, you open iMessage and you text the people you need.

Yep.

And you've already worked with these people, you've already done deals with these people, you've brought them stuff, they've brought you stuff. Like you just basically, your work happens on text when you're a second-time founder.

We were talking about Breeze earlier.

That's all we do is a 24/7 text thread.

Yeah.

Yep. We were talking about Breeze earlier and kind of a, Making the point, I was sort of making the point that you don't play the game of speedrunning to $100 million on your first brand.

Right.

Like, you've got to be, uh, like, you are going to stumble, you're going to get into a cash crisis along the way. Like, you got to understand all that stuff. Totally. You know what I mean? And so—

Which is such a good point and such an underrated, uh, because that takes time and it takes, like, you know, it's the equivalent of 10,000 hours in business.

Yeah.

Like now with how fast AI moves, people are just trying to fast forward that.

Yeah.

And they're trying to fast forward the, you know, how you put together a board deck presentation, an investor presentation, 'cause they're just asking ChatGPT, right? And like people are about to get punched in the face so hard, so hard.

Yeah. All the investors.

Yeah, I was watching a Claude thing this morning around like this guy just whipped up a full-on like pitch deck I don't know, it looked like 7 seconds with branded imagery, everything just all in one.

I will say for our, the checkouts, like sales decks for our sponsorships for our podcast, like I just prompt Gamma and it does pretty well.

No, no, no. 100%.

You put personal sweat and tears.

Yeah.

But the

other

thing, and if any of our sponsors are listening to this, I actually put 20 hours into that of my own time.

Well, I'm constantly happy you're efficient with your time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, but the difference in what you're doing and what I'm saying is, You've already put the work in to know how to pitch a sponsorship deal, what should go into it, the research behind it, right?

Yeah.

If you're just outsourcing the entire context part and not retaining that while using the tool to fast forward, you're cooked.

So, I mean, kind of back to this person, he's saying, hey, I have like 8 sleep of Office. I'm gonna guess, I'm just gonna go out on a limb here and guess it's a product person. Like, this is maybe a product he made, invented, he or she made or invented. Like, they haven't ever— they haven't been doing e-commerce for— like, if we're talking about Eight Sleep, Breeze, I don't know who else we've brought up here, but like even Purple, some of those that are really category relevant to this person, it's like, yeah, they weren't like— they didn't make the product. The people who ran that thing up to $100 million that quickly.

For sure.

They didn't make the product. They'd just been growing e-commerce brands for like a super long time. That was their skill set.

Right.

So that's not incredibly actionable for this person, you know what I mean? So like to kind of like, Hammer on something a little bit more actionable. I don't know. What do you think that is? Either of you, Bart? Bart, you've been kind of quiet over there.

No, come on, Bart.

Bart is a bit of a quiet dude.

No, I

he just looks good in the corner.

I'm not the best podcaster. I'm not great at podcasting. Looks cool.

I'll let John do all the talking. No, I would agree with the especially on the Eight Sleep side, like the connection between a popular figure and why that product is important. I remember like JJY and like. with some big NFL names being like, you know, I get beat up on the football field every day, sleep is super important, and this is why I choose Eight Sleep. And it wasn't like, this is the product, I'm this guy. It was just naturally integrated into their everyday life. So when I thought of, 'cause my in-laws actually came up in the mattress game, like selling mattresses their whole life.

Nice,

yeah, nice. And so I saw the shift happen from like going to Vegas trade shows every single year, multiple times a year, to like, wow, we're going to trade shows, we're meeting with reps, to like, you're going on eatsleep.com and it's showing up at your house.

Yeah.

So I saw that explosion happen. I saw the like stress amongst the industry. And then I would see that Eight Sleep was the one that was kind of like, oh, those are the ones for the athletes. Those are the ones for the like, you wanna aspire to be like the healthiest sleeper or whatever. And so that would connect. Pretty well with consumers.

Can I ask this? Maybe you have insight on this. How did— because you said they were pretty strict about the performance marketing numbers. And given, you know, we're talking about a brand that none of us admittedly have like a ton, ton of insight on them, but we're sort of generalizing across these types of brands. Usually you're right, they are strict on their performance marketing numbers. In your observation, how do they think about stuff like that? Like a partnership with JJ Watt that is a bit more of a brand play and it's a bit more of a moonshot, a bit more of a big swing. Like, the performance marketing numbers on that usually aren't gonna bear out super well.

Yeah.

You know, but like, sometimes you say, well, this budget is earmarked for that. How did they think about that, would you say? 'Cause that could be actionable for this person.

Yeah, I don't know that this is exact, but just from my convos, my guess is like, well, I know for a fact that they don't always look, like, this is a separate budget. This is not their performance budget.

Yeah.

This is where they'll do a partnership, and sometimes it's access, right? Behind-the-scenes access you get. Sometimes it's the connection to the person that you're working with. Sometimes it's just the cosine of the person because that cosine gets you 5 other things in the future. Mm-hmm. I know for like, they did a, I remember it was the F1 stuff, and, or it might've been the US Open stuff, one of those 2. And like, that was the response. It was like, well, this, you know, this has like a good brand building effect, and that's something that you have to slowly funnel resources to over time. But this thing also just enabled 3 other things, so it actually paid itself back. Immediately, not directly, but from the 3 other things that came from it. Yeah. And I've heard from other people like—

Can you give like an ex— like a specific example of what you mean by like, doing this branding play opened up doors of access that we wouldn't have otherwise had?

Oh yeah, for sure. So like, this happens a lot in, anytime you see like IBM sponsoring MSG's network showing of the Knicks game.

Yes.

You know, that's like IBM is just paying for a suite out of their different budget.

Yeah.

And those ads are just kind of BS, but like they're using that to get access either themselves. They're creating their own access. In other places, it might be like a sponsorship towards something to get access into a room. You're in the green room at— or you're in the Paddock Club at F1, right? It gets you in that room. It gets you to a bunch of other people in the room. Yeah.

And to be clear, the reason that IBM would want a suite at MSG is to invite people who are potential clients.

Exactly.

To games in the suite. Totally. As someone who gets invited to that being brand side, those are the things that I go to.

Yeah.

I get invited to a dinner, I'm like,

You kind

of, you— My wife's into the game. Invite us to a basketball game suite, I'm like, no.

It depends where the suite is. I've been at a basketball game suite, it's up in the nosebleeds. What's the point of that?

I agree though, like, with kind of the long tail plays of doing stuff with athletes or doing things that don't have, you know, instant performance marketing ROI. Like, I mean, we do it all the time. You guys do it a ton? We work with athletes and celebrities and singers and all these people.

Totally.

The intent going into it is never, 'Cause we wanna be a very human brand. So like, we never go into it being like, okay, if we're gonna work with this guy and we're paying him this, it better be this return. It's like, no, do you know how much working with like this one person can open up for you down the road and maybe work with other people on that team?

Yeah, in the creator and athlete world, it's like the biggest thing because when you work with one, it gives everybody else the social capital that like, oh, these guys are legit enough to work with that person, then why wouldn't I work with

them? Just a real life, I was at Strideline Summit I worked with Socks for 6 years and we worked with Marshawn one time. And Marshawn is still the face of the brand and I left like 2019. And so like, and it's totally cool, like he's good with doing that, but like that one thing led to so many other things. Now they have an NFL licensing partnership. Like, yeah, it's kind of like your, you never know budget almost.

Yeah, though that's the other piece of it is like you can't predict what's about to come from doing these things. Trackable.

It's small stuff too.

Yeah.

Like, you don't have to go pay a bunch of money to go work with an athlete. Like, you could go do the small thing that's at your— and I'm talking to like people just building. Like, you could go work with the guy that has a high school basketball team, and but then all of a sudden, like, somebody else from that program wants to talk to you about this. Like, you never know budget. Yeah. So we would call it.

How do you budget for it? Like, do you got— are you guys like just vibes? You probably are. That's how you guys do everything.

Yeah. Yeah.

As long as the whole dad gang brand is selling the hats. Yeah. The whole dad gang brand just runs on vibes.

Some opportunities are just like, some opportunities are just like, are you seriously not going to do this? And it makes sense.

Yeah. Someone somewhere in the brand has a QuickBooks account, I assume.

Yeah. Our accountant.

Yeah. But like, I mean, do you look at it in terms of like,

I'll give you

like, tell me, I'm trying to ask the question of bet sizing. How much risk do you take? Like, okay, here's a thing, it seems like a great opportunity, it costs $1 million, you know, but like, it's pretty— but like, $1 million is a stretch for us. Like, how much do you stretch? Can you quantify that at all, or do you just go off vibes?

No, it's not all— it's, it's definitely like gauging impact of what will happen a little bit, but I haven't been faced with a million-dollar opportunity. But like—

Have you been faced with an opportunity that felt like it's a good opportunity, but it's a stretch? Financially for us?

Not quite.

Okay. Yeah. Well, then you don't— you haven't had to quantify it yet then, I guess.

Yeah.

That's not helpful, Bart.

No, sorry.

Yeah, I don't know. Have you—

Well, yeah, it happens a lot at like these big events that want sponsors, right? Like they want, um, like the, the Tough Mudder, um, thing, or like a HYROX thing, or whatever it might be, right?

Yeah.

And they usually like have some outrageous price because they're licensing their name effectively.

Yep.

And, you know, it depends. Like, there's some brands who do it. They're usually brands that just have like retail-focused or local retail selling budgets to deploy.

Yep.

In my experience, almost any time like a direct-to-consumer brand has come across opportunities like this, you start to look at, well, like the impression count is like 2,000 people. And like, oh, your 40,000 followers that get 200 likes, man, not really relevant. Right. So those usually fizzle out. I'd say most DTC brands don't do it. Usually it's food and bev brands that'll donate product in exchange for something for free. Yeah. But, um, yeah.

Yeah, here's the framework I use, and I don't know if it's right or wrong, and this is, you know, to kind of move on to our next question. This person who's like—

Wait, we gotta finish answering this guy though.

Yeah, he says, you know, he's at 2 million. What he— I mean, his question is, what do they do? that it's different, you know?

Landing pages, advertorials, whitelisting, try some offers, like, even if you, yeah, all that, right?

If you're the Eight Sleep of office, then you need to educate people on that.

Yeah, you basically just need like top and bottom. Top, like how are you telling people what you're doing and showing them how it's different and why it could benefit them? And bottom is just landers, emails, SMS, you know, listicles, all that stuff.

Running ads, testing creative, he said that he's doing. Here's the thing, if you're running—

Yeah, but most people say that and they run 4 static ads to the homepage.

And let me be clear, yeah, $2 million, I don't know, look, I don't know what the AOV is and stuff like that, but at $2 million a year, you should be testing like kind of, you know, probably like 25 unique ad concepts a week.

facebook.com/ads/library.

Yeah.

And you can type any company in the world and see their Facebook ads.

Yeah, and look, yeah, just copy it.

Like, if you're starting out, go copy it.

Well, yeah, I think specifically for him, I think what happens in this like $1 to $2 million zone is they've heard some stuff about how to run ads and they got a little traction, you know, they watched some stuff on YouTube and they've got like a system, but the system is like, oh, I cut what doesn't have as good a CPA and I keep what does have as good a CPA. You, if you are the Eight Sleep of office, you also have to think about what feeds the funnel because most likely your price point is not like a one-click buy.

Right.

Like most likely you're a multiple touchpoint. I'm guessing it's a higher ACoS product.

100%, yeah.

So you probably need to look at some of your creatives that you might be cutting because they don't have as good of a CPA and say, well, what's the new impression ratio? What's the new visitor percentage? And like, what, like how many, what's the cost per new visitor on this? Or are we getting like new eyeballs and new traffic with this? And is this more of an educational? And you need to probably change the target for that. And that, I would actually say tactically, that is one thing large, like these brands that like hyperscale very fast, they get that inherently because they hire people. Totally.

They think like in 8-week conversion cycles.

Yeah. And they, and because they hire people who have like done it a bunch of times, right? That to our point, that is one way that manifests. is that those creatives get different keep/cut scale metrics than our bottom-of-funnel creatives do. Yeah. Advertorials is another really good way to educate, which, I mean, yeah, good formats for advertorials. I mean, you have a bunch, right?

Oh yeah, tons. Yeah. 5 reasons to buy. I just made a site last night, write.nik.co, and you can write any advertorial.

Little Google Chrome.

Yeah, basically. But you can write any advertorial, like expert level from—

There we go, write.nik.co.

Yeah. And, um, plug.

Yeah. Do you like real, like, real—

there's no charge.

Do you like real advertorial? Is it a lead magnet? Are you collecting?

No, there's, there's nothing going on. I just, I finished it at 4:30 in the morning. Yeah. Somebody asked it, 2 brands yesterday.

By the time this episode airs, that might, you might have to give him your email and get on his newsletter to get on that.

Yeah. Yesterday, 2 brands asked me to help them with advertorials and they sent me drafts and I was like, this is horrible. But instead of rewriting it, I was like, let me just take, let me create a little knowledge base of all the things I know about Advertorials over the last 10 years, put it in, and then build an app to write them.

Yeah. Tell me, do you like— What's

the stack? Is that Claude?

Yeah.

Yeah.

You use Claude code for it?

Yep. OpenCLAW.

Nice. Just, I mean, a crash course. So, okay, you've written a ton on advertorials. Obviously, if this person's like, yeah, I should do advertorials, go find everything that Nick has written, posted, you know, all the stuff, the material we've done on advertorials. What I'll say as a crash course is, 2 categories here. One category is something that actually looks like an article and has like a very hooky headline. Other category is like what I'd call a branded advertorial. 5 reasons why your back hurts when you—

Totally.

When you're at your desk all day, right? And that's gonna be very like branded. It's almost gonna be like a souped-up product page, right? And most people in ecommerce have seen this. If you haven't, you can find it, right? Who's somebody who does those?

Well, if you just Google like 5 reasons why listicle, you'll find one.

You're gonna find one. You'll find one. Yes, you're gonna find one.

Or just ask ChatGPT to write you the 5 best reasons to buy a—

Yeah, Hootsuite does them. Um, if you subscribe to Replo's— I mean, dude, Replo's not even a sponsor of our podcast, but if you subscribe to Replo's newsletter, they send like templates like this out all the time.

Yeah.

So Replo is cheap. They're not a sponsor of our newsletter, but I use them.

No, I just got a, um, like a beta look into I'll tell you guys off cam, but like, uh, you put in any landing page, so like Eight Sleep's landing page that you really love, and it'll just take your landing, that landing page, and match to your branding.

Nice.

And, you know, change up the words and everything, but it'll spit out the exact same flow.

Yeah.

Um, there's so, so many resources like that. But with this, like, to move away from some like technicalities, making office furniture, the Eight Sleep, I think you would have to touch that like that partnership middle of funnel stuff.

Yeah.

Where like I would have so much fun taking like influential, whether it's like operators or business owners, and having them use these desks or whatever it is.

Yeah.

And make content and storytelling around like why should you buy their office furniture when you can go to IKEA or Wayfair or any of these other—

Right.

Like you gotta add some emotion, some people to it.

Yeah.

Right. Yeah.

You go to Wayfair to buy office chairs?

I do not. I would assume most of America does.

I got mine at Staples.

No, Wayflyer is the lending platform.

No, not Wayflyer, Wayfair.

Wayfair.

Jeez.

Yeah, that's true. Another plug for—

I'm sure Wayflyer's got a lot of office chairs though.

Another, another, a lot of empty ones. Yeah. Oh, we might have to cut that. Oh. Yeah, okay, so I would say that like, look, my main advice here is if you're not like a multi-time operator, just don't feel bad. You've built something up to a couple million, like you're killing it, just keep going, right? Probably more creative testing, give different metrics to your, you know, top of funnel ads, bottom of funnel ads, set aside a little bit of budget for like fun, cool opportunities, like just set aside a little bit of budget.

Yeah, or create your own, like do what you're doing. Like you created all your own opportunities, right? Yeah. And a lot of other brands do a good job of it. They host their own events, their own dinners, their own whatevers. Yeah, there you go. Like cheap and easy.

Yeah, I mean, look, if it's office— the other thing is you can go enterprise here. Like go into offices and be like, hey, I'm gonna give you guys like 5 chairs. Like I'm gonna give 5 of your team members chairs. Totally. And like they're gonna sell you. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

That's another play you could do. And that's also content while you're doing that.

Totally.

Everything's content. That is actually, when you're running a brand these days, just you gotta think everything is content.

Yeah, pretty much every company is now just basically a content company. Yes. And if their product happens to be good, they'll survive.

Yeah. All right, let's go to the next one. When you look at brands that have made it to $100 million versus ones that had early momentum and then stalled, what's the difference there?

Um, let's see.

That's like maybe the better question.

Yeah, it comes to mind. Like, one is— a big one is talent. I think the talent that, um, you know, you usually need like different level of talent going like 0 to 5, 5 to 25, 25 to 75, And maybe 75+.

And I think that the brands like Eight Sleep, Jolie, like those, what they do is they raise some money up front and they just hire their $100 million team right away.

Not true, actually.

You don't think so?

Both of those didn't— they like both, both actually. So Eight Sleep continued to add just smarter and smarter people over time. And then Jolie, what Jolie did was they were— so they were for the longest time, they were just a one plus 2 founders company, and they just had the best agencies around them. So like they— Like Sharma

Brands?

Yeah, we were one. But they had, they just always had other agencies involved who were, you know, if they weren't like able to continue pushing the boundaries and innovate, they would cycle them out. So they were very disciplined in that sense, which I think is almost just as good as like raising money and hiring upfront. So that's one. I think the other one is like product innovation. A lot of brands just kind of stall. Like they figure out, oh, you know, this is selling, maybe this is even in Target now. We don't have to keep innovating on product.

Yeah, there, there are some caps for products. That's a good point. I think that there are like some products that can get you all the way to $30 million.

For sure, for sure.

But they can't get you to $100 million.

Yeah.

And so like you do have to product expand to get to $100 million.

Right.

But that's tough when you made like one product line that got you to $30 million because you're like, shouldn't that just be able to get me—

Totally.

It feels very risky.

Yeah, no, 100%. I mean, there's some, like, a lot of supplement brands that have a wide variety of supplements, like maybe 80% of their sales come from 2 or 3 products.

I would say the ones that speedrun to $100 million almost always found some sort of product-market fit that had that much.

Totally. And then they started adding stuff.

But if you get stalled, your product might might not have had that much run, if that makes sense.

Totally.

I'm not saying that very well.

No, no, no. What you're basically saying is the market punched you in the face and you have to like face that reality.

Yes, for the ones that stalled.

Exactly.

But a lot of the ones that speedrun there, it's like, yeah, they, I mean, they found a space that had that much play and they scaled into it quick and they got there.

Yeah, 100%.

True Classic Tees is a great example of this. You tried to launch True Classic Tees today, you would struggle to 100 million. For sure. It would take a long time.

For sure.

Right? But it's like they found They were the first ones to get into that space. They scaled it early. And then, you know, other brands—

They're just nibbling on their toes.

Yeah. I mean, I'm trying to not think of exact knockoff brands, but like Dad Gang, I'm not saying you guys are gonna stall, but like if you got stalled at 30 or 40, it would just be like, okay, you know, like it just, that had this ceiling of like you could only get to 30, 40 million efficiently.

Yeah, with heavy advertising.

Whereas True Classic was able to get to 100 efficiently. You know what I mean? It just, it was a lot of times the biggest difference is a non-controllable, which is just how much tailwind is there in the market. And how fast does it take you there?

Yep.

But that's not very actionable. I mean, they didn't really ask for actionable, they asked for the differences. Cool. Yeah, cool. How do the high-level brands decide what to focus on and ignore? Specifically, there's new channels, attribution tactics posted all the time, and AI tools all the time. What is— how do I differentiate between shiny object syndrome and stuff that I should actually be focused Hmm.

Well, to be honest—

Really good question for almost anybody.

Yeah, to be honest, I think a lot of this starts at the top. Like, there's some brands I work with where the— it's if the founders are like locked in and they're like, you know, we have this CAC goal to hit because of this, we have to hit this, our attribution needs to look like this, I need to see these daily reports. Like, you can bet that company's gonna be totally fine. You know what I mean?

Well, they might miss some stuff that isn't shiny objects, Yeah. Does that make sense?

No, for sure, for sure.

Right.

I guess I'm more, I'm assuming this person's talking more in like the—

How do I ignore the, how do I not get FOMO? No, like— Is what they're asking?

More so like, I guess what I'm trying to say is like the, like the whole push of innovation and finding new tools and figuring out what to focus on and what metrics should be their north star and what they should look to automate versus not. Like, I feel like that thinking starts at the top and distills its way down. Okay. I mean, sometimes you'll find that there's somebody within the org who is just like, you know what, I'm going to figure out how to automate my entire copywriting process into an app because this is a waste of time and everything I'm doing has learnings behind it.

Yeah,

but a lot of times that doesn't happen unless it's starting from the founder or like the exec level and they're like, yo, we need to figure out innovation or we need to figure out AI, we need to think about, you know, building our own attribution system, whatever it may be.

I would agree. So how would you advise founders on— because I do think you can get on a slippery slope of playing with tons of AI tools. You can get— you can save 10 tactics a day on X and LinkedIn.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? Like, I mean, I think there's so many advertising channels you can test and, and so many people say like, test everything, try everything. And I'm like, that's like kind of the worst advice.

I feel like that.

Once you're testing everything, you're just dicking around, honestly.

Totally.

Yeah.

That job of the, like, the conductor of the track choosing what you ignore and what you focus on, like, is the job of the CEO.

Right.

Right?

So I think that if this person's a CEO or a founder asking, I think they're asking for, like, heuristics you use.

Yeah. I mean, to be honest, if I were—

Or heuristics the best people, like, the best operators use for it.

Yeah. Well, it's a tough question 'cause, like, if you're building a mascara brand and you're looking to see how True Classic is using AI and, like, what they find important, it doesn't make sense either. Right. My recommendation for a lot of founders, like, in the sub, sub-$10 million, or even if you're a marketer at a brand that's sub-$100 million, is like, go build a group chat with people in similar size, sizes around you, maybe slightly above. And like, that's where you're gonna find the alpha of whatever, whether it's how you decide to better forecast inventory or use which AI tools or, you know, something similar to that nature.

I think just to like, on that note, we have like a private Slack that's like 22 operators, CEOs, founders deep.

Yeah, yeah.

And all pretty successful brands from what I know, and a couple media buyers that have spent like billions successfully. And it's like, even in that group chat, there's not a lot of conversation around like, what do you think of this tool? What do you think of that tool?

There's some.

There's a little bit, but for how many people are in there now, like how—

Yeah, 'cause you know why? But that's separate, 'cause like everybody else is gonna be like, ah, who's getting paid to say that? You know?

Yeah, yeah, but in this, like it's kind of the tone's been like—

When it's a tight group like that, it isn't. Like, you know what I mean? That's like where you can talk about the stuff.

Yeah, we're kind of like, I started it and I kind of set the vibe around like, don't come here to like spill any shit. And then like, but it's funny, this subject in general, 'cause when I was at an agency, your newsletters were like the most popping thing of all time. And so I worked on 30 brands in 2 years. 'Cause it was stupid. Yeah. And, but like our founder and some of these CEOs, we would like hop into work and like, I just don't—

Sundays were the worst.

It's just like client-facing stuff. And then you get an email and be like, okay, Bart, like cool that we're doing this, but Sharma said do this. And I'm like, fuck this guy.

I know.

You know the biggest— Have you heard about these 5 reasons why editorials?

No, you know what the biggest disclaimer I need to always put is like, Like, this, this is what, based on what I saw in the last maybe 2 to 3 weeks.

Yeah.

This might not apply, but like find the golden nuggets that apply to you and take them.

Use if useful.

Exactly. But they're so easy to do that. You like subscribe to a newsletter, you go on X.

Yep, that's what I mean.

And then you look at your business and it's like, oh man, I just, you know, I just saw 10 optimizations today. Why aren't we doing this? And it's like, I don't know, we at Dad Gang, we're always sending pictures of racehorses with blinders on.

Yeah.

Because it's like our goal is to sell Sell hats and build community. Those are the 2 things, right? And anything that can help that, truthfully help it, not like test out and try and maybe it'll work, let's do that. But everything else is a distraction.

That's good.

I think that my heuristic for this right now, and the heuristic I see amongst like pretty good operators, a lot of it comes down to, we keep saying the same thing, experience. People who've done this 2 or 3 times, Teams have a pretty good filter just on their own, right? They also have a good network of a handful of people they can text and say, have you tried this? Is it good? Right? Before they, like, take demos, right? But tactics is a big one because everybody is worried that they're not using, like, the most— the latest tactics and stuff like that. And they get newsletters like yours, and then they do what I call flyovers, right? Founder flyovers. Yeah. Where they're like, why aren't we doing this with our landing pages? Yeah, forward. Yeah. You've ruined many a startup.

I used to get those too. Yeah. I used to get those flyovers. I used to get, how come we're not spending on Cheddar TV?

Yeah.

ThirdLove is doing a $400,000 sponsorship. We should be doing that. Like, no, we shouldn't. Absolutely not.

Let ThirdLove waste their money.

Yeah, exactly. Time for the retention tip of the week brought to you by Instant. If I could give every D2C founder one piece of advice, it's this: your lapsed customer list is an underpriced asset. Think about it. You've already paid to acquire these people. They've already bought from you. They already have a relationship with your brand. Reactivating lapsed customers is almost always cheaper than acquiring new ones. And reactivated customers tend to have higher AOVs because they already know your product. But most brands treat their lapsed customer segment like a lost cause. Maybe they send one hey, we miss you email with 20% off and call it a day. But that's not a reactivation strategy. That's a Hail Mary. A real reactivation strategy playbook has layers. You start with a content-led re-engagement. Remind them why they love you. Then introduce them to what's new— new products, new formulas, new packaging. Then offer them a time-bound incentive. And here's the key: you segment your lapsed list by recency and LTV. A customer who lapsed 90 days ago with a $200 LTV should get a very different sequence than someone who lapsed 365 days ago with a $40 LTV. One-size-fits-all win-backs are a waste. Instant makes this easier with AI and personalizes reactivation to every individual shopper based on what they browse, what they bought, and how they engaged. If your dormant list is sitting there untouched, go to instant.one/sharma and start turning it into revenue.

So here's my heuristic for it. In e-commerce, there are like 5 channels that work really well, and anything besides those 5 channels is probably a distraction. Like, there's like a couple others that I'm like, yeah, maybe. Okay, and the 5 channels are Meta, Google, Amazon, TikTok, and some form of influencer. Currently, I think the best kind of like ROI on paying for influencers is on long-form YouTube.

Don't forget AppLovin.

Currently, AppLovin is bubble. AppLovin is bubble for me. And Snapchat has been in the group before. It like, it kind of hangs out on the bubble, gets in, comes out, right? Like, but if it's not one of those 5, like, dude, if it's Pinterest and you're like, should I test Pinterest? I'm like, It's gonna— whatever time you spend testing Pinterest is gonna end up being kind of a waste of time because here's what's gonna happen. You're gonna spend 5 or 10% of your budget there and you're not gonna know what it's doing. You're not gonna be able to tell.

True.

Your attribution tool isn't gonna tell you. Pinterest isn't gonna tell you. Nothing's gonna tell you. Like, it's better for you to just, like, not even spend— put it out of your mind. Don't do it, right?

Yeah, yeah.

And like, then yeah, landing pages can help, but then there's like a certain— you could— you should kind of say like, so that's one heuristic is like, if it's not one of those channels, like, good chance you can just backburner it. it from a channel standpoint. And then what I like to do is I like to say, like, pick, pick a section of the business in marketing. So, and I section it up like this. So paid acquisition, organic, like organic content. Mm-hmm. Site, so like landing pages and stuff like that, and retention. All right? And like in a quarter, be like, this is the area I'm maximizing in, and do all the tactics All the other ones, save. That's for a future quarter. Like, your team— but like, everybody's on board when we do this quarter. Like, where do we feel like we're lacking at the high level the most? Okay, we think it's retention. Yeah, every tactic that comes up, every tool that we think might be able to help, every agency that we think can teach us something or help us out, every coach, like, we'll, we'll try everything there just to like— we're on this like sprint of information gathering and testing things, and we put it through a filter. That doesn't mean we test every single thing. Mm-hmm. You know, there's a filter. And, and like a network of people, like you said, can help a lot. Like, yeah, I tried that, don't, don't bother, or whatever. Um, but like, just do that for whatever the thing is this quarter. And like everybody decide that ahead of time. And that way when the founder comes by and says like, yo, why does our organic social suck so much? I saw this thing that Alex Garcia posted that we should be doing a social show. And it's like, well, that's not our focus this quarter. And we already decided that upfront.

Mm-hmm.

Right? Like bookmark that for our quarterly planning, you know, and we can decide if next quarter organic is. So that's the best heuristic I've come up with for it.

Yep, I like that a lot. Yeah. I, yeah, no, no notes.

Cool, notes? Bart's like, ours is a 3-year-long, if it will help us sell ads.

Oh, the only thought actually that came up is like, the reason people don't do that is 'cause they have zero patience.

Yeah, and once you get some traction and you have some resource duty, you just wanna try everything.

Yeah, then you think everything else is just a waste of time 'cause you're like, I'm speedrunning now. But you're not.

Yeah,

you're speedrunning into a brick wall. It's got to be really bad right now with AI.

You know what you should— oh, dude, the AI especially.

Like, the tools for it.

That's, that's if they're using it. Like, 95% of people are still not.

Yeah,

which is crazy.

I would say if you're gonna tinker around with AI, like, still confine it to like— if I were using that heuristic, I would still say like, so at Royo this quarter it was site, right?

Yeah.

So I would try an AI tool or like set up a Claude Cowork thing that would go spy on brands or do something like that that would be like, okay, with Is this going to help us optimize our gross profit per visitor, which is what I'm optimizing this quarter on site side? I'm launching landing pages, I'm launching pricing tests, I'm launching offer tests. Like, that's what I'm up to this quarter. So if I'm going to play with AI at all, it's got to help me do that. Otherwise, it's—

And are you using AI in any of that stuff you just mentioned?

Not— no, I'm not. No. I've been— I, dude, I feel a lot of AI FOMO. Like, I don't think I'm up on it enough. Like, when I hear that you've got Like for OpenClaw setup. Yeah. I'm like, dude, I don't know. I chat GPT stuff sometimes. Yeah. I like just got into using Claude Cowork, and I'm like, this is powerful. I could use this for some stuff.

Do you use regular Claude as well?

Yeah. Yeah.

Of course.

Yeah. Claude. I find ChatGPT kind of unusable now.

Yeah. ChatGPT in my head is like you go you go for a drink at the bar with ChatGPT, but like you go to the office with Claude.

Chat ChatGPT.

Why is that?

ChatGPT is Hermione Granger.

Well, I don't know, but my only The only reasoning I can think of is the Anthropic guys are apparently ex-early OpenAI people.

Yeah.

So my guess is like they left OpenAI and they're like, oh, let's make the more like office-friendly version.

Yeah.

And to their credit, they do. Like they plug in with Fireflies, with Gmail, Calendar, Drive, like Slack, everything.

Yeah.

And so you've basically got a second brain you can use.

Yeah.

Cowork is— you can use Cowork for some pretty simple stuff pretty easily. Right. Like I would recommend, but like again, confine it then to your like quarter focus, you know what I mean?

Totally.

So like I might set up a cowork thing where I say, hey, like here's my, here's like Facebook ads library. Every week I want you to like go look at, go search these 5 brands, use it in Chrome, go search these 5 brands, tell me all the ads that they've launched, you know, and click through the ads and then go to the landing pages and tell me if they've launched a new landing.

The other thing, like going back to network, and you mentioned like if you started a brand before and you have a network, like finding people that are well-versed in all this stuff, like he could hit you up and be like, hey, is Todd worth it? for Royal right now. Or I have a buddy who is like the head of—

And yeah, is anybody using like a Claude code thing that's like helping with retention?

Or like my buddy's, uh, like head of securities engineer for Lululemon, and I'm just like, all right, let me know any of this stuff worth firming right now. And he's like, oh, we should maybe look at that. So like, the people that are already up there doing it, you should just hit them up and be like, I'm almost distracted by this, should I jump in? And then you can get some better—

Because on our last like round of shooting, you said you were just playing with every Like, all the AI, like, image generators, video generators.

Yeah, and I got stuck on text.

And I'm gonna be honest with you, I was like, I'm the worst person. I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna be obsolete, like, next week because I'm not doing that.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? But I'm like, it's just like, you have to confine it to your focus. Can I give you a real example of somebody who, like, I talked to today, and I think they will set up a Claude cowork thing? So they're maximizing in the category of, I'm gonna call it creative, but they are, they do, like, viral parody videos. Okay. You know what I mean? So like, when a moment hits, they gotta release a shirt type of thing.

Yep.

And I'm like, okay, like, how do you do that? And they're like, he's like, I just kind of use my taste. And like, and I'm like, all right, you need to like take that outta your brain. Like, go back and forth with it with Claude on it, take it outta your brain, and like set up some workflow for Claude Cowork to go through on a normal ba— on a regular basis. So like every single day, twice a day, it's saying, hey, here's like, Here's like 4 trends that I wanna surface to you that like might be worth a shirt, right? And I'm like, start there, and then over time, like maybe create a scoring system for like what you actually wanna launch a shirt around and stuff. And I'm like, yeah, that will probably be a pretty simple setup for him.

Yeah.

And I think it will be incredibly helpful for him. Yeah. Because right now he gets like basically 4 or 5 big hits a year.

Right.

And I'm like, can we make that 8 or 10?

Right.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Probably just more stuff needs to come your way.

Yeah, more context needs to be fed in.

Yeah.

Honestly, the context being fed in is, Like that's part of the reason why I think more people just need to play with any and every tool because you'll understand how the patterns of how these platforms work and how you need to feed information and what it does when you don't versus do. And like that first-party data is about to be the most intense thing, right? Whether it's like 2 examples, it can be first-party data could be this conversation transcribed and fed into somebody's Claude. Like somebody who asked this question could feed this whole conversation transcript and that's amazing first-party context, right, that his Claude's now gonna have versus others. Another example is let's say you have Dad Gang and you're like, yo, I'm gonna create a Claude bot to make, to be, to come up with all my social media cap— social media posts for stories, just for stories, right?

Yeah.

And because it's stories, I want it to be more fast and witty and fun. So then you can go and create a Twitter account for Dad Gang and a Twitter developer account and feed that home feed from the developer API into Claude. And now Claude is just browsing Twitter as your customer seeing what they would wanna see or what kind of content they'd wanna see and then use that to make creative and then post.

Yeah.

And—

Damn.

Yeah.

Well,

yeah, oh, back to that, like first-party data, right? That is another form of like first-party data you can feed in.

Yeah.

But the more you can feed in, the more precise it gets.

I do wanna clarify something you just said. And you said that's why you need to play with any and all of these.

Yeah.

If you just sold your company and you kind of got nothing going on for a little bit, then you should be playing with any and all of these.

All right, then I'll give you a list.

You give me— yeah, like, be more practical because people are busy.

All right, go to Figma AI, go to Perplexity, go to— definitely use Claude. I would check out Journey, J-U-R-N-I, getjourney.ai. I would check out Higgsfield. I would check out Kiva, K-I-V-A. I would check out

Is this in order? Is this an unordered list?

No, unordered list, but they're all kind of different tools, right? Replit, Cursor, Lovable. Some are web creators, some are for AI creative.

Yeah.

Some are like Figma AI. You can literally design now within Figma using chat.

Yeah.

And I would, I would, I would, yeah, even just those I listed, I would go play around with them and see where the limitations are.

Yeah. And I would, here's how I would structure like play around with, because that's It's like a bit like, how do I play around with it? I don't even know. Sure. I would use something like Claude and say, hey, I have an hour this week. I want to play with Lovable. I wanna just like try something out with Lovable, or I wanna try something— Lovable's a really easy one 'cause you can do a project in there very quickly. I wanna try something out with Claude Cowork. What would be a good idea for me? And especially if Claude has a bunch of co— like, you could ask ChatGPT if it has more context on you. But like, um, like, I'm going to do this for an hour. Like, what's something that could end up being useful for me? Even if it's just like organizes your inbox. Is that that useful? No. But like, it's something—

Play around with it.

So that you can do— like, don't go into it and be like, let me push some buttons and stuff like that. Be like, let me try and do something.

Yeah, help me set up my second brain within Claude. Help me build a landing page coming from Facebook traffic. Help me— another one I did was Like, you know, all these, because there's so many tools and people are gonna continue to use different tools at the same time, there's no, there's no like USB stick or thing you can reference to keep everything consistent. So like, you know, create a folder of documents that speak all about your brand, your story, your tone of voice, your messaging positioning. And then you now understood how to create a memory system that you can then take as a zip file to every model you use. So it applies the same branding or tone of voice or copy, things like that.

Yeah.

But yeah, I do think people should, go in and figure out an objective and try to work toward it. Because if you have an objective like the landing page or organize my screenshots and rename the ones that are important and delete the ones that are not important, you know, like you're going to start to learn how they work and where things time out or where things fall or what you need to connect.

Yeah.

And those are like, those are like relearning the English language for the next, you know, 100 years.

And I would say, yeah, like to kind of answer this person's question about shiny object syndrome, what we're talking about is like you can go down this rabbit hole hole. Yeah, get shiny object syndrome and be working on stuff that is not going to be helpful to you, which is like, you have to constrain it some way. Probably you need a time constraint on it. And probably you need to say, okay, I'm only going to try and work on stuff that is in the product, is then in the category of my business that I'm maximizing right now, which is creative or content or, you know, site or something like that.

Just to dumb it down, you gotta get good at saying no way more.

Yeah, for sure.

Like any, any founders that Like, if you have traction,

if you

have traction,

you

do. Usually say— they usually end up saying that because it's so easy to say yes to every opportunity. And then, then once again, you're not working, you're just, you're just trying new things. The other one I'll add is Kyiv. Not— you mentioned a different one, but

no, Kyiv.

Kyiv.

That's what I meant, not Kiva.

Oh yeah, unbelievable.

Did you just think it was pronounced Kiva? Be

honest. Yeah, I

don't know, all these weird-ass names.

Like, I've only ever read the name.

It's a chocolate brand, I think.

Oh yeah, but Kyiv is the one. Unreal.

Insane for filler content. Yeah, especially like Now, another thought I had, so like Kaiv, right? Like the photographs are almost too pristine. And yesterday I was at a friend's office and he was doing a shoot and the photographer put this spray in the air, almost like hairspray, and it's called atmosphere spray. And then I was thinking, wow, how do you figure out, like for a person who's just getting into Kaiv, how do you go figure out all the little things you can, like now I can tell Kaiv, pretend there's atmosphere spray in the photo. It'll feel more realistic. Like you almost gotta somehow study still the basics so that you can apply it in this world too, if that makes sense.

Yeah, the really cool thing about Kyve, and you've known from, from the, the Slack channel, like I always post stuff I create in there. And like the one thing is that you can take photography you find on like Pinterest or any photo you see on Instagram, like even one of, of your family. Yeah. You could be like, hey, take this photo, keep the exact same feel of this photo, put X pro— @X product on it, on, you know, in my case it'd be a Dad Gang hat on that person's head, and it is like 100%.

Yeah,

yeah.

Well, what's cool about that, Kyve, is like you spend a good amount of time defining the actual product image, right?

Yeah, yeah.

And uploading a ton of references, which like Gemini doesn't— you don't do that on Gemini because like most people just look for a one-shot response. But

yeah,

yeah, it's a sick platform.

I tried the Google one, the Google Labs, um,

Nano Banana. Oh no, no, no, you're talking about Google Labs, the branding tool?

Yeah, Google Labs branding tool, and they have a photo shoot tool within there now, but it's still Yeah, I feel like hats are different. Like you have stitching and realistic elements to it that like some AI platforms just can't get. But like we make a suede hat, a corduroy hat, and Kaiv just nails the textures. I'm like, $100 a month? Like it's ridiculous.

Totally.

Do you run it as ads?

Yeah, but just for like product photography. It's not great at video.

Yeah.

Plus you're not really supposed to, you know, I love dad gang hats in a video and it's not a real person.

Right, right, right.

There's, I think, some state, maybe it was New York, just passed a law on this, yeah?

Yeah, yeah.

That you can't, you have to like disclose if it's AI or something.

That's been a thing though, like Icon got in trouble for that too, because it's like you can't put fake people saying they love your product.

Right.

Right, you already weren't allowed to do that, I think.

Oh, with AI, I see.

You'd have to say it was an actor already.

And now you have to say it's a fake actor. Now

you have to say it's not even an actor.

Yeah. There's nothing going on here.

Just a computer. I like this question a lot. So let me wrap on this shiny object thing.

Yeah, say no more often.

You just in real time watched us get shiny object syndrome on this podcast. It happens to everybody. And I think this, like, there is this world where, like, trying to be as efficient as possible all the time isn't the best way to operate a business. Like, sometimes you do have to go down a little rabbit hole and be like, damn, I lost half a day to that and I got nothing out of it.

Yeah.

But, like, that is what helps you gain context over time. time of like, oh, I can tell I'm down a rabbit hole, let me pull out.

Right.

If you never go down a rabbit hole, you don't know that, right? So, so I think you got to forgive yourself a little bit.

Totally.

When that happens. And like, sometimes—

That's where the gold is sometimes too.

Exactly. Sometimes you go down a rabbit hole, and then 3 months later, you're like, hang on a second, and a light bulb hits, right? I always say that like, super key roles in a company, and if this person's a founder or CEO, I would— that it's the most efficient and inefficient efficient person in the company.

Yeah.

Right? Here's the best example I have. Um, I don't know how true these stories are. Maybe you do. There are stories of MrBeast going in, just like sitting in Walmarts and watching how people like act in the candy aisle and like looking how often people restock his candy and stuff like that. And I think that there's like a story where he like made the boxes wider because of that, because he's like, oh, if I do that right now, they're putting 2 here, but if I make it a little bit wider, they'll actually have to put 3, and I'll take up more space on the shelf. And like, you know, it will like be like— so he could go to Walmart for 5 days and nothing could come of that. And it's just the highest leverage person in your company hanging out at Walmart. Yeah. Or you realize, oh, let's make our boxes a little bit wider. And then not only will we be able to like put 2 rows of chocolate in there, which I'm not sure if this is exactly the right story, not only will we be able to put 2 rows of chocolate in each box, but the lack actually put 3 boxes up there. So we'll go from like a row of 2 to 6,

right?

Right. And like, that will increase our sales exponentially in Walmart, right? So it's like doing this thing that could end up being very, very inefficient, and then finding the most efficient unlock, you know, in the business.

Totally.

That is the role of the founder and CEO. So you do sometimes need to let yourself go down rabbit holes. If you like, if you feel like you're sniffing

Totally.

You know what I mean?

Yep.

And if you don't find it, it's like, all right, fine, you've built a bit of a skill set and you have knowledge now.

You learn more context.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yep. Uh, I like this question. If you had $50K today to start a brand from scratch, how would you do it? And as of, uh,

put it all on red.

As of March— and

then start the brand.

As of March 2026, how would you start a brand with $50K?

$50K, I mean, I would, uh, build a I'd build a site and I'd get a designer developer overseas, build a visual identity and a site for like $5,000 to $10,000 all in. Okay. I'd use pretty much the next $25,000 on inventory, $25,000 to $30,000.

Yep.

And then use the last for ads.

You'd run ads?

Well, it depends what it is actually. If it's like I've got $50,000, you know, like if I'm in this—

Are you sitting on a brand idea at all? Can you make this more real?

Yeah, I mean, let's see, so—

I am too, and I'll share mine too.

Okay, well, this isn't a real brand idea, but let's say you're starting like a kids' vitamin brand, right? You do the, yeah, design and site for $10K, you spend maybe $25K, $30K on your first PO, you go negotiate really good MOQ numbers, ideally you get, you know, something good there. You spend on boxes, you know, 3PL, and then the rest is just ads.

Yeah, and you would launch on Meta Ads.

Yeah, 'cause you, 'cause like a category like that, you can test it on ads, and then if it works, then you can do a proper launch. Yeah.

I am proficient in Meta Ads. That's the thing I'm really good at. So I do gravitate toward launching on Meta Ads, but I don't think that that is actually the best way to launch a brand today in 2023. Like, I do think TikTok is a better place to launch a brand.

Totally.

And if you were, and if you're neutral, like you don't have a previous skillset in Meta ads, then you should probably gravitate there.

Yeah, totally.

Yeah, and either make content yourself or be seeding product.

Yep.

Yeah. Bart, what do you think? $50K? You've launched even less. I'm going small.

I'm going small.

You're like, I would just put, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, well, I didn't even need anywhere close to that. So like, I probably wouldn't spend, it all depends where you're starting, but like, I wouldn't—

I think, let me actually rephrase the question that they said. Because the idea of this whole episode is like, what do the like heavy hitters do that others don't? If you had $50K to launch a brand and you wanted it to be one of those heavy hitters, like, you can launch a brand where you're gonna make a decent personal income and it's never really gonna get to $100 million, you know? But if you're like, no, my goal is to like make a heavy hitter brand and have like this huge exit in the end? How would you deploy $50K a month?

I do like inventory and ads as like the main places you spend because that's where you end up anyways.

Yeah.

Right? So as your business grows, we spent $750 to start our business, so it wasn't anywhere close to $50K, that'd be nuts. But like, but as you build and you grow, like your top 3 expenses or whatever you wanna categorize, it's gonna like, it's usually ads and it's usually inventory. And then from revenue, you're taking cash flow to buy more inventory. But I wouldn't overbuy inventory for something that doesn't have, you know, some sort of early result. Yeah. So if you can somehow like half your inventory order to test it to see if there's demand, and then have a, some agreement with your factory or whatever to like, to re-up once that demand is proven, then that's probably like a more efficient way to just have more cash still for other things as you're building. But yeah, I would still, I would still go Meta first. And yeah, although TikTok's great, I don't think it's great for every brand start.

Yeah, not, not every, you know. Yeah, like Royo wouldn't have launched on TikTok.

Yeah, exactly.

Because basically who we found traction with early on were 50, 60-year-olds who were like, oh, I can have lower blood sugar and still eat bagels? Great. Not a lot of 18-year-olds have that problem. Okay, here's my brand idea. All right, so this is— I think that a business that could live on its own, that literally anybody could go out and start tomorrow, is a variation of an idea that I'll cite the Corner Office podcast for, which is a super fun podcast if you like just like random business ideas that aren't necessarily e-commerce. He was traveling somewhere and he was like, oh, I saw this thing on the side of the road that said like hole-in-one, win $10,000. And it's just, uh, golf, like one hole on a green in a field, and you're like, I don't know, 100, 200 yards away. I think it's 100 yards away.

Yeah, I'd be a par 3.

You get a bucket.

Yeah.

And if you hit a hole-in-one, you win $10,000.

Nice.

And the bucket, I think, is $10. So they've mathed it out.

Wow.

And, and they're making some sort of profit on this, right? I think you could do the same thing in a lot of different sports, and I love I think you could go to courts all over the country and be like, 3 hits— you hit 3 3s in a row, I'll pay you $100, $10 to play.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

And I think a lot— 3 3s in a row, I could take that.

Yeah, you could kind of set it up anywhere.

But a lot of people are not going to hit 3.

A lot of people that don't play basketball would do it.

3 in a row is tough to hit. Like, look, there's some courts you go to, you're going to get hustled, you know, they can hit shots. But like, 3 in a row, even for somebody who's—

I would almost make it 3 out of 5.

This is basically the equivalent of that.

This was my variation. If you couldn't get somebody to play, to play, I would say start on a make. You know what I mean? So 3 in a row, you get to start on

a— Yeah, there you go.

Yeah, so—

'Cause if you miss the first, it's just—

Yeah, your first make is shot 1, right?

Yeah.

I think you could get people to play. I've asked a bunch of people I hoop with, like, somebody came up to you and said that, would you do it? They'd be like, yeah, probably $10. I'll take a flyer on it. But like, and I don't know if that's the right math, but you figure out the math where it's like, I like that $10 to play, $100 win, 3 in a row. If that's the right math where it's like, yeah, only 1 in 20 people win, I have a margin.

Right. Already, I think that's a good business.

And it's good content, right?

Yeah.

Now attach a brand to it. So everyone who loses, you're like, hey man, sorry you lost. Here's my like shorts from my brand, from an econ brand. Everybody gets a pair of shorts even if they lose, right? I think this can—

Loser shorts.

Loser shorts, yeah. Like, I can't shoot, you know, something like that. Or like a shirt that says like, I can't shoot, not a shooter. Yeah, yeah. Seg off. You know, like, and I do think like a comedic basketball brand would be funny. Yeah. Like, like slow, white, fat, can't jump. Like, you know, that's what's on my shirt.

Adam Sandler basketball brand.

Yeah, truly.

Yeah, and, and so like, uh, everybody who loses like gets, gets that. Um, I don't know if anybody— like, I think you would have to make it cool maybe for people to buy it, but I do think there's a bunch of people who would like ironically wear a shirt that says I can't shoot to their pickup runs.

Yeah, totally. You know what I mean?

Yeah. Um, and, and so like then you attach the e-com brand. And then I'm like, I think you cash flow it just on the game, honestly.

Yeah.

And so I would, I maybe would start this brand print on demand, maybe, just because it's like quicker.

Yeah,

this includes like physical activity, setting up hoops and all that stuff, right?

So I think I'd go to cut, like, I think where I would spend my money is I would hit up some of the street interview people here in New York to go to Washington Park and to go to the Rucker and go to like some of the—

Oh my gosh, you would rock it.

Some of the famous courts.

See, I hear that and I'm like, I'd rather sit in my boxers and make money.

Yeah, that's true.

Well, I'm not gonna go to the courts.

Yeah, fair.

I'm gonna pay, pay some people to go to the courts.

Yeah, yeah, how many shots we get off today?

Yeah, well, look, actually, I might go to the courts 'cause I might just think that was fun.

Need more shots, please fix.

That is fun, but it could be like the debate table at the college campus too, where you're like, you can't make 3 3s, prove me wrong.

Yeah, yeah.

And win $100.

Yeah, that's a cool idea too.

Yeah, you could go to every city. Like, honestly, just the content play there could— you could end up building—

You could make a brand called 3 3s.

Yeah,

just off that.

3 3s. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's— so this is my idea for an e-com brand right now. I think you could probably just do the game and launch it that way. Yeah. I mean, and I think you could POD the brand if you want, but you could buy some inventory. Like, I'd be fine to spend some money on like a low MOQ.

Yeah.

The thing is, if you do an e-commerce, like an apparel brand, and this is why I'm like, okay, to get to $100 million, you do have to have a bit of a movement

for sure.

You know what I mean? Either you have to have a very innovative product, which I have no idea Or you have to have a bit of a movement, like Dad Gang.

Yeah.

And I'm like, I think that, like, uh, hoopers who would, like, ironically wear a shirt that says, I can't shoot, or things, I think that's a bit of a movement in the basketball space where it's, like, a very cocky space. But I also think there's people who are like, yeah, no, sag off, that's fine. Like, and then they'll hit a 3 on you anyway.

You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah.

Um, like, I, I— and it's more of a— it's like a movement within that subculture.

Dude, you should. I mean, Utah has a lot of basketball.

I know. Dude, I have explored that. Look, if somebody's listening to this right now and they're like, that sounds dope, I wanna launch this brand with you, what I have is some money and no time. So if you've got time, then let's team up. Hit me up on X or whatever. But like, yeah, I think that's where I would go with it.

I really wanna see you try this.

I know. I know you

do. It sounds so fun.

I know. Yeah. And the problem is I'd probably be like, well, I actually wanna go do the content. So then I would just spend all my time—

You would have to go to the first one. For sure. The launch of your thing.

But like, especially with some of these street interview like agencies now, it's like you probably could be like, yeah, just like crank out tons of these, dude. And you could probably get 'em to give you a bit of a discount on the pricing by being like, I'll split like off of the game. Yeah. Like whatever we make off the game, I'll split that with you.

Totally.

You know what I mean?

Dude, you could go hire all the big basketball creators in different tier 2, tier 3 cities to go run these.

I know.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Get them on iPad with AI. And so that's a—

once I had proof of concept, then I would just go to like, I mean, Tristan Jass is too big, but like other, like especially people who are— He's the guy that plays everybody one-on-one.

Yeah, yeah. MK dude.

Yeah.

Oh yeah. Dude, he would. He's. I was thinking of him the whole time.

Yeah. Or Friga.

Yeah. These guys are too big that you're saying. Yeah. You got to get the next tier down.

That's okay.

Although that might be a good like face of the brand, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. You could. Do you guys both? You know Jack Appleby?

Yeah.

Yeah. He like I was like he might not be a bad person to partner with on.

Or there's Bucket Squad too.

Yeah. Right.

But he's got his own.

Right.

Big brand already.

Yeah. You're like, there's these And1 guys. I don't know if you've heard of them.

No, but they're gonna— yeah, yeah. Hopefully these—

Like Bucket Squad, who already has a brand.

But these big creators could like easily just hear this and then pop this up at their next thing, you know?

Totally. Yeah. No, I— and I literally think you— like, what I like about it is you don't have to be famous. This is my current idea.

It's like a carnival game.

I'm very hot on this idea right now. I just don't have any time to do it. But, um, this is how I would look for some opportunity like that. where it's like, could I self-fund this with content somehow? Or could, you know, I don't know, could I like, what's a different angle? You have to have either product innovation or a movement. So how can I make a movement in a subculture or something like that? That's where I would look for. So I would spend with $50K, maybe a bit of money on inventory, but I'd spend all my, almost all my money on people doing this content. And if I spent $50K on that many videos,

Yeah.

and it didn't work, and I wasn't making money on the 'Cause then I could potentially start to just self-fund it with the money we make off of the game.

I think you need $100 and a basketball to do that.

Yeah, right.

Not even $100.

So maybe slower, maybe slower, but yeah.

Yeah.

Um, but, but then, uh, then if it wasn't working at $50K, it'd be like a good signal for like, this isn't gonna work. You know what I mean? Like, with that many videos, this doesn't work, this isn't gonna work. Totally. You know what I'm saying? That's what I would look for if I had $50K to start a website. Content. Where can I say this isn't gonna work? If I get there.

What? The content behind that would be so funny.

I think so, yeah.

It's like watching people try to make putts and stuff.

Yeah, yeah, that they're like so confident, 'cause it looks not that hard.

You can do this with putts, you can do this with soccer goals.

Puts, you can do this with soccer goals. Yes, every, literally whatever sport you like. Just think of a challenge where people are—

Field goals. Yeah, totally.

This is what you—

Tennis serves.

Think of every 30 to 35-year-old dude you know who used to play high school football.

Who thinks he still has it.

Right, right, right.

Who's like, oh yeah, that's easy, I can do that.

I'm too good.

For sure can't do it anymore.

Goes and looks at their high school baseball trophy in the gym. Yeah, yeah.

Let me get that $100.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, I think this is a good round-the-table question to end on. Yeah. What is one thing you wish every ecommerce brand owner understood about scaling that almost nobody talks about?

I would say, like, you know, blinders on. Like, you have to have blinders on even when you're scaling. You have to be very good at filtering through what you're doing and what you're not doing. Like, that's really most of the game, all the stuff behind that is what either gets you on a good path or gets you lost in the sauce.

Yeah.

And, um, I think a lot of people just assume they can, like, they, you know, they can just copy what other people on the internet are saying has worked for them, and they think that's scaling, or it's working for them so it should work for me. But, um, you know, unless you put in your own, like, 10,000 hours into each part of that, um, you know, you can't really, like, get to a point where you're scaling and, like, doing it properly.

Yeah.

Like, you might just be scaling and running right into a brick wall that you don't know is right in front of

you.

Yeah.

Yeah. Like, so—

Blinders on.

Blinders on. Yeah, I get it. So, like, yeah, give me an example of how, like, again, contrasting someone who's like, has momentum and then like fizzles versus someone who actually like hits $100 million. What does blinders on look like? Is it like the blinders fall off and that's why they

Yeah, blinders

fall off. And what does the blinders falling off look like? You know what I mean? Like, what do they get distracted by?

Yeah, blinders falling off could be, oh, uh, we're supposed— hey, we should do the CTV test. They're gonna give us 10 grand in credits if we spend 20.

Yeah, spending all the damn credits everybody will give you.

Yeah. Or, uh, hey, we should, um, our competitor is on TikTok and Snap. How come we're only on Meta? We should be on there too. Um, you know, like that kind of stuff is, is where you want blinders on. And like, to be To be honest, scaling just means you figured out something that worked and then you're putting more fuel behind it.

You need more of it.

Right? And like, while you're scaling, you should still always be testing other ways. 'Cause like scaling is really just like a, it's like a vine, but like you're gonna have to build other vines off of that. That one vine is not gonna always take you to the end. Yeah. So I think, yeah, blinders on is blinders on and like figure out what works for you. It's not gonna be the same thing for, you know, everybody.

Yeah, if I were to tag that, I think a good framework is more, better, new.

Yeah.

So like, you should just try and do more first, right? Like, before you do anything even better, you should just try and do more of whatever's working. And if that's not working, to do more of it, you should try and do it a little bit better, and then new. Like, new is the worst risk-adjusted bet.

Totally.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, I just heard on another pod, um, that like, you know, when people are like, oh no, that already exists, we shouldn't do it, it's like, well, why not? Something that's already existed, that means it works. Yeah, yeah,

yeah. Another That's a good one. Bart, what do you think? Blinders on is probably— he stole yours.

Yeah, you might have taken mine.

I know, but you said it earlier, so.

A little bit, but like, for— I'm speaking for the people, kind of in the beginning of stuff, like, you know, we went from 100 hats to almost a million hats sold in 3 and a half years. But the one thing we like kept true in working at an agency and stuff was just like, I would speak to CEOs and CMOs and founders all the time that were always worried about the It was like always like, so we did a million last year, how do we do 2 million next year? Why?

Let's come up with some arbitrary number that we have no proof of.

No, you know what the worst is? Uh, a CFO being like, so our sessions look to be up by 16% coming in March, what can you expect for May sessions on the website?

Yeah.

Like, what are you talking about?

I know, I, I think, I think a lot of scale and all that talk about going to the moon and all that shit needs to be be like, it needs to calm the fuck down in general, like, because everybody's talking about it. But when we started building Dad Gang, I was like, let's see what happens, right? Rather than like, oh my God, we sold 100 hats, how do we sell 200? Okay, 200, how do we sell 1,000?

Right.

Like, that was never the goal, was to like wake up the next day and think of a, of a scale goal immediately. And I, and I think a lot of people get an early and then start thinking, oh God, I need to be like Eight Sleep, or I need to be like Casper, or I need to be like—

I've got to set hard goals.

Allbirds, or whatever you wanna be like, but like, but stop thinking about scale so much. Honestly, be in the business, be working on the business, and I think a lot of the time it does show up organically. And then when you do find wins that do work for you, lean into them more. Like, let's dumb down what scale actually is, like you just said.

Yeah, I have like, a, I guess, kind of hot take that like, uh, I hate projections and I think most brands shouldn't do them.

Fully agree.

Like, they just—

you are talking to one that does not.

I know, I— and I love it. Most brands shouldn't do— most brands, the projection's not worth the paper it's written on anyway.

No, projections work if you've got like insertion orders for media with guaranteed CPMs and impressions and all that bullshit.

So our 3PL asks me for projections, and this is

why people

do them.

People get pulled into it by their vendors, and you got to just Yeah. I don't know.

No, no, no, but I will say I love our 3PL and I like doing it for them because they need to know during the holidays, do they need 6 people on the line? Do they need 12 people on the line? But what I do is like the simplest math ever. I'm just like, all right, last year on ads we spent this much and had this many orders in December, right? We've grown as a brand, we have some momentum. I'm gonna project like a little bit of a lift and a little bit of more spend. And so like if I'm spending this percentage more, I'm expecting this many more orders. I literally wrote this out on cardboard one time with a Sharpie, and I sent them a picture of the piece of cardboard, and they're like, all right, cool, thanks, and then other than that, we're just—

What I always say about it is like, if you're projecting because you need to know how much stuff to order, that's like one of the only legitimate reasons to project.

Yeah, it's physical goods.

But you don't have to be ambit— like you should under— like you should err on the side of under-projecting then. It's way better to have more demand than supply than more supply than demand. You leave money on the table both ways, but one problem is objectively worse to have. Yeah. Like just under-project it a little bit, but then people also tie that to their projection that they do to give their team goals.

Yeah.

And so then they feel like they need to be overambitious with their suppliers. They get themselves into cash. I have a whole soapbox about why I hate projections.

No, they're just like ego numbers for the most part.

Right, right, right, right, yeah. And so it's like, yeah, for the most part, it's not like worth even doing. And another thing is that you spend how long doing it when you could have just been like working on the business all that time?

Yeah.

Like what you said about like—

Not easy docs.

Focus on ease in being in the business, business, like focus on activity.

Or if you have an account— if you have a decent accounting team or an accountant, just be like, hey dude, I need projections for the 3PL. Can you look at last year's?

Yeah, err on the side of being conservative. Yeah. Yep, there you go. Boom. Tell Claude to do it.

And all the other—

No, literally. Um, I think, uh, one— everything— or, uh, what's one thing you wish every e-commerce brand owner understood about scaling that almost nobody talks about? If I'm thinking about what do What do people not understand about scaling a brand to $100 million that nobody talks about? It's that it's just a different life and you most likely don't want it. You know what I mean?

I would say the answer's in the question. It's the brand part. Like, no one knows how to build a brand. They sell products on ads mostly.

Well, if you scale to $100 million and that was your intention upfront, I mean, some brands just like bop their way there, I feel like. You know what I mean? 'Cause they just had so much tailwind in their category. Yeah. of those. Um, I almost just— I almost said somebody, but then I was like, that's kind of mean.

Yeah, you could think of like Liquid Death building a real true brand.

Do you understand though that that's a different game that most of you don't want to play?

Totally.

No, like if you're watching this, $50 million raised up front,

yeah,

you know, you're basically underwater.

Yeah, even building a brand like Jolie or like Eight Sleep, it's like that's a different game that you probably don't want. Like what you probably want is to make a lot of money and like—

No investors, no board, no nothing.

And have time.

Yeah.

Yeah, and have time and be able to kind of do what you want and not have money dictate your decisions and not have like, um, investors, board members, you know, uh, having to feed a 50-person team, not have that dictate your decisions.

I always wonder what's like, what's wrong with having a decent income brand that you can run for a long time?

Doesn't

get

It

didn't get clicks. Yeah. When you post a Twitter thread about it, it doesn't blow up.

Yeah, it

doesn't get clicks.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And people hate on it more because they're like, wait a second, I'm struggling to raise $2 million only to do $4 million and have investors breathing down my neck every other week and asking for a board deck while you're making $700,000 of personal income every quarter?

Yeah.

Yeah.

You

know what I mean? Dude, I know a guy that sells car wash water filters. Nobody's ever heard of him or his

brand.

And guy easily brings in $2 million a year

in

personal income, and nobody knows about him, and he does not care to blow this thing up at all.

Right.

And he's been doing it for a long enough time now to be like, okay, it's gonna stick around.

My favorite one that we covered in season 1 was, is RockAuto.

Yes, yes.

RockAuto. It's just like an online auto parts store. They launched in 1996, and they just own every keyword. Dude, they probably do $50 or $70 million $180 million with like 4 people. Wow. 'Cause they just have all this SEO.

Yeah.

And I'm like, nobody's ever even heard of these guys. Right, right. Just crushing it, you know, all online. And it's like, yeah, that's the business you want. Now that's bigger than, but like you could do $5 million, $10 million and make a pretty good personal income and have pretty good freedom.

100%.

And that's probably the life you want.

I met a lot of those people in EcomFuel. You know, like I remember one guy, he sells like truck radios on Shopify. Yeah. Makes like $6, $7 million bucks. Niche stuff. Niche stuff kills it. You hear a lot about it. He goes skiing every day. I'm just like, dude, that's a sick life.

That's the life you probably want. And, uh, there's an article, um, that's like, I don't know, back when articles were like really like blog posts were like, oh, that was impactful, I think about that once a day.

2010.

Yeah, back in 2010, uh, somebody sold his business. I can't remember this guy's name, uh, and he wrote an article called Rich Versus King of the World. And I think that's what it comes down to, is that like most people just kind of want to be rich. They don't— and when I say rich, they want to have earned the last dollar they ever need to earn, right? Like they want to like not have money dictate their decisions, and they want to have time freedom, right? That's what most people want. Some people want to be the king of the world or have their like brand, their company, their thing that they built be the king of the world. Now, some people start out wanting to be rich, and then when the opportunity arises to be the king of the world, then they want that. And that is a category I could put Dad Gang in where it's like, you might have started out just wanting sort of like money and time freedom, but then it's like, okay, now we have this opportunity. And, and like, that doesn't come along very often. And it's okay to switch what you want, but most people don't actually want to build Jolie or Eight Sleep or Feastables or something like that. You know what I'm saying? Most people like probably just want to make really good personal income and like be like the guy who sells, uh, what did you say it was like car radio or what was

it? Yeah, truck radios.

Truck radios. Like, dude, that's That's who you wanna be. Or like water filters for car wash, like that's what you want.

The boring industries, so my—

Nobody's coming for you, nobody's knocking you off.

I had a buddy nobody knew about either, and he just sold iPhone screen protectors on Amazon, and like no brand, nothing. And he was like, not huge money, but he was bringing in like $30K in revenue just by himself, didn't barely touch any marketing, product, and then like kept a few thousand for himself here and there, and then was like,

oh,

this is awesome. Now I'm gonna do phone cases. And it just kept going and going, and it's just kind of like, yeah, there's a lot of happiness in the building of boring businesses.

And you can become, your brand can become this huge legacy brand over the course of 40 or 50 years, right? Like Carhartt's or Stanley. I mean, they've kind of taken a downturn now, But like, that can happen over the course of a really long time if you just are like, let me just build a business that like supports my life that I want.

Isn't there— nothing's coming to mind, but aren't there a bunch of like businesses that started making one thing and then like 40 years later they're known for this thing?

Yeah, I think Stanley is that. Is it? Yeah. Okay. They were always making some kind of like— I think they made like Tupperware people put their lunches in.

Oh, okay.

Like construction workers. Yeah, yeah. But like, yeah, no, anyway, that's probably like the main thing that I think is like, especially if you have a brand in the early stage, you're like, man, what are they doing? Like, all the people who ask me the question, like, what are they doing? I'm like, they're doing what you don't want to do.

Yeah, exactly.

You know what I mean?

Exactly.

You don't want to live like that. People ask me what Breeze is doing all the time, and I'm like, I have insight on Breeze, and I'm like, I just don't think you'd want that life. Yeah. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

And no offense to Nick, but they're playing a game that like most people don't really want to play.

Yep.

You know, or Nick and Aaron. I think they're They're killing it, but they've decided purposely to play that game.

Yeah, totally.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Would you say that's like a common thread amongst these brands that people always hold up and say, how do I be them?

For sure.

Yeah.

For sure. And the answer is literally like, look, this is not, we're not building the next like electric car battery. There's a very proven thing of like what to do to build an e-commerce business. And the fact is most people just don't wanna do those things. They don't wanna get the eyeballs, they don't wanna get the views, film content, they don't wanna seed it out, they don't wanna do this, they don't wanna go negotiate for a partnership. Like it's just things they don't wanna do. The things are so obvious. We probably covered the entire thing on this podcast.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

Yeah. If you watch one podcast and build any company, it's probably this one.

Like, the things are all there of what to do. It's just that you gotta do 'em.

Yeah.

I always tell— people are always like, you know, like, how do we get to the— from the $20 million to the $50 million mark? Well, you gotta focus on building a brand and you gotta get eyeballs and you gotta do this. Like, they're like, oh yeah, we thought that was the right direction. Yeah, you knew that was the right direction.

Yeah, you already knew that 'cause you got to $20 million doing that.

Yeah. Do it now.

Uh, cool. Nick, I, I don't know what you're up to. Just, I guess we're pretty deep in the podcast to say that, but you just sold Sharma Brands.

Yep.

Not that long ago. And you're— I don't think you have a new project yet.

Yeah, nope, not officially.

So like, you still do the newsletter? You still do—

yeah, yeah, still got the newsletter podcast. Those keep me— honestly, that's what keeps me like super in the trenches too, right? Um, but

yeah, so tell people where to find you then.

Yeah, just hit me on Twitter, Mr Sharma on Twitter. Uh, Nick nick.co, my site. nick@nick.co is the email. write.nick.co is the advertorial thing.

Yeah.

Whatever you need, I got you.