[RTB:E31] How Josh Snow Scaled a Teeth Whitening Brand To 9-Figures (49th Biggest Shopify Store) 💰

Hey, you're listening to the Road to a Billion podcast. I'm your host, Stefan Georgi. I'm glad to have you with me here today. The Road to a Billion is a call and radio show style podcast where you can ask me questions about freelancing, copywriting, entrepreneurship, mindset, skilling, funnels, relationships, money, and more. And you can also ask my guests those questions, including my guests who I'm going to be introducing in just a moment. The reason for the name the Road to a Billion is twofold. One is that I've sold about a billion dollars worth of stuff through my copywriting and the funnels I built, both for myself and for clients. And because I want to make a impact in the lives of a billion people over the next 10 years, although really now it's nine years since we're in year two of doing this. We'll start taking your calls in about 30 minutes from now. And the way that works is you just put your questions into the Q and A in zoom and then my friend Ed Ray will go through, he'll review those questions and put you on live and you can ask me and my guests and Ed what you got going on. We will help you out to the best of our abilities. Ed, do you want to go ahead and say hi and introduce yourself, let everyone know who you are?

Yeah, for sure. Hey, I'm Ed Ray and when people get their Facebook ad accounts, business manager, personal pages, or any other account issues on Facebook happening, we help fix that.

Sweet.

Always good to have you with us, Ed. And my guest today is Josh Snow. Josh has been in this industry since he was 13. That's when he made his first client website. He got his first big paycheck from an advertiser who ran ads in a blog that he created when he was 14. At 16, he created 4Sold, an Internet advertising company that became very successful very quickly, leading to him landing a Fortune 500 client by the time he turned 19. He sold the agency part of his business for over eight figures at the age of 20. And then at the age of 23, he created the first rendition of Snow or Snow's mouthpiece, which is a teeth whitening product, which has been, you've probably seen it on Facebook. He's leveraged different kind of influencers from Gronkowski and Floyd Mayweather, a lot of cool people, and bootstrapped his way to generate over $250 million in revenue and done a bunch of amazing stuff since then. Josh, thanks for joining us today.

Hey, thanks so much. Thanks for Having me. It's a pleasure.

Absolutely, man. So the first time I saw you talk, it was at Ed o'.

Keefe's.

One of his things he did in Scottsdale a couple years back in February. I'd heard of you before, and then you got up and you presented. I was just immediately like, holy shit, this guy is way smarter than me. There's a certain people where you hear them and you're like, man, this person is just really smart and really on point. And you're one of those folks. And what was cool is, I mean, I knew about Snow, but then you were doing stuff with Lead gen. You were doing stuff in, like, the, you know, kind of financial space. You were doing a bunch of different things. So I guess let's start from the beginning, though. What kind of got you into this whole world? I mean, at the age of 13, when you first created a website, Kind of walk us through your origin story.

Yeah, so, I mean, for me, it was. I didn't know what I was doing. When I was learning how to make websites. I was hanging out at the public library and there was a reading contest there. And I found kind of a loophole, I guess, where if you read For Dummies books, they were considered reference books. So you would get. You would get 10 points instead of like one or two points that, you know, everyone else my age was reading, like, you know, children's books and color, you know, picture books. And so I found a way to kind of, you know, get more points by reading these For Dummies books. And most of them had pictures in them. So I was like, this is awesome. But you had to take a test at the end to kind of make sure that you read the book and all that. So you had to kind of, even if you were skimming, you had to take some notes. So, you know, I was bored and I was reading books, but there were some that really stood out to me. It was like, web Design for Dummies, how to make a website. All of the websites, Internet, all those books were really interesting to me. And so I was like, wait a second, this seems like something I could do. I could make a website. That's crazy. And so I started using the public libraries computer to build what were essentially like blogs, their websites. This is before Shopify, before even WordPress is really a big thing. And so learn how to program, learn how to web develop. And then while I was doing it, one day at school, after school, my librarian walks by and says, what are you doing? She probably thought I was Hacking into the school or trying to change my grades or something. She's like, what are you doing? I was like, I'm making a website. And she was like, what do you mean, making a website? I was like, yeah, just making a website. I had an idea last night of making a website before I go home. And she's like, what? And she's like, can you make websites for other people? And I was like, I guess. And she's like, well, I have a friend who has a small business that could use a website. Could you make one for. And so that was the start for that was like a pivotal moment where I realized, hey, I guess I'm pretty good at this. I like it. It's kind of like a video game. And I had the chance to make a little bit of money making websites for other people. And so that's where it really started, the whole kind of agency working with different types of businesses, then eventually businesses all around the world. And I started to build my presence on online marketing forums. And you didn't have to put your ages on there, so I've been at 14, and I'm up all night on Warrior Forum and Wicked Fire and all these forums where Internet marketers were hanging out. And I started to build my websites. And then I found a community called SitePoint. And SitePoint had a marketplace, which is now known as Flippa. And I realized that I could sell the websites that I was building, and so that kind of then split my focus on the clients, and the clients enjoyed the websites we're making for them. By now, you know, a few years into it, I had figured out freelancer.com odesk.com, which is now Upwork. And while I was in high school, you know, we were building websites for all kinds of businesses all over the world, online businesses. And then I was selling my websites on SitePoint. So I'd make like $4,000, I'd make like sometimes $10,000, and I spent spin them up in a weekend, grow them for a little bit, and then I could hand them off to somebody. I was like, this is amazing. It's like real estate. So I started to understand that process, and then I got really good at selling my own websites that I guess I got the attention of other members on the marketplace. And they said, hey, are you a broker? Like, could you sell my website? And that kind of, you know, one thing to the next I started to see from brokering other people's websites on SitePoint. I remember there was a guy that had like a Million dollar business and he had a completely outsourced team. And I said, wow, there's a lot of opportunity here. There's so many types of businesses. And so I was like a kid in the candy shop because I could make the websites. I was learning search engine optimization at the time because I couldn't afford ads. So I was like, I gotta be the best at SEO because I don't have the money to go and spend on ads. And that was a huge benefit because it turned out that when it works, it works really, really well and it's very, very profitable and you can pretty much sell anything. And that kind of continued to grow and grow. As I went to university, the business started to grow really fast. And so I had to get in and out of university pretty quickly. I graduated in two years. It was a lot. It was 22 credits a semester running my businesses, meeting with clients, hopping on calls between classes. It was a lot. But you don't know what you don't know. And at the time I was just so hungry. I wanted to build, build this business. But then toward the end of that, I started to, I think we all did as a team. We started to fall in love with the projects that we had created internally and we started to kind of turn our focus in that direction. And that's when I realized that we should probably sell off what we have and kind of really focus on building our own products and kind of doing it. Soup, nuts and bolts. And the whole team was in on it and. And so we went in that direction.

That's amazing. I love the kind of the accidental nature of it to where it just went from reading books for like kind of points or whatever to building a website, to getting clients. One thing I'm curious about is, I mean, because I know a lot of entrepreneurs, even successful ones, and business owners like never sell a business like they, you know, and I mean, and that's true at any scale, whether it's a million dollar business or you look at someone like Harry's like the razor company that was trying to sell for like 1.3, 1.4 billion and it just fell apart, you know, it's hard. And yet you've sold multiple businesses. What are some of like the keys do you think, to Kind of. Because I feel like healthy businesses that don't, they just don't know how to sell them or doesn't happen. What's kind of the key to selling a business or a couple of the main keys from your perspective.

I mean, you never want to build A business to sell it. You want to build the business to keep it. And you want to build a business that is respectable. The numbers are respectable, the size respectable. The team is phenomenal. You want to. Because there's no guarantee that you're ever gonna sell anything. It's just you gotta build something that you're gonna be okay living with for potentially most of your life. And if you're lucky, if your business lasts that long, you will be very successful and very highly regarded and have a huge impact. And so that's where that happens. But I think that too many entrepreneurs that I talk to are tied up in a certain number. They're like, I wanna sell for 100 million, I wanna sell for a billion. And they follow Elon and they follow Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. I'm like, I want that. And it's like, I want my own spaceship. And so I think that there's a tie in to that certain number of like, I've got to sell 100 million, I've got to sell it 1 billion, 200 million, 50 million, 10 million, everyone's got that number. And so in reality, you want to make sure that if you're in this for the long haul, especially if you're building brands, you might have your first thing doesn't have to be your biggest thing. I've done probably a hundred things and only a few have worked. I don't talk about the things that don't work because I've learned from them. You move forward, it's on. Unless there's a learning lesson and I'll share it. But it's, you know, people get tied to the idea, people get tied to a business. There's a sunk cost fallacy. I've already told all my friends that I'm doing this. I've already posted on Facebook, I'm doing this. I already have some customers, I already hired my first few team members and people feel stuck. And I think there's a lot of entrepreneurial productivity that's lost in burnout, it's lost in exhaustion, it's lost in the lack of execution because people feel stagnated. They're stuck. And so I meet time and time again businesses who have that seven year stretch with their business and they start to fall out of love with their business and they start to look elsewhere. And so when you have a business and you have something that you're committed to, just like you would in a marriage, you have to nurture that. You have to understand that there are going to be Tough times, and they're going to be great times. And yes, it's a labor of love. But in terms of selling the business, there's a hundred ways to sell a business, right? You can go public, you can sell a portion of your business, you can raise VC funding, you can raise friends and family funding. There's just a lot of ways you can access the debt markets. Getting a line of credit, getting a credit card. I mean, there's just a lot of ways to be able to gain liquidity in your business. I think that people are. It's all about timing. People miss the timing too often. Mark Cuban is famous for being the luckiest man in the world, and he says it because timing is absolutely the most important piece. And when you think about timing, if there's an opportunity for you, like for us, we want Snow to be a household name. We want people to respect our brand and enjoy our brand and our family of customers to take part in that and to really be proud of what we're building here 25 years from now. So if that's the case, if that's something that you want to do, then you might look at, what does that mean? What does that mean for us? Does that mean that staying bootstrapped is going to allow us to be a household name in 25 years? Or does raising lots of venture capital allow us to get there more quickly? Or does going public allow us to get there more quickly? Ultimately, we're focused on the customer, and the customer experience our products and our brand and our team. If it allows us to, any type of funding allows us to reach that goal a little more quickly. You know, tomorrow's never guaranteed. So it's like, you have to be willing to give up control. You have to be willing to give up ownership. So you have to be willing to give up ownership. You have to give up control. Depending on the size of funding that you're raising, right? Someone that's not going to come in and put $10 million in the business and not expect a big chunk of it. So you have to, from the start, be building something for other people. You don't have to build it to be sold. You don't ever have to sell a business. By the way, the best business is you never sell. But you have to build something that you know is exciting. It's something that has the ability for you to not be involved in it and for it to continue to grow. And so you have to lay that foundation in the beginning. It's a lot, right? It's a Lot of. A lot of things. But you get to a certain point where potentially your opportunity cost changes. Potentially. There are lifetime things. And I think there's kind of the entrepreneurial scam is that you become an entrepreneur to gain some freedom and you end up working 18 hours a day. You have no work life balance and your family's ruined. You don't have friends, and you're just lonely in a room, clicking away, hoping to get to that number that you somehow came up with in your head. And that's when I'll be happy. You've got to find ways to enjoy the process. You've got to find ways to look back and stay grounded. We do a lot of community work so that, hey, I didn't come for money. Keeping me grounded, understanding that, and also having a discipline. I haven't taken a single distribution out of Snow. I've only put money into Snow. We're bootstrapped and customer funded. And up until recently, I've taken almost nothing of salary. I mean, literally $0. Right. But I poured in significant capital. So you have to be willing to bet on yourself, bet on your team, which is why your team's super important. And you have to think through that authentically. Maybe you don't want that and that's okay to build a business and use that to build the foundation for your bigger business. But you have to understand that even Elon had a hop, skip and a jump. It wasn't just first thing. I started Billionaire. Bye. I can do whatever I want. It's like, no, look at his story. Look at everyone's actual story. Look at Warren Buffett's story. You'll see all of them. If you really want money, you got to realize that these guys do hop, skips and jumps. They don't come out with one product and then put their whole life in it and say, it has to work. Now, because I have mortgaged my house and I'm so passionate about it, nothing has to work. You're owed nothing. So just by putting all your eggs in one basket doesn't mean that it has to work. And so those are things that I think, looking back, and I still think about that a lot is what we're building. Could someone else take it or partner with us so that we can reach our goal faster? And the biggest shift for me entrepreneurially was learning that nothing is about me. It's all about other people. Nobody really cares about you, but not a bad way. But especially your customers. They care about the products. Do they work? Is the brand Doing well? Did they respect me? Did they answer my call? You have to be worrying about those other people. And part of that is other investors. And I think too many businesses stay too small because they're stuck. And sometimes you need a dose of capital to wake you up, and that's okay.

Yeah, that's amazing. There's a lot of. A lot of gold there. A couple of things that kind of struck me or that I think are worth pointing out. All of it's worth pointing out. But I don't want to repeat you entirely, but I think, like the part about your identity, right, because it's not just that number, but like, it's sort of wrapping up your identity into this. Like, this has to work because I've told my friends that I'm doing it. So I'm going to look like a fool. I'm going to look dumb if it doesn't work. People, I think, stay in. There's a tough. Like a tough tension because, like, you know, you don't want to give up too soon. I mean, how many times have you seen those stories? Or maybe you've experienced it personally? I know I have. Where I kind of thought about giving up and I didn't. And then the breakthrough is around the corner, Right? So there is that, but at the same time, there's. There's sometimes something just isn't working. And it's like you can keep trying to push a rock up the hill for the next year, two years, three years, or you can just, you know, lick your wounds, learn from it and be like, I can move on to. To greener pastures, I guess. One interesting question. How do you think people should kind of balance that tension between not giving up too soon, but also not just feeling like they have to burn all the boats on this one idea, when the idea maybe isn't the right idea for them or the right business for them?

My challenge to everybody listening is cut off a few things in your life over the next 30 days. Kill a business that's just taking too much of your time and it hasn't made you money yet. Well, you know, my belief is that there are a billion ideas out there. There are a billion ideas. Money flows where money flows, and you got to follow the money. And, you know, I was not a dentist. I'm not a dentist, but, you know, going to jaw surgery, I spent a lot of time in those offices and talking to my oral surgeon, to my orthodontist, understanding where I wanted to go. But I think that you have to be willing to Give up the good to go for great, right? That's a common quote. Give up the good, go for the great. People have a hard time with that because of identity sun costs. I told all my friends about it. I'm wearing a hat a bit now I'm wearing the shirt of it. What am I gonna do with all the merch I just bought from Custom Inc? It's like, you know, there's this kind of thing that everyone's. Everyone is watching me. And like everyone, everyone, you know, if I change, they're gonna look at me and say, maybe something's not doing well. Or if I get a lesser car, they're gonna think my business isn't doing well. Or if I downgrade my house, they're gonna think I'm not okay? So there's all this concern about other people. Nobody really cares. And so what you need to care about is your output. You only have so many days left on this planet. No matter how old you are, your time is limited. Everyone's is. You've got to go follow the money. If it doesn't. If it's not making you money right now and it hasn't made you money, just get rid of it. You might be one step away from figuring out now if you are really sunk in, you're a doctor and it's your doctor practice, and that's kind of to be hard for you to switch from. I'm not saying jump out of that, but if you're selling a widget here and you're trying to widget over here, and this one's not making money, but for some reason you like it, money doesn't care that you like it. Money likes to be respected, and your soldiers should go out and bring you back more money. But I think there's also product market founder fit, which I think is something that's talked about, has been talked about, naval talks about it. There's. You've got product market fit, but is it product market founder fit? And I think that a lot of times people get into businesses because they want to make money and they want to whatever. They want to get a new car, they want to get a new house, they want to quit their job, and they do something that doesn't really have a founder fit to it. Now, it doesn't mean that you're going to have that fit from day one where it's just going to make sense. I'm a podiatrist. I'm starting a footwear brand online because I know Internet marketing, and I'm A doctor. Like, yeah, if you got that lineup, okay, it's kind of set for you. But for most marketers, it's like, I can sell anything in the world. What am I going to sell? And, like, what's next? Shiny object Syndrome. Distraction kills productivity. Distraction kills dreams, it kills marriages, it kills friendships, and it even disillusions yourself from yourself. Like, you start to kind of create this secondary ego inside of there. And it could be. It could be a deep, dark, imposter syndrome drenched ego. It could be something that. And you got to kind of peel that apart. You got to kind of take a step back and say, what am I doing this for? And it's like, okay, this isn't making money. This is not working. I've got to move to something else. And that is totally okay because you've got to pick a few gold mines before you find the gold. You can't just go in and be like, oh, it didn't happen. I'm done. I knew this thing was a scam. I'm out. You got to keep looking. And what happens is, over time, you build the empirical evidence through experience and through other people's experience. That's why these type of communities are important. You're learning from others failures, other things that work. But after a while, you might realize that maybe it's not for you, and that's okay. Doesn't mean that you're a bad entrepreneur. Doesn't mean that you're a bad leader. I've seen people pivot and their business booms. And it's like, you have to be willing to do that. And there's a book called the Dip by Seth Godin talks about, is it a dead end or is it a dip? My thinking is, if it's not making money in six months, you want a business where you go, is this legal? You want a business where you're like, wait, is this really happening? You want a business like that now, it's not gonna pop out at you. It's not gonna happen right away. And you don't have to do 20 things to see what works. But my buddies at Tuft and Needle, the first bed in a box business before Casper, they had, I think, four projects running, and they had Google Ads running. And they didn't have the product. It was just an order now, just to see what the cost per acquisition was on Google. And it ended up being mattresses. These guys are some of the smartest people I know in the world. They're programmers. Silicon Valley, top cream of the crop. And you're like, mattresses, not software, not anything else. Matches bed in a box. That's what you're gonna sell. And it's because that's where the money flowed. They ran some Google Ads. They didn't have the product, and they said, we just 10x our money on accident. They go, I'll follow that. And they cancel it, cancel everything else. They left one of the projects we were working on, and I was like, I totally understand. Because the things that they're working on just weren't moving fast enough. They had huge, huge potential that, you know, if they did work, huge potential, but it ended up being shoving a mattress in a box and sending it out. And they built the most reviewed, highest reviewed mattress on Amazon. And they merged with Serta Simmons for a whopping number last year. And so huge success. And they bootstrapped the whole thing. So there's a lot of ways to go about it. You never know what it's going to be. And you can fall in love with. You can fall back in love with your business. You can fall in love with your business and stay in love with your business. The problem is everybody's in love in the beginning. It's the honeymoon stage of a business. Everyone's excited to get the website up. Everyone's excited to do this. Everyone's doing handshake deals instead of contracts with partners. They do all this stuff because we're so. We're all jazzed up. It's like we're all high on this euphoric kind of psychedelic, and we're like, this is gonna be big. Oh, yeah. If you get 1% of the market, bro. I know. Even half percent of the market. Oh, my God. Oh, I just excel sheeted it. Oh, my God. We can get three Lambos probably by next month. And it's like, that's what happens. And that's okay, right? Like, that's. That's fine. I like nice cars. And that's part of it. It is what it is. But you gotta kind of take a step back and be like, wait a second. You shouldn't be getting married when you meet someone that morning and get married that afternoon. But people jump into business partnerships like that. They jump into businesses, they jump into JVs. There's a lot of this kind of push, and you go, why are you doing that? Well, it's because you're Maslow's hierarchy of needs. If you can at least get your food, shelter, security covered, then that might allow you to think beyond that kind of. That kind of Sphere of kind of survivalist and kind of, I need to make this amount of money, et cetera. You gotta detach yourself from that. And you have to detach yourself from, you know, how much money did my business make today? That's what I'm worth as a person. You have to delete the Shopify app, delete the apps on your phone. Stop looking at those numbers because they mean nothing. And they mean nothing long term. If you're building something long term, you want to look at it week by week. Okay, here's my. Once a week, I get to check Shopify stats. You know, that sounds crazy and I'm being extremist here. I don't even do that. But I'm saying, like, you've got to detach yourself from the numbers. You got to really be thinking about that customer. What am I actually solving for that customer? And what else would they like to buy from us? We've got to take it back to basics, back to a merchant. You go to a shoe cobbler, and the shoe cobbler will ask you, hi, let me see your shoes, let me see your feet. What's the problem? That kind of connection has been eroded because of. We're looking at a roas, we're looking at an order number, we're looking at these things. This is a person who came into your shop and somehow gave you their credit card. And that piece, I think, is what is missing in E commerce. And the ones that get it do incredibly well.

Yeah, that's awesome. And I do love that, again, that idea of detaching yourself from your numbers and looking at your customers as actual people and human beings. So still, I mean, I guess, why teeth whitening?

Right.

Well, obviously part of it was because the money was there. I'm assuming part of your philosophy, you just shared, you were you testing it, running it, and you're like, oh, shit, this is working. Um, but like, you know, did you kind of just identify it as like a really, like a blue ocean type niche?

Right.

For disruption? Because people weren't doing it online. And you knew you had this skills and kind of the knowledge, like, you know, why did you initially kind of decide to move really deep, deeply into the teeth whitening space?

I mean, there's, there's, there's, you know, we didn't bet teeth whitening, right? What I saw was I was going through. It was $50,000 for me to get my jaw ripped out of my head and put back in. I had horrible jaw alignment. You know, I get headaches and stuff after talking for a while. And so I knew that I was eventually going to have to get that type of surgery. And I spent a lot of time in the orthodontist office, in the oral surgeon office. I see what I'm paying for this stuff. And also I see myself going on Amazon buying all this, you know, all these products so that I can heal faster and I can get back to work more quickly. And I bought all these products and I said to me, there was no life in the products. They were very, very sterile looking. They were very medical looking. There was no transparency. And then I look at skin care, I look at hair care, I look at all these other. These other areas, and you're like, wow, there's like, literally caviar and this eye cream, and there's literally, like gold flakes and this shampoo, and there's all this. And then I've got two brands to choose from on toothpaste that I do twice a day for the rest of my life, since I'm a baby, till the day I die, I'm going to be brushing my teeth, and I feel like I don't have options, you know. And I remember staying at. It was some nice hotel, and they, like, upgraded me for free in the room, and it was like this beautiful room. And I legitimately forgot toothpaste. So I called up for toothpaste. And all of the products in the restroom were like Bulgari, like, really expensive, like, you know, body wash and shampoo. And I go, I go, I need some toothpaste. And they bring up. And what they brought up was like, it was almost like a laugh. It was like in a thin plastic, like, it was like a spork. It was like, you have to open a spork or a fork. And I was like, this is, you know, this is a very nice room that I got upgraded to beautiful. Everything's great. And I go, where's the Bulgari of toothpaste? So that it matches so that I could take a picture of this stuff because it's beautiful. You know, where's the mouthwash? That's, you know, Bulgari, like, you know, so that's where I started to think about, you know, a lot of people have teeth. It's a huge market globally, you know, and we said, well, what if we could create what we think, what we would like to see in oral care products, starting with teeth whitening? Because that's where, particularly in America, that cosmetic benefit is where the consumer is kind of going first. And you got to kind of you sell them, Sell them what they want, give them what they need. So we're going to sell you something that's going to whiten them up. That's what we're known for. Safe on sensitive teeth, not a problem. But also while we're in there, we're going to load you up with hydroxybutide, which is 94%, I think it is, of your. Of your tooth is hydroxybetite. It's a fluoride alternative, just as effective. So we're educating. So while we're in there whitening your teeth, we're going to get to what you want. But while we're in there, let's go ahead and remineralize, mineralize the enamel, the gums. Let's do some gum work. Let's kind of get all that done in one fell swoop so that they're getting what they really want, which is whiter teeth. They want to connect with the snow experience. And we have, we have a whole team dedicated to counterfeits and anyone who copies our copy, things like that. Because part of even being on these podcasts, people will listen and say, oh, I've got to start a teeth whitening company. Not realizing that we, you know, we're in the, we're in the mouth share business, right? So we can spend to infinity to make sure that that customer is joining us. And now we've got an army of them. But we've seen time and time again because we've unfortunately dealt with some of that and continue to deal with some of that. There are thousand industries. Oral care, I would say, is probably looking back on it. There were probably 20 other or 30 other ideas that were a lot easier in terms of market penetration. People don't really buy oral care online. We have to educate them. The snow brand is ultimately what we lean on now. Now we have the brand where it's like they're kind of like the apple of oral care. What are they going to come out with next? And they know that it's going to be a few bucks more, but it's going to be the best thing. They're going to show it off and they're going to take pictures of it. So we've kind of built that anticipation now, but that wasn't free. It took some time and it took tens of millions of dollars of advertising for sure.

But it's amazing, I mean, to take, like to create a prestige brand in oral care. Right now that you're successful, you can look at it and be like, oh, that makes sense because people spend a ton on skincare and whatever else. Like, but honestly, like, it's a really brilliant idea and the realization you had because, like, to your point, I know exactly what you're talking about. The little. It's like the little crest or Colgate, like tubers, like a packet. You're kind of rolling this little packet and the toothbrush is this dinky thing and you're like, you know, great. Like, so. Man, that's amazing. So one more question on snow, and then we'll talk about what you're doing now, and then we'll move to questions that'll be what we'll do. But just obviously, one of the really cool things you guys did that was so smart and continue to do is working with a lot of kind of like celebrities and famous people early on. And I just think the reason, you know, Craig Clemons of Golden Hippo, like, he was really smart of getting Dr. Gundry early. Right. And Dr. Gundry was this really celebrated surgeon, wasn't, like, famous as a celebrity. And honestly, when that first happened, I had this, like, bitterness of, well, I could have done that. It's like, yeah, but I didn't.

Right.

Like, I'm. That's Craig's. What makes Craig smarter than me is that he actually did it. He was like, wow, I can get these credible people and bring them on and increase kind of our reach and turn saying Dre into a full on brand. With you guys, you had Mayweather, Gronkowski, a ton of different folks. And I'm just curious, did you know that that was gonna be successful? Did you sort of just decide to go for it and test it out and then any advice you have for people when it comes to working with famous celebrities, personalities, influencers and that sort of thing?

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of sizzle there. There's a lot of sizzle and not a lot of steak most of the time. Right. And you gotta go into it understanding that, you know, for us, it's. We're on a mission here. And, you know, brand equity takes a long time to build. It usually costs a lot of money and costs a lot of maintain it. That's why Coca Cola still spends so much money on advertising. Like, we all know what Coca Cola is. We're all gonna reach for it. Why are they still spending so much on advertising? Because they know they've got to remain relevant. And I think that is companies in this age and moving forward, if you're going to be successful and you're Going to build a brand that actually matters, that actually has impact. You have to stay relevant. And that's probably the hardest thing to do at every stage of the business. When you're too small, you're ignored or laughed at. So you're trying to be relevant by saying, we're better than blank. You're trying to grab some of that relevance when you're huge, you're trying to say, we're not old, Blockbuster. We're not old. We're still cool. And so we're all chasing that relevancy. Whoever can hold relevancy the longest makes the most money, and their shareholders make the most money. Coca Cola, American Express, a lot of things like that, that hold that brand equity. And so when you think about that, you think about a celebrity who spent 30 years building their brand equity up, and they've got a flawless reputation and tens of millions of fans. It's generational. Now at this point, you've got mom, daughter and granddaughter listening to the same song and singing along. Yeah, like Madonna. Someone that has that. That's like. Those are like the top tier of the top tier. Mariah Carey and like that. And then you've got your influencers, and then you've got people with 25 million followers who are vine stars, who are. Who never necessarily had a TV show or all that. So you have a range. What we're looking at is we're saying, okay, we're a company that creates products to help you smile. We're in the business of confidence. Who are some celebrities or influencers that do that already? And they're known for doing that. That could be comedians, that could be singers. One that we would love to work with would be like Taylor Swift, for example. When you're working with celebrities, you have to understand that in exchange for, they're sharing their brand equity with you. Right. It's like, you know, we have an exclusive license for teeth whitening with Aldous Pressley. You know, you can't go back and, like, you just. You can't create that type of brand equity. That's like built in loyalty. That's like fan, fanatic, you know, natures. Yeah, that's tough to create as a business. It takes so long. Look at Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Apple. They spend so much time, money, effort, building that brand. So if we're able to collab with Apple, Apple and snow on a toothbrush, that's amazing because Apple's able to show that they're relevant. They're cognizant of what's Going on. Obviously, we might not be big enough for them to even consider us, but they're thinking about that. And then look at their Beats by Dre acquisition, for example, the relevancy of the culture. So if we had a collab with Apple, all of a sudden people are saying, I know like and trust Apple, I know about Snow, but I don't like and trust them yet. But I'm going to take the warm third party referral from Apple, someone who's changed my life, and I'm going to go ahead and take the bet on this. It reduces friction, it reduces that kind of thought that, is this going to work for me? What if it doesn't? Is this real? You have someone's favorite celebrity or favorite TV star in front of them saying, hey, you guys got to check this out. I use it. Here are my before and afters. Give it a shot. 30 days money back guarantee. What do you have to lose? Use the coupon code Madonna to get my special discount. That kind of like. And then you take that huge version of it and you take that down to the everyday influencer. People with 10,000 followers, 15,000 followers, it works the same. It's a little bit more day to day work, manual work. Madonna might take nine months to close. You might have to pay her a million dollars up front. She might want 20% of options in your company. But the micro influencers, they take a lot more. It's day on, day in, day out work. But you got to think about it. They've only got 10,000 followers. But those are people they went to high school with, Those are people they went to college with. Those are family members. They might be a hairstylist. They're kind of a local kind of influencer for being a hairstylist. You think about that, that's someone you're paying maybe nothing to just free product. And they're talking about it. You get five sales, 10 sales. But you multiply that by the 999 million people on Instagram that don't have a million followers. That's a lot of exposure. That's where the opportunity is. There's only one Madonna, but there's 999 million that add up to a million Madonnas and are a lot more approachable, a lot more trustworthy now that Madonna isn't, you know, if Madonna is talking about something, she hopefully got paid. We're kind of like, I hope she got paid for that. But it doesn't carry the same weight. Then your crush from high school, who you still follow On Instagram posts something and you're like, oh, that's how she gets her teeth white. I gotta check that out. That type of connection builds a lot more trust than simply Madonna saying, go check out snow.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And yeah, that's awesome. So I know in addition to Snow, I know you do a lot. You have the mastermind with Lo Silva, who was a guest on the show a few weeks back and just crushed it with a lot of stuff around influencers and kind of micro influencers and things like that. Nano influencers I think he talked about, which totally makes sense. And since been using him and Mike Roddy for my own Instagram, Speaking of that, which has been awesome. So for anybody looking to grow their Instagram or do a lot of stuff, I would talk to los, but you guys have a mastermind together. Do you want to share basically what we're going to keep going and answer questions. I want to give the opportunity before we go too deep in, to share what are the big things that ways that people should connect with you? Is it joining your mastermind? Is it, you know, following you on social. What are the best ways for people to kind of continuously follow you?

Yeah. So, I mean, naturally, right now I'm super busy. Right. Everybody is. But I wanted to, I wanted, I've always wanted to create a community of, you know, our focus right now is E commerce entrepreneurs, but brand builders in general, where we could kind of at least have an area that we can share what's working today, what's going to work tomorrow. You know, hey, this app just increased our conversion rate. Check it out. And just kind of, just kind of a community. First and foremost, the community, kind of like an entrepreneur's organization for brand builders and E commerce and online entrepreneurs. Something that was extremely vetted. So, you know, we're particularly looking for if you're making over a million dollars a year already in your e commerce business, that's just where we're able to. Our teams are able to help you out a lot more. The results are 10x faster. So we have a mastermind, we have a community. The community alone is absolutely incredible. I'm seeing the people coming in. Okay, I did that thing from the training and I added $100,000 in upsell revenue this month. And we're seeing all that happening, but it's just essentially a community for people kind of all doing the same thing, but also want to learn from what we're doing inside of portfolio companies and what I'm doing here at SNOW and what we're seeing success with. And my belief is that we operate from an extremely abundant mindset. And so showing you what I'm doing today, if that risks me being out of business tomorrow, I don't have a business. I should be able to show you everything we're doing, down to who we're hiring and everything. And you should be able to use whatever you want of that, whatever makes sense for your business, and we'll help you do that. But it's kind of shattering, the split. There's radical transparency in the group because if we don't know the situation, we don't know how to help. And so I think now more than ever, after Covid, the loss of community. I used to be speaking at events every few weeks. I used to be on stage. I used to be with small groups. I used to be going to dinners. And, you know, that died down a lot. I think that the solo journey became a lot more solo after Covid. It really kind of became everyone's in their own bubble. And we're trying to shatter that, at least with the community. To say, hey, you're having a down day. We know what that's like. Let's talk about, let's hop on a zoom or, you know, so even beyond all the stuff that we're doing, the marketing, the advertising, here's how to get the celebrities, here's how to do that. I've got my link in bio, I think, at Josh Snow on Instagram, and I've got a phenomenal team. And LOS is my partner in the powerhouse Mastermind group. And we've got different stuff we do there as well, like masterclasses. We ran like a Black Friday sale for $997 to get people access to stuff. I mean, my focus in terms of where I make my money, 99.9% of it's always going to be in the brands that we're building. And I'm focused for the long haul there. So that's why we curate as closely as we can. Cause we're trying to build something special here. And we'll have about 100 members probably by the end of next month. We've got an event coming up in Orlando February 4th through 6th. So we're going to be going through website teardowns, e commerce teardowns. We've got some of our close friends that they've got nothing to sell you. They're running their own. One of them, A.J. patel, is just one of his brands right now is valued at $500 million. And he's like he never speaks, he never goes on podcasts, you can't find him, he wouldn't even text you back. It's just, that's just he's so. I'm hoping he shows up, but it's like those type of people that are behind the brand that are really pushing it forward. He's probably one of the smartest guys I know and definitely the smartest on Amazon that I know. He's built and sold five out of the six brands so far for big, big things, but he's the most humble, like Nigo, like, here's what's working, here's what we're doing, here's what I'd recommend for your business. Like it's just, it's just kind of an all out community for helping each other reach our goals and building brands. Because building brands are different than doing a drop shipping offer or doing just a regular offer. These are things you're signing up for. Could be one year, it could be 50 years. And so having that community along the way has been super, super helpful. It's been helpful for me. I've been learning as well from all the members. But we're doing website teardowns, we're breaking down strategies that worked for us 30 days ago and they're still working. And here's exactly, here are the stats. I mean it's just radical transparency. It's like a live college, right? It's like a four year college that we get to hang out. You can leave when you want, you can stay when you want. You're probably not going to want to leave. Here's what's going on and then there's an individualized attention as well. So we'll put pods of our team onto your project. So it's like getting, you know, right now we're like 50 people. It's like getting 50 co founders without giving away any equity and everybody helping each other out. So that's oshnow on my Instagram. They keep changing the team, keeps changing the URLs. It's like ph now.com then it's this. I can't even tell you, but if you go to instagram.com joshnow it should be in my bio.

Cool. Yeah, that's awesome. I got the chance to do a guest kind of like training for you guys a few a month, month and a half back. Talked about kind of copy and on page optimization, conversion optimization. And then just for everyone who's listening or watching now or who's going to be watching on YouTube, listening on iTunes, whatever. A couple of thoughts on that one. The group was really cool. It was a lot of really interesting businesses, entrepreneurs, brands, like very eclectic in a good way. People doing like natural cleaning products that were like, you know, that are crushing it. And honestly, even your coo, I think it was a CEO Josh, like he gave one company just some advice on like they spent all this money on this really viral Facebook ad and it was getting a ton of engagement and views but not converting. And essentially his advice was, yeah, it's too produced, too polished. You know, it's great for engagement, not good for conversions, make it uglier. Which was totally, really good advice. But that alone and I know will make those people so much money because they were like, we're going right back to the drawing board. We're reworking our ads, like more user generated content. Right. Just the gems are being dropped like for the members was just amazing. And the crowd of the members was amazing too. So if anyone who listens or watches or is with us right now is doing e comm, trying to build a real brand, I honest to God, I cannot think of anybody better to learn from then Josh and Los and their team, it's, it's absolutely like a no brainer to be a part of their community. And again, yeah, you put, Josh has put a link in the perfect. I'll put it into the Facebook Live as well and we'll definitely share it in the show notes. And again also you can make sure you follow Josh on Instagram at Josh Snow. But like, seriously, I'm loving it.

I got to tell you, I'm, I'm loving it. I mean I just, you know, my, my whole thing was, and I had to wrap in multiple teams because I was like, I don't have a ton of time right now, but there's just so much like just coming out and it's. And what we're doing, even just inside of one brand like Snow, there's just like so much goodies in there that it's like it doesn't hurt us to share them. But there's like sometimes there are windows, right? We might be like, oh my gosh, you know, TikTok ads are really crushing it with this type of creative guys go at it and it's like I'm enjoying seeing not just the results but also seeing kind of the relief from a lot of our, you know, our members. And like we're, we're really like a fat. We're a family. And it's like, hey, you know I'm struggling with this. Or Facebook ads are, you know, really beating me up now. What are you guys doing to do that? And so a lot of that kind of push back and forth. But those, there are those small but huge gems, like, they're quick gems that fall, like you notice. But they're, they're, they're big, big changes. And we see businesses go from 100,000amonth to 300,000amonth. And it's not like they change that much. It requires sometimes a village to look at your business and be like, dude, you're not doing any SMS marketing. That's crazy. Let's add that in. Here it is, here's the rep. And we're now bringing in founders. So we've got Jordan, the founder of Carthook, who's a part of the community. We're bringing in Che from Bold Apps. They set a huge fundraise, number one app developer. So not only do we get perks x amount of months free for this, reduced pricing for this, we're also trying to create, we're trying to create buying power as well internally. So our goal is to have, by the end of this year, our lofty goal is to have a billion dollars in collective revenue forecasted for the group. And so we can take that collective buying power, we can go to merchant processing and say, hey, you got to give us better rates for all of our members. We're coming as a cohort of a billion dollars a year. We can look at everything from life insurance to payroll to all of that, to think about the infrastructure for the modern day entrepreneur. And we may eventually take that and create a fund to be able to invest in the ecosystem as well. And we would like to do something like that on behalf of the members because one thing that we found is that a lot of entrepreneurs will build a business that we talked about exiting. A lot of people will build a business, not take a salary or a low salary for several years and the business closes and you got to start all over again. The entrepreneur doesn't have life insurance, doesn't have a 401k plan, doesn't have savings, mortgage their house, so they lost their house, so they don't have to have that. And you're like, you created jobs, you created value for five years in this, and the only people that won were IRS lawyers, payroll taxes. So we're trying to create this ethos that we are the value and we're brand builders. But brand builders create jobs, they create innovation, they lead innovation. And that's what this country's about and kind of building that into it and saying, how can we take back the power that we've given up to everybody else? Take nickel and diming us. And by the time payment processing, chargeback, I mean, you start breaking stuff down. And we as entrepreneurs and team and, you know, founding teams and growing teams, we're working for the irs, we're working for our payment processor, we're working for our working capital, you know, working capital providers. We're working for all these other people dipping into our pot before we could even touch it. And that's why I'm worried that this is going to be, this is going to be successful with or without me. But I'm worried that it's going to be so successful that we're going to leave a lot of opportunity on the table. And so I want to make sure that at least our family is, you know, we take that billion dollars of power. Talk to Shopify. Why not? Let's get Shopify on the line and see if we can get our Shopify plus thing knocked down. Okay, now we're saving 3 million a year collectively on Shopify fees. Okay, what about Carthook? What about this? And really just to show our loyalty to those providers. So there's a lot of fun stuff going on there right now. It's jam packed with golden nuggets, jam packed with gems. We have some people in there that aren't E commerce, but for the most part it's E commerce focused. It's Shopify focused right now and it's focused on brand building, not drop shipping. We do have drop shippers in there that are transitioning. They're like, I'm tired of this. I built great drop shipping businesses. I want to build a real brand. How do I do that? And so we're seeing a lot of success right now. It's only been a few months and it's been extraordinary.

Yeah, I love that idea of the economy of scale and the fact that you can take your collective power and negotiate things. That's really, really smart. And again, I think the other thing is you guys are really actively doing it. That's what I love. I mean, I've got my copywriting mastermind copy accelerator. And that's one of the reasons I still take on freelance client projects. Not like a ton, but one of the reasons I do it is so that I can be like, hey, I'm still actively writing because there's so many masterminds from people who crushed it like a couple years ago. And then they're kind of, what do I do next? And they start a mastermind, and they can still provide tons of value, but there's so much value to being like, oh, shit. We ran this test last week. It was sick. It went great. You guys can do it. Here are the steps to do it. You know, there's just nothing that can compete with that. It's just so powerful. So, yeah, everybody check it out. Put the link again in the Zoom. And also in Facebook Live, we'll put in the show notes and follow Josh Snow on Instagram. Link in the bio there, too. Cool. We're move on to some questions. I think we've got like five or so right now. Ed, before we go to those and you kind of bring people on, do you have any questions that you want to ask to Josh?

Oh, man. For sure. Dude, that was. Fuck, man. You're so smart. God damn it. And this guy started younger than me. I'm not happy about that. But anyway, I'm like, what am I doing with my life, dude?

When did you started at, like. You started at like 14 or 15 too?

Yeah, I started at 14.

Yeah.

Okay, so it's close.

Yeah.

Cool.

Well, yeah. Do you have any questions, Ed.

If.

You want to think about, you can always call on some. You know, we can always bring one on.

Yeah, yeah, I think. I think it'll come with time.

Cool.

So we got a question here from.

Oh, he's leaving.

Got a question here from Chad about measuring relevancy.

Cool.

Chad, what's up, man?

Chad. Amen. Hey, gentlemen. How's it going? Good. How you doing? Good, good, good. So, Josh, you talk about relevancy. Excuse me. And I think we all know it when we see it. We look at Coca Cola and we know they are relevant. But is there a metric that you use to gauge relevancy or is it simply, you know, we've been in business for 30 years and we're still generating a revenue, so therefore we are relevant. Yeah. So, I mean, you look at Crocs, and Crocs was in big, big trouble before COVID even. And they went after Post Malone and, I don't know, peeps. Kfc, they just came out with KFC chicken crocks. And what happens is that you have to keep track of your customer. Because what happens is when you start a business, you think you're going to target one customer. The one who gives you their trust ends up being a different customer. So for us, we thought we were building more of Millennial style brand. We thought that the way we talked about oral care and that may be the case down the line. Who knows? It ships, but right now our Customer is mostly 45, female, and she's tried a lot of stuff in the past before she comes to snow, so she's really got her guard up. And so we understood that. So you want to stay close to your customer. That's the benefit of direct to consumer that none of the big guys have. If you're all retail, you can't talk to that customer at the end, you might get some insights. It's really, really tough with direct to consumer. I can pick up the phone and call 25 customers today that paid us in the last 24 hours and I can ask them, why did you buy this? What would have made you not buy this? What would make you come back again? What are other brands that you can't live without? What's your favorite TV show right now? And so the data is in front of you. In fact, you're getting paid for the data. You just have to go and collect it. And you gotta be willing to pick up the phone or someone on your team to be able to have that type of dialogue, to understand, are the products working? Is the formula good enough? What are the issues? Is the cord long enough? You know, is the battery lasting long enough? Just understanding that you'll find patterns within those conversations. And of course, you can automate it. You can put it on the thank you page and say, get $10 rebate back on your order by filling out these five questions. You can give them a gift card and do whatever you want. But I think the way you measure relevance is first and foremost, are you growing in sales? That's important. People voting with their dollar, that's key. But you can reinvent the brand many, many ways. And you look at Crocs now and they're crushing it. I mean, they're absolutely crushing it. And what they did is sometimes you have to. Luck is preparedness and opportunity meeting. And Crocs was certainly prepared. They were in trouble, they were waiting for something and the opportunity came about. And there you get luck. And timing is so, so important. So you have to, as a brand, you have to stay alive long enough to get a few chances to do that. Because you look at GoPro, you look at a lot of stocks that were hot at one point and aren't as hot anymore. What's GoPro going to do to remain relevant when people aren't traveling the world right now like they normally do? So, yeah, you have to think about that and Say relevance is a measure of how fast are a company growing, how is the market responding to it? In a public company, you might look at stock price and kind of what analysts are saying to a degree. And then what are your customers saying? What are the reviews? And then also are they coming back? What's your returning customer? Are you still relevant to that customer, that they're willing to come back and buy more of your products? And then you kind of chase relevancy. If you have a lot of money like McDonald's, you go and get J. Balvin, number one reggaeton star, and you go get Travis Scott, number one hip hop star, and you do a little Happy Meal with them and some slippers, and all of a sudden your stock jumps and you're kind of relevant again. You can do things like what Elon does in terms of remaining relevant, not just from the designs of the cars, but selling hats and selling flamethrowers and speaking to that super core, which is now a super core Robinhood investor, someone who's cashing out their 401 and putting a Tesla stock. He knows who he's talking to when he does those things. And so chasing relevance, you can manufacture relevance. Nike did it with a huge NFL kind of situation. They went in one direction because they said, you know what, our core and who we think our core is going to be 10 years from now really cares about this. And we think that this is going to be normalized five, 10 years from now, and that that ship has already sailed. So if we try, if we don't jump on the ship, we're going to miss it. And Nike made a huge, huge, bold bet to jump on that train. And it paid off for them long term. Adidas did it by grabbing Kylie Jenner early on and creating a collection of Kylie Jenner and then opening up the floodgates with Kanye west and saying, hey, Nike's not giving what you want. This Kylie Jenner stuff is like crack. It's working really well. Why don't you come over here, we'll give you what you're looking for. But you got to do this, this and this. And so a lot of times you have to follow those trends. But if you follow trends too quickly that don't match your brand, you can cue your own relevance very quickly. You become commoditized, you become gimmicky. So really what you want to focus on is focus on products or services that work, products and services that consistently deliver. And then if you're solving a true pain point, you should remain relevant. Just as a base of that you solve someone's back pain and they just keep using your cream every single night. You got a customer for a long, long time. So there's a lot of ways to measure the way we're measuring it today. We're looking at our engagement and our ads. We're looking at the ability to work with retailers and celebrities. How are they responding to us? How are we merchandising there and then remaining relevant in terms of talking to our customers? So we send out surveys, we have a post purchase survey. Where did you find us? Why did you buy? What are you looking to get from this? It's all automated that side of it. And then we'll pick up the phone routinely and call and talk to the customers. But you're going to need to remain really, really tight. Pretend like your customers are your best friends, because they should be and you should be talking to them. Like, what shows are you watching now? What clothing brands do you wear? What food do you like? What are you really excited for this year? Boom, boom. What's the last show you binge watched on Netflix? Or you're just trying to understand those things from the customer and you just jot them down. You can do 100 a week or 50 a week or 10 a week, and you have a cohort. You don't have to pay some big marketing agency or research agency to do it. You just call your customers and say, hey, I've got a $25 gift card to Amazon. If you can answer five questions with me, boom. You do that 10 times a week. You're going to know when things are starting to shift a bit. You'll start to understand from the customer base and then ultimately you'll see your sales and your sales growth follow that. It's a very difficult thing to track because it's not binary. It's an aesthetic, it's a filling. It's the way that people think about your brand. And then you just want to make sure you're delivering the product, you're taking care of the customer, the product actually works. And then you're thinking about the problem that you're solving, other problems that same customer might have or other ways to solve that problem. So when you look at skincare, you have a 26 step routine from South Korea. It's like, what are they trying to solve here? Well, skincare is so lucrative, they created 26 steps so that everybody could make more money from the same customer. So that's what you got to think about when you're Expanding upon a problem set, you want to make sure that the solutions are relevant so you can stay hyper focused on the problem. And you will remain relevant as long as you're solving that problem consistently. Otherwise you have to remain relevant in other areas, which is celebrities and product placement and Procter and Gamble. The big guys are the best at this. They pretty much created one of the top longest running daytime soap operas. So that you see the mom in the show Pouring Tide, she's using all the products and so there's levels to it. I think what we all could do today is pick up the phone and call some customers and saying, was this relevant for you? And they're gonna say, what do you mean? It's like, what made you choose this product? Did you look at other products before you chose us? Would you realistically come back if I didn't call you today? What would make you come back? What things do you like? And you kind of understand those things over time. And there's apps, by the way, on Shopify and everywhere where you can pull demographics and psychographics and all of those colorful charts. We pull them, we look at them. And so we're trying to understand the psyche of the customer, why they're buying and then how do we lean into that? We found for us and a lot of our customers and it could be different for another oral care brand. They're looking for that anti aging benefit. They're looking to feel younger, look younger, feel more attractive, act more attractive. They're looking for those things. And when you think about a customer like that, you go, what else can we do to make them feel that? And it starts to open up the product portfolio. You start to say, wait a second, this customer trusts us because we whitened our teeth and we made them feel younger and look younger and feel more confident. What are other things we can do to make them feel younger and feel more confident? That's where it starts to open up. But if we didn't hear that from the customers, I just got out of a divorce, I'm 55 years old and I want to white up my teeth as I go on the dating market. Or I just got displaced from my job, I'm looking to find a new job. I want to feel good about my smile. You find out that the features don't really matter. There are life events happening in someone's life. You know, they're fed up with their back pain or, you know, whatever it may be, it's gone worse than it's ever been. I want to try Something new. You have to pull those moments out and then that's going to fuel your copy, that's going to fuel your advertising, that's going to fuel your packaging, that's going to fuel all of your follow up, it's going to fuel your questions when you call them. And that's the best thing I can give you if it's right in front of us. And that's the best thing we found. We buy all the software and demographics and we get all that stuff, but nothing, nothing works like picking up the phone and saying, you know, why'd you choose us? And what'd you think of the packaging? Did you like it? Did it work? What would you do if you ran this company and just ask the customer, what would you do if you ran this website and they say, oh, the contact page is a little bit hard to reach? So that's why I called you instead. You know, they're going to give you everything, like conversion, rate optimization. You don't even need a little heat map. Just call the customer and be like, what pissed you off on the website? And even better, in Shopify, there's an Abandoned Checkouts tab. Click the Abandoned Checkouts tab and call those people and say, what did we do wrong? And they say, oh, it was just the checkout process was too long or I didn't feel trustworthy putting my credit card in. What would have made you feel trustworthy? Well, if I would have seen how many customers you have, I would've seen a money back guarantee that would have helped. What kind of money back guarantee? 30 day, 60 day, 90 day? At least the 30 day. I'd be following the 30 day. You do that 10 times. You have your copy for that week of what you're rolling out and then you repeat it the next week. It's not even free. You get paid to do it, Josh.

Great one.

I don't know how this guy sleeps at night because I think I speak for everyone in the chat. We've lost limbs from that giant value bomb you just dropped on us.

Yeah, that was amazing. And I put in the chat too. I was like, I almost feel guilty that I've got Josh giving away so much value here for free. But we're incredibly appreciative of it. That was an amazing answer, Josh And Chad, great question too.

Thank you. Thank you.

Cool, we got time for a few more. Ed.

Yeah, I do have a question, actually. So I've been looking at getting into building a physical product brand for the past few months and it's kind of gearing up more. I mean, this is probably a pretty basic question, but it's worth asking anyway for someone who is looking to get started, what would you say to them in terms of what to watch out for and what to keep in mind when selecting a product to sell?

So, yeah, I mean, I would. Sometimes it's easier to select a customer to sell to than it is to find that hero product. There are a billion products out there. And look at Apple with AirPods. If they would have went out of business in 2001 or they would have not come out with the AirPods, they wouldn't have realized that that's a $10 billion product for them a year. 10 billion a year on one single SKU AirPods. And it just exploded. But obviously they, you know, they built up to that. You know, we call it the snowball effect internally here because of snow. But the snowball effect, literally what I would, what, what you have to caution for is like, you don't want to order too much inventory up front. You know, when snow started, even though, you know, I'd been successful or whatever before then, I could have said, all right, we're going to get a million dollar office, million dollar warehouse. I'm going to get 25 team members. Do this because I don't want to package any boxes. You know, I packaged and printed those labels from my spare bedroom in my house at the time. And that was, that was still, you know, and I put it set aside a budget that was very strict. And it was like, okay, this is what I'm going to do. Let's see if this thing has legs. I think it really does. Let's start with the formula. Let's figure it out. What you need to do is you need to go and if you think about a customer or think about a set of products or think about a category. Pain relief. Okay, cool. Go to Amazon Top selling pain relief. Get 25 of those pages. Go to the reviews tab, click the one star reviews and read 20 of them with a little notepad next to you and be like, too menthol. It's too tingly or burns the eyes. If they put it around their neck and it's like, wait a second, you might just by reading negative reviews on Amazon products, you will come out with a winner. And you know what they're complaining about already? 20,000 reviews. And then the most common negative reviews are saying that it has a sticky residue, it's a little too menthol for the eyes, so they can't use it on the neck and the shoulders really. So now you come out with yours and it's called pain begone. And it's shoulder and neck relief. The right amount of menthol to get the effect you're looking for without burning your eyes. That's my hero product. Day one. Maybe I turn into a balm. And then I say, okay, do those customers care about eco or refillable? Maybe you make it refillable. Now you've got an eco friendly version of it. And it's a pain balm and it's pain balm and it's no parabens, no sulfates, whatever that, that customer, they're going to tell you all, there you go. Wow. It looks like, like, you know, like deodorant, native deodorant. All these guys, they just took out aluminum from the ingredients that like aluminum free. People don't know what that is, but they know it's aluminum free, which means aluminum must be bad, which means I should get this one right. So you can literally have a million dollar pain relief business. If you just look at the Amazon reviews, what people are complaining about and make that your very first ad. The copy is written for you right there and it says, finally, a pain relief stick that doesn't burn my eyes. Works 100% of the time. 30 day money back guarantee. What would your life be like if you didn't wake up in pain or if you didn't go to sleep in pain or if you weren't irritable around your wife or your kids because you were dealing with your pain and the tolerance of pain. What if I told you that the reason why you're barely feeling pain is because you don't built such a high tolerance? Hi, I'm Ed and I was dealing with neck pain working on the computer all day. But the problem with the bombs out there was that they were burning my eyes or whatever it might be. I said there's got to be a better way. And so we've created pain relief treatments that are good for you, good for the earth, have all natural organic ingredients because your skin's the biggest organ on your body. So if you're going to be absorbing stuff and then you go to a CBD line now launching cbd, CBD pain relief for shoulders. And it just goes on and on and on. There's a brand called Okeefes that just does cracked feet and it's like cracked hands, cracked feet. And they got two, they had two products I think when they sold the business like last year and they Were just known for. If you've got the worst cracked feet and the worst cracked hands, come on over. We got you eight bucks. Here's a tub of it. You're in the goop business at that point. They sold out. And now they have lip balm. They were like all kinds. They're going to be Burt's Bees. So thinking about product is important, but I would really think about the pain you're trying to solve. And maybe a pain that's. That you can relate to. It could be psychological, it could be emotional, it could be meditative, it could be fitness related, whatever. It might be something that you can relate to where you like. I kind of understand what that customer is going through. I've kind of dealt with it before. I bite my teeth a hundred times before I started Snap. No. So I knew about the sensitivity, that it sucks. I want my teeth professionally. I bought stuff on the black market that was like so strong that I had to order it through there. And I pay with bitcoin just to get it. That's how crazy I was about the appearance of my smile. It was something I was so focused on. And I said, wow. I kind of figured out some things here. This might be useful to someone else, but keep in mind, there are brands like Death Wish Coffee, Liquid Death. Death was coffee. It's coffee, but with more caffeine in it. Great. A hundred million algorithms. Liquid Death. It's water in a can. And our advertising is very adversarial and the list goes on and on. So you don't have to, like, reinvent coffee. And you don't have to be like, I have to think of an idea that nobody has thought of. No, you don't want that. You want to think of an idea that a lot of people have thought of but nobody has acted on. You want to think about what is already out there, that the customers are begging for. People that are paying money. 20,000 reviews, you get it for free. And you get to just scroll and be like, got it. You go to manufacturer, hop on wherever you want to find a manufacturer. Post on Facebook, drive around town, whatever. Go on Yelp and say, hey, you're going to be my first manufacturer here. I need a formula. Do you have someone that makes formulas? Yeah, yeah, we'll do that for you. 500 bucks. We'll come with a formula. Give me a formula that is all organic, doesn't burn the eyes, could be used on the shoulders, has CBD in it. Is that possible? Yeah, I got a CBD guy, et cetera. A week from now, you could have your winning hero product number one. And all you got to do is sell a million of those and you got a business.

Dude, this is fucking insane.

Yeah, it's awesome. It's been fun. Just seeing a lot of. A lot of wows in the. In the zoom chat. See, literally speechless. I see a wtf. Sam Safi said houses free. Molly Levitt said wowza. And yes, Sam Saffie also said madness. This is madness. Julia dropping fire knowledge. Steve Butler, masterclass in E Comm knowledge. Yeah. Jack Ainley. This is brilliant. Yeah, man. You're killing it right now. This is awesome. So again, by the way, remember, everyone, if you're doing E Comm, if you're doing branded stuff and you're getting a ton of value from this episode, imagine being in a Mastermind where you're hearing gems like this from Josh and his team and other brilliant entrepreneurs every single week and basically every single day and what's working right now. And really tactical stuff, too. So again, go to follow Josh. I actually wasn't following you. I'm an asshole, but I'm following you now. Oshsnow. I went and did it while you were talking on Instagram. Link in the bio to join Josh's Mastermind. Plus, he's a great follow. Anyway, make sure you follow him on Instagram right away. Steven Butler says following.

Awesome.

Cool. Let's do 2ish more questions depending, because I know we're getting good, lengthy responses, which is good. So pick the next one. We'll do one or two more and go from there.

I have more questions. Okay, let's go for it. Question here from Max Uriah about choosing the right business partners.

Cool.

What's up, Max?

Hey, guys, what's up?

Okay, so let me be quick.

So. So we have time for more questions. So you said in life, some people choose their wife or their husband, like after some time. But going to join ventures and business partnerships really quickly. So my question is, how do you go about filtering and selecting right for partnership? Yeah. So, I mean, the thing is, a great partner and I have great partners, a great partner can change your life, Right? I think you need to spend some time really understanding about yourself. There's Tony Robbins has the disc profile test. It's free disc. Tony Robbins. I would take that test. It takes 10 minutes. Have everyone take it. Whoever wants to take it, take it. But it tells a lot about yourself. Like, you read it, you're like, oh, my gosh, that makes a lot of sense. And it's free. So Take it. And then also thinking about the love language. Take the love languages test, the five love languages and see are you words of affirmation? Are you acts of service? For me, I'm. I'm mostly acts of service. And I'm. And then the second for me is words of affirmation. So, you know, I like it every once in a while. I don't need it all day. I don't need to say, Josh, you know, thank you. Thank you. But I do really appreciate it. It's my number two thing, and it means a lot to me. Acts of service, you know. You know, Stephen, setting up this community and inviting me in, and that kind of act of service is where I feel my love. And I think that that's important to understand. You know, people go on dates and they date for a year or two before they even move in. Sometimes they'll move in before they marry. People will meet at a coffee shop and start a business that they're tied to for 10 years after one meeting. It's because there's some. There's a level of desperation there that is. It's always going to be there, but there's a level of desperation where it's like, hey, this is scary going into this. And it may be some conscious. But it's like, I don't want to do this alone. And I want to. I want to have somebody there with me so that if we fail, I don't fail alone. And if we succeed, yeah, we succeed together. But mostly it increases my chances of success by having someone else. But what you want to keep in mind is you want to think about this is a partnership, and partnerships are. Are. There are more successful partnerships than there are, and the ones that are talked about, at least, there's nothing. There's no right or wrong with partnerships. But what I will say is that you want to understand that you're going to be working with this person pretty closely. What are your goals? What are my goals? And then I would urge you, as much as you can, spend the money, to get a contract, lawyer or legal zoom or something, to put something in place where it says, hey, if this isn't working a year from now, what are we going to do? If it is working a year from now, what are we going to do? If it's work, you know, five years from now, or if one of us wants to buy each other out, or you want to buy me out, or you. We get an investor. These scenarios should be talked about. What happens when we lose all the money? What Happens then because there's a fear of talking about. It's not fun. You know, it's the elephants in the room. Nobody wants to talk about it. Everyone's like, dude, it's going to be a billion dollar deal. Yeah, you can 50, 50, why not? Yeah, go for it. And you just go into it. And then three, four years later, you either end up with some resentment or you end up with. Or hopefully you end up in a great partnership. But generally, I will tell you that most boy bands break up. That's just how it works. There's always somebody that wants more or overvalues themselves or undervalues themselves and wants find another place. It's, you know, humans are the most complex variable to deal with in business. So you can't, you know, you can't take human element out of it completely. Right? You have to. You have to, you know, choose the right people to be around. But I would take a step back and think about, could you. Is this someone who is more of a therapist, friend, business partner? Is this someone who is actually a good compliment? I would look at the. I would take the quiz from Rocket Fuel which says, are you a visionary or are you an integrator? So very important, because if you got two visionaries and you guys both have lots of ideas, nothing's going to get done. And you guys are going to both tug at each other to get your idea through and you're going to waste a lot of money because of ego trying to fight that race. You have to say, hey, am I the integrator? Am I the visionary? You're going to have a mix of both, but you kind of have to pick that scenario. If you're the visionary, you've got to give up control of operations. You've got to give up control a lot of times of hiring. You got to give control of the day to day. You got to be willing to not have a say in every decision in order for you to drive the ship two, three years down the road. And then you have to have respect, trust from the team and from your partner to be able to look out for those icebergs and drive the ship. And so you have to have that kind of mutual respect and mutual understanding. The problem I see nine times out of ten is that, and I'm guilty of it, business partners just don't have a proper operating agreement. They don't know exactly what Stefan's going to do versus Ed versus Josh. Who is responsible for this? What exactly are you doing day by day? What are the expectations of non compete or you just got to think of all those things, think of the worst scenarios, multiply the 10 and plan for that. Day one. So while you guys are getting all happy and excited, oh, hey, now, let's talk some serious stuff. Just because, you know, I talked to you about some advice, we're going to kill it here, but let's make sure that we, we really set this up right. Let's talk about the nasty stuff today. Knock it all out in one day and say, what do you want? What are your expectations equity wise? Okay. What are you bringing to the table? Okay, here's what I'm bringing to the table. Have that open conversation. So it's very clear from the get go because if that resentment is allowed to fester, it's going to cause a lot of turmoil in your business. It's going to fracture your growth, it's going to fracture your team. So you're taking on that thing. I mean, I can't tell you to never take on a business partner because some of my successful businesses have been with amazing partners. What I will tell you is that especially early on, you may have to partner. But think about it. Is this someone that you could go on betterhelp.com and get a therapist that you can talk to one hour a week, or is this actually a business partner who's going to bring equal weight to the party and actually be a long term benefit to the business? Not just, I'm going to make some intros early on. Is this someone who's going to be thinking about the business and really helping to grow the business beyond the first six months?

It's amazing. Max, was that for you really?

Just like amazed. Thank you. Thank you, Josh. Thank you, Max for that question. Yeah, that's not true.

I mean I can't tell you sometimes.

I've seen business partnerships where there's this resentment because one person partner doesn't feel like the other person's pulling their weight, but that person feels like, well, I'm.

Doing the stuff that I always plan.

On doing, but they've never communicated what the roles are, what the expectations are.

And then it leads to a bunch.

Of weird passive aggressive bitterness and kill us productivity. Just so much stuff. So I think there's a lot of gold in that advice for sure.

Cool. And I think Josh has popped into the chat for on zoom here the disc profile and this rocket fuel now one and yeah, the five languages of love. I love that my wife is quality time and just knowing that in your personal relationship is super valuable. Cause then if she's like trying to. I'm like, oh, yeah, she wants to spend quality time. Cool, let's do maybe rapid fire. Ed, you want to. Josh, what do we do here is. I'll just kind of read out the remaining questions. We'll just give a quick, like, you know, 20, 30 second answer to those, and then we'll call it a day.

All right. For Patrick Chen, what was the hardest part for finding your product supplier?

I would say quality, man. It's tough because you're not there physically. So do what you can to pay DHL overnight shipping. If you do anything out of your country, pay the extra to get the overnight shipping. Procure as many suppliers as you can, even if they don't make your specific product. Maybe they make, you know, maybe they make head razors or whatever, head buzzers for haircuts. And they don't make necessary body, you know, stuff like that. Reach out to them anyway and say, could you make something for Bodi? And so I would get samples from at least five different suppliers, pay for overnight shipping, get them all in front of you and really use those products and really understand. You'll see very quickly which supplier really cares about the quality and which ones don't. And you'll see the exact same product. Sometimes one is heavier, nicer, lasts longer. You can just tell and you go, okay, these guys are probably who I want to work with. This product is still a piece of crap, but they are a lot better than everyone else. Let's work on something that isn't a piece of crap. What is that going to look like? And so I would look at as many suppliers as you can, get as many samples as you can. Try out the products. Even if they're not, they have nothing to do with the product you're going to sell. If they're making this stuff, make sure it works really well. And then you can go in and say, I'm going to choose this one to kind of go in with. Or I'll get a quote from two or three of them. This one's going to charge me $10,000 for tooling. This one's going to do it for free. If I say I'm going to order this much and you also want to find out which one is the actual supplier. There's so many brokers of brokers of brokers of brokers, especially in China, you've got to check if you're on Alibaba or something. Check your profile. Do they actually own the factory? Do some research on them. Ask them those questions. You want to make sure you're partnering with the manufacturer who could destroy your business or who could help you grow your business. You want to make sure that you feel comfortable in that partnership. Minimum order quantities, timelines, deadlines, what are their certifications, what are pictures of their factory. Just gain as much due diligence as you can. Just like if you were hiring someone, you want to really understand who you're bringing on your team. And keeping in mind that anything you create, you're trusting them to do that. So do you have any contracts you can put together? Even if it's you putting it together, saying, hey, if we make this thing together, you can't make it for anyone else but me. Have them sign it. You know, think about those things. Awesome, dude.

When you're looking for someone to join your marketing team, which of these do you hope to gain more of? Time, Money or life simplicity?

Mostly time, which comes with life simplicity, too, but it's mostly time. I mean, it's. We all wear so many hats here, and I've got such a rock solid team, and, you know, the. The biggest thing is time, because I just. We're all finite, but I've got to be focused on initiatives that are, you know, equally as important to what everyone else is working on. But things that are uniquely set for me to work on, like raising funding or, you know, partnerships, retail partnerships, celebrity deals, those are things that I've got to spend a lot of time on. They require a lot of thinking. Phone calls, video calls. So for me, I've got the same 24 hours as everybody else. So having an extraordinary team who can take that off your back and take that off your plate, because day one, I was printing the labels, packing the packages, writing the media ads, Facebook ads, running ad espresso, you know, going to the post office, dropping it off. And so you kind of map that out by dollar per hour. And if you're able to find someone who might be able to help you out with that, then you can start building a team and you get more time to think. And some of the biggest things that come out of my time are simply just aha. Of just sometimes I'm just sitting on something that we're working on, and it becomes radically clear once I'm not On, you know, 25 calls a day, or if I'm not, you know, writing ads anymore, you have to be willing, remember, you have to be willing to give up control, give up ownership, and in order to build something big. And so it's actually really relieving when someone joins our team because I know that it's going to help all of us and I might get another 30 minutes back a day to think.

That'S great.

That's.

Yeah. Killer answer. Cool.

How do you handle your logistics for delayed shipping?

So delayed shipping is going to happen if it's outside of drop shipping. The thing is you never want to run out of your top selling product, even if that means you've got to ask the manufacturer for some financing terms. Say, can you have some ready for me set aside And I just pay 30% of those now. Kind of just hold on them for me. When we're ready, I'll pay you up to get them shipped by air. You have to be thinking about 10x your business right now in your mind and think about where all the holes are. 10x making a million dollars. 10x to the 10 million. Who are you going to need to hire? Who are you? What is this supplier going to keep up? Ask them that question. If I 10x order volume, will you be able to keep up? Pretend you're 10. You have to be the person that you're going to be two years from now. You have to be that person today and you have to be that business today. Because if not, you're going to be caught with your pants down and the customers are going to come after you and they rightfully should. And we're not perfect. We deal with those issues as well. So essentially the way I look at it is you messed up, you messed up as the brand. You have to take responsibility. And maybe there are some things out of control. Supply chain, ups, usps. Yeah, everything's overloaded. But you say, this is my investor, my customer is my investor and I want them to keep buying our shares. What can I do to make it right for this customer and you? And that answer changes for every business. Can you give them free product, gift cards, cash back, new products, whatever, something that you can give to that customer to make sure that they feel that, hey, I'm going to stick it in with you know what, I'm going to stick with you. I'm away a couple more weeks or I'm going to wait another week. But this thing better work. That's why it's important the products you sell work. Because you get someone waiting that long to get something that they're not happy with, they're going to be really mad at that point. But you've got to beef up your supply chain. That's why drop shipping doesn't work in A new age because it's just people want stuff in two hours. And so here's Jeff Bezos over here getting people trained on two hour delivery. And here are drop shippers training people on five week delivery. It's just never going to work, so you have to move in that direction. So use fba. Use the infrastructure that these companies have built for entrepreneurs like us. Add two bucks to your product to cover FBA fees, but get the product to the customer. There's no excuse. As soon as someone gives you money, you're on a ticking time bomb to get the product to the customer in as perfect condition as possible. That's why we've never outsourced our fulfillment. We have 100% in house fulfillment. We always have since my spare bedroom. So we control that entire supply chain. At least getting to the customer. We can't control ups, but we try to get it out as soon as we can. And when we run into issues, we know that customer support has to step up and, and make sure that the customer feels alleviated, they feel listened to, they feel taken care of so that they go, okay, this is a growing business going through growing pains. But I love the product. If the product is really good, they will bite the bullet and come back. But they might not come back to your website because you kind of lose their trust there. That's why it's important to be on Amazon, other marketplaces so that they have an option to buy somewhere that they trust on the delivery. Like Amazon.

Yeah. That's amazing. Awesome. Hey Ed, we just hit, you know, whatever time, 12:30 where I'm on mountain time right now. So the three remaining questions for you people who ask those questions, two of them were for me anyway. Email me or ask them and Justin stuff and talk copy and I'll reply there. But we'll wrap up here. Josh, thank you again so much for taking the time to do this. It was amazing. You just crushed it. Is there anything you want to kind of leave the listeners and viewers with before we end here?

Things always take when things are really bad, they're never as bad as you think. Things are really good, they're never as good as you think. Everything takes longer than you think and consumers can see through what you're really trying to do. They're smart, they can shop around, they'll out you on social media. So you want to build something that you're proud of. And the last thing I'll say is a principle I live my life by is chase difficulty not making things hard, but not Be afraid of things that seem difficult. There's a reason why they're difficult. Because they're worth learning, they're worth understanding. And so things that sound too good to be true usually are things that sound too easy to be true, they usually are. Things are always harder than they seem. But you can get better. And so the focus on your personal development, your mental health, your health and wellness, your supplementation, your hydration, really think about yourself as a machine. Because entrepreneurs give themselves too much to their business sometimes and they forget about themselves, about their health, about their sleep. Don't get me wrong, I love a good eight hours of sleep. And I get it almost every night if I can. I love to sleep. You got to take care of your body. If you take care of your body, then your mind is clear to execute. And just realize you only need one or two things to work through you a year to build a really big business. It's not a hundred things that need to go well. It's one or two that need to go well. And so take that longer term approach and you will have success and never give up unless you have to give up and you made the decision. But if you're onto something and the money's flowing, you've got to double down, follow the money. Thanks, guys.

Amazing. Thank you, Josh.

Thank you.

That was Josh Snow, oshsnow, on Instagram. Check him out.

You guys. Cool?

Thank you.

Sweet. Well, that wraps it up here. Ed John off as well. So we're done, basically. But hey, if you enjoyed this episode, make sure that you, if you're on itunes, that you're subscribed to my podcast, leave a review, please, on itunes. That'd be awesome. If you watch it on YouTube, make sure you leave a comment letting us know that you have value from it. Hit that, like, button, all that kind of stuff. Share it with friends and family and loved ones. It was an amazing episode. Thank you everybody who was on the live record already on Facebook live or here on Zoom. And I'll see everybody next week. Thank you everyone and take care of.