👶 JUDAH BERGMAN // JOOL BABY FOUNDER & PRESIDENT

0:00Thank you so much for coming. I'm so excited to have you here today. Your story is near and dear to my heart. I have three little ones who actually are not so little anymore. But I, you know, just have such a love for kids' tools and innovation and children themselves. So I'm excited to hear more about the business. And I would love to start with what you got started with. If you'll just take us through like the very beginning of your founder story. Yeah, absolutely. First of all, thank you for having me on your show. I was actually selling on Amazon as a reseller originally, and I was doing pretty well with it.

0:33I was actually finding things online or in stores at a discount and then reselling them on Amazon. After a while, I realized I wasn't really able to scale that. So I had at the time I had a one year old kid, my first born son, and he was wrecking my cabinets like he was taking things out. And it wasn't just wrecking, but also like getting touching things that were dangerous, glass bottles and cleaners and sprays. And I wanted to get like a cabinet lock that I can like install without screws and also wouldn't be like really ugly. And I couldn't really find one. I said, you know, I'm always looking to make a product and this was an opportunity.

1:12So I found a supplier in China and designed this cabinet lock with an adhesive and it uses magnets. You don't really see the lockets on the inside. Launched that on Amazon and it performed really well. So that was the first product. A couple of years later, I was still doing this product and I wanted to scale it up. And I had my brother-in-law, he became my partner and he joined me and we launched a full line of child safety products. So it was like six more products, really, really successful on Amazon. There were two of them were top 100 in baby for years. Wow. We made, we got into other categories, body training, baby gear, like baby swings, changing pants, bath toys, all sorts of different baby products.

1:57We also expanded to retail. So we started to Walmart, Target, BabyList, just a great site. And we're pretty much like everywhere. That's awesome. And I love that you started with a need and something that was dear to your heart. Because I think sometimes that's what you need to get kind of like the giddy up energy to actually do the thing. It's got to be something you care about. Well, what was it if you were to go back to Young Judah and be like, you know, here's three things that would have made all of this easier. What do you think those three things would be? One would be investing in marketing earlier.

2:29We've always had the sales, but we never really invested in the marketing and we weren't getting credit. we've always focused on innovation and aesthetics but people weren't talking about us enough and ever since we started investing in the marketing we started to see that shift completely makes a lot of things easier um i would say that's one of the top three two would be the team that we built we didn't build it fast enough me and my partner we're doing a tremendous amount of sales and just two of us and we didn't hire quick enough and so paying the tax on that to have systems you need to build out a communication.

3:03And the faster you hire, the faster you get experience. Yeah, we definitely failed. We didn't really know what we were doing. We didn't know how to hire. We didn't have roles, really. We were both doing everything. So I wish we knew how to hire quicker. Number three, it's software and automation. Having the right software systems and the right automations can really help us scale. Instead of just adding headcount constantly and things breaking and having the right software setups help ease that load tremendously. Okay, super helpful. So, okay, so you broke it down to if today Judah could go back to slightly younger Judah and help them out, it would be investing in marketing, investing in team, and investing in software and automation.

3:48Can I dig into each of those with you? Because I'm really interested in more. Absolutely, that's why I'm here. Okay, thank you. So, okay, so on the marketing side, when you say investing in marketing, what I heard was really brand. And that old Warren Buffett saying, I don't even know if he coined it, but it's always attributed to him that brand is the greatest moat. And is that really what you mean by marketing? Are there other aspects of marketing that you've found like a lot more durable value in? I mean, I've been a customer of your brand and thank you, by the way. And I know it as Juul. So, you know, clearly some of those investments that you started to make are paying off and customer recognition.

4:28And I'm sure that helps with retention and cost of acquisition and all of that stuff. So is it brand that's kind of at the core of that focus on like young entrepreneurs go, you know, go make sure that you're doing marketing right? Or are there other kind of pillars within that kind of bucket of marketing that you think have been really important or have helped you mature? It's mostly brand. We weren't really telling our story. And even when customers were happy with our product, they weren't really talking about it. We might have a product that was selling 10 times of the competitors. And when the articles would come out, recommendations, we wouldn't even get a mention.

5:03And these brands selling not really great product would be the ones that are getting talked about. And it's like, why aren't they talking about us? And the answer is we weren't enabling that with our marketing. And since we did, the conversation has completely shifted. Which brings us to another type of marketing, affiliate marketing. I don't know if this was your experience, but my experience in the early days of building was that I didn't we weren't doing affiliate marketing from day one, but I think we were pretty early on for my first brand in doing it. And and I I just thought, oh, this is like a good way to get more, you know, more places, more eyeballs.

5:38And what I under I don't know, under calculated, I guess, miscalculated was that actually once we have like enough affiliate marketing going on, like that was the thing that generated the reviews engine. which there's a little bit of a dark underside to that, right? You're like, oh, this is all pay for play. Like I find that so, so irritating and sad. And you know, the same with awards, like awards are just all pay for play. And so none of my brands had any awards because I just refused to do it, which is probably my marketing team was like, Sam, come on, it's too grand.

6:10Judah Bergman:Just apply for the award. I'm like, no, I can just, I don't need to buy a gold badge, but of course it would help. I'm curious if you had the same experience of like just getting listed on these affiliate marketing platforms is enough for that part of the engine to kind of kick into gear. And it was really mystifying to me as a younger entrepreneur, like I, you know, you always want to build the best thing and be recognized for like the quality of the product and the innovation in it. And at the end of the day, we weren't getting credit for that stuff either until we gave people a way to make money on us.

6:42And then, like, okay, fine.

6:44Judah Bergman:Now you can be, Now you can be in the listicle and now you get the award. Was it the same for you? We approached it a little bit differently. While we do have an affiliate program, we haven't generated a tremendous amount on there that have been working out really well has been through TikTok. It's also, I feel like it's a really good alignment, you know, with the brand. And so TikTok really turned the mom into like an affiliate. And now the lines are blurred between like moms, creators, affiliates, influencers. I don't even know what's what anymore. That's awesome. Like, so you mentioned these three things.

7:17I want to talk about all of the marketing team software and one version of kind of like that, that loop closing in on itself is if you think about trying to build a brand, trying to build awareness, trying to get to that, you know, end number of customer impressions that are needed before, like they'll remember your brand, which is historically always been. And Stefan is like the, you know, the kind of the going wisdom on how many times someone needs to see your brand in order either to make a decision or to remember you. And in order to get those seven impressions, I mean, you can pay for display advertising.

7:47And my favorite version of this was just to be in a store. And so we listed on as many channels as we could because I knew that, like, there's customer search and customer discovery. And when someone's in discovery mode, we could just be around. And if they're, you know, they're looking for a like product, at least we give them another chance through our listings engine, you know, to see us. And that really helped us build the brand. And so it took a lot of operational capability, which isn't always associated with marketing, to get to that marketing lift that we wanted. But it turns out that there was like a real mix of those two that made it work at least for us.

8:24And I don't know if you found, too, you mentioned TikTok Shop. Like, people are discovering your brand. You're doing marketing on TikTok shop, but it's like got this beautiful side side dish of sales coming with it. Yeah, absolutely. I don't think a lot of brands value the marketing opportunity of just being in the store, just being on the shelf. There is definitely a value in that. And now there's a certain legitimacy that your brand will have just being in a Walmart or Target. This is a real brand. I think it's it's definitely a great opportunity for a brand, but it's not the it's not the whole picture.

8:57there's the packaging the the imagery that you have the assets on your sites in the unboxing experience and then all the other things they were doing around social media and pr how about uh how about the team what are like some of the biggest mistakes that you made around team early on and then what has been the more recent unlock other than just like speed to build a team sometimes you have to just sort of like you've got to lean into it and accept that you might make some mistakes. But has there been any difference in your approach to team building in more recent years? The structure of our team was probably not optimized for what it needed to be.

9:35There wasn't enough balance in some departments. Now it feels right over time as we grew. This is really my first job and same for my partner. So we don't have any corporate experience and part of our MO is just to move fast and to be the first to market and be the first to do things. And that's great when you're like five people in a room or 10 people in a room. When you start to get a little bigger and you start over communicating and that becomes a mess. Because now everybody's CCing everybody and everything and getting approvals on everything. And it's like the meetings are everybody. And it's like, okay, this is also not working.

10:10So understanding how to create the right system and also having the right people in the right meetings. Understanding who's the decision maker. having that bureaucracy that we hate, but reworking that every so often, understanding there's going to be parts that are, you know, people are going to complain and hopefully keeping it to a minimum as much as possible.

10:29Judah Bergman:Well, you still seem pretty young, so it hasn't aged you, all the bureaucracy. Not yet, not yet. Not yet. But it will. You still got some kicking yourself. For me, there's been a real tension there as like a, you know, as a builder of physical products. that are like durable and permanent. They're still the greatest thing ever, right? And like, that's so comforting. I don't have to adjust it. There's other designs, of course, that like there's V2 and V3, but there is like no permanent version of like leadership frameworks where you're just like, this will work forever in every, you know, in every kitchen or in every bathroom or whatever.

11:06Absolutely not. What's working for us now is not going to work for us in a few years from now, if not sooner. And so we kind of constantly revisit and make sure your workflow is making sense. I want people to feel empowered to make their own decisions and that will enable us to keep our edge. Okay, last piece, software and automation. I'm guessing that at some point in your life, there was a clipboard and maybe a Google sheet or a spreadsheet in your life that had the truth of everything. How have you adjusted your approach to software over time? And what's like maybe also as you answer this, I'd love to get in just like, What are some of the things that you've automated where you're like, this is like chef's kiss?

11:50From pen and paper for inventory and orders and purchasing to Excel sheets, to maybe to Google sheets, to like a, I don't know if I call it ERP, but like a light one to now being on NetSuite. And so that's been a journey and it's a growing pains to learn what's needed and how to design it out. And then there's the automations. An automation project that we had recently is we migrated from Amazon Marketplace to Amazon Vendor. So instead of selling directly to the consumer, we're selling to Amazon who sells to the consumer. And we had that as a project that we were able to automate essentially almost the entire process.

12:31And it just works. Everything is automatically confirmed, all electronically, and there's very minimal input on anybody's end. And these are the type of automations how much can we just not touch and still not mess up everything, which, and it's still a work in progress. And as more retailers come on board, we're going to do the same thing. As it will be, right? One of the products that we focus on a lot is EDI. And I remember feeling in 2015, I was like, one day when I grow up, I'm going to take down EDI.

13:02Judah Bergman:And I was like, so naive. There's no way. It's like, you know, the thing that runs everything, but it's all a snowflake. It's every EDI connection is like its own little thing. You can automate it at some point, you know, up to some point, but then you're like, here we go again. Exactly. Yeah. Are you guys using AI much? We are. So we hired a software developer and he's been working with our ERP and creating all these automations. They're like, why don't we do this sooner? So like three months later, we hired another one. Once we realized how many projects we can get done with the use of AI, the developer was showing me how, how is, how many commits you would have to GitHub compared to previously, like the advancements have been so rapid that like the cloud code, you'd be able to have five agents simultaneously and we're getting so much more done.

13:52And then within the company, just the everyday employee, we've encouraged them to create their own apps. Those have been really helpful being able to spin those up quickly and them having the ownership over it and then getting insights in Excel, like turning sales reports and to trend the ports actually getting usable data. So really everybody's using it and we're still just scratching the surface. And I think it's important even for myself to spend time on all sorts of - Yeah, it's such an exciting and fun time to be building for all those reasons. It's just like, one experience I've been having too is like, I'll build a tool.

14:29Well, I've been developing software for a really long time, but the permanence of it or the need for it to be permanent, the need for it to be like a high quality artifact fact was so much greater in the past because, you know, going from zero to one on something took a lot of effort. And now I'm having this experience of like, I can be a little bit more playful and experimental because if my experiment doesn't work out, the stakes are so much lower. I didn't bring five devs in to help and can fully build something, throw it away, having like resolved my idea or my prototype or whatever and be like, okay, now we're going to start fresh from this.

15:02And that's been really playful for me. and it sounds like it's been a good experience for you too, fiddling around with these things and figuring out what's going to be the most useful to people. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in general, I'm an optimist, but what I see in my own company is that it's making us more productive, more capable. I had a recent employee that didn't really have much experience and said, okay, he's going to get trained. With AI, he's much, much faster, creating tools for himself. And like, he's at a place where after not so long, it's like he's been here for years. And so how is that a bad thing?

15:36How is upskilling quickly a bad thing for us? At the end of the day, the AI is not going to control itself. You still need someone to direct it. That will just create more need for my company to grow and have more people, really. Hey guys, you're just hiring. I'm not joking. We hired a couple of people last week and hiring another one, hopefully this week. And I have an abundance mindset. I don't see this negativity. I think it's very short-sighted. The more prosperity there is, the more productivity, there's going to be more jobs.

16:08Judah Bergman:When are you running for office? This is great. Yeah, I totally agree with you. It's really wonderful to see the evolution of what work looks like. And it can be scary to be on the near jagged edge of that. And all these skill sets that people have are, some of them are irrelevant. I mean, my skill sets are irrelevant. Like I wrote for a living for a while. nobody needs me for that anymore like I you know nobody needs me for writing code anymore nobody needs me for like pushing pixels around in Figma anymore but I have a different toolkit that I used to deliver my taste through those things through writing through code and product features and you know and through design and so it's I think if you have an abundance mindset like you point out and you're willing to learn, then that it's really actually a delightful time to be in knowledge work and figuring out how you can get even more done with less.

17:07Absolutely. I mean, for yourself, it wasn't about the fact that you wrote a story that gave the value. It was your take on it. Now you can get to that take faster and you can put it out quicker. Then you can write that code a lot faster. But it wasn't about, oh, how many keystrokes you did. that wasn't the value. It was the brains behind the code. And the brains behind the code is still very valuable. I was speaking to a local software company that developed projects for other companies. And I'm thinking about all the local businesses, and they would never be able to hire them for a project. But now they could have been one of the custom software.

17:42They could do it. They can demo it out in a few hours. They can create things for other businesses that weren't able to afford it, and now they can. So there's so much abundance. As I was saying, this is the greatest time to be alive. Speaking of sort of, you know, product and having a story that you want to share with the world, I would love to talk about your business's product line. And maybe we can enter into that conversation from here with just some curiosity around like how you're using these new tools in the product development process or the product lifecycle management process, you know, for starters.

18:16The research development of the products definitely has changed. Being able to get and compile all this data and get the insights in much easier and use that to help us define the product that we want to create. So that's, I would say, step one. The concept creation is also a lot quicker. Sometimes in minutes or less, you can show what the product will look like. Even non-designers like myself, if I wanted to give an idea, it's hard to verbalize an idea, but I can create the image. And so maybe I'm not a designer, but. I do have some good ideas to share. There's also, I would say, around the products itself.

18:51So we have a lot of products. We have a full assortment of potty training. And we started creating all sorts of tools to help benefit the consumers. When's your child ready to potty train? So building these interactive tools to help them make the right decisions, find the right potty for you, and non-technical people build this out and put it on our site. So these are interesting things we were never even considered. I was going to try really hard not to not to ask you about compliance, but because I love compliance, has it been helpful? And I mean, it's, you know, the baby compliance landscape is really complicated and you have like a pretty wide range of products, too.

19:28So baby compliance for a product that has a food use, like your musical spoons, is like even it's like the next nth degree of all of that and the materiality of it. Has it been helpful to you to have kind of like more AI sidekicking in navigating the complexity of that piece of the puzzle? We also have someone that's managing the compliance that's been in the field for a very long time. So in that aspect, we're kind of covered. It's really more on the managing all the different inspections and the testing reports. And even the product development team is really knowledgeable, whether it's chemical, physical or labeling.

20:06They're pretty familiar at this point. I wanted to ask you, too, about like the, you know, so many of your products have this really interesting mix of there's a small bit of electronics in it. And and I really like those ones. Like there's a there's a thermometer. There's innovation there. There's a thermometer in one of your bathtubs. And then there's I've just mentioned the musical spoon, which I think is like so adorable. Has that increased the complexity of bringing these things to market? Has it changed the timeline? How do you consider kind of when's the right product or the right moment to bring that in versus sort of, you know, leave it on the cutting room floor for whatever reason?

20:42Let's talk a little bit about the consumer electronics piece of it. So that's something that we've struggled with over time. And there were certain things that were maybe over-engineered and it's like, was it really worth it? And so, like, do we really want to go down this path? How do we not over-engineer something and not get stuck on this project for years and years? The singing spoons is actually one of the examples I would bring, unfortunately. It's a great product, but it was over-engineered. It took a long time to really figure it out. And it just kept going back and forth with the factory.

21:16And the way it worked, it doesn't break. It was a lot. And the market for it was not, we didn't really have a great market fit. The retailers didn't take it. And on Amazon, it wasn't really a good fit. And that's really where you realize, okay, if I don't have great marketing, then how are you supposed to launch a product like this? It doesn't really work. So more recently, we've...

21:42Judah Bergman:There's no one who's searching for a musical spoon, right? No one's going to be like, what's the best musical spoon? Like, this is the N1. It's the only musical spoon. Nobody's looking for it. So TikTok is great for that. Product discovery, it's interesting. It's different. And if you want to launch a product that needs a consumer education, it's by far the best place. We've seen with our most recent launches, like it kind of took us by shock of how successful they were. We launched recently our SmartWave touch-free diaper pail. So it's a new product completely. It's the first hands-free, like electronic sensor diaper pail.

22:21And it's really beautiful. and we were able to tell that story through TikTok. And right away, we saw that demand, not just on TikTok, but our website on Target, on Amazon. And it's been hard to actually keep that in stock. And then our foldable bathtub that we launched as well, one you mentioned with the thermometer, that was not in stores. It was just on TikTok and Amazon and we couldn't keep it in stock. We were shocked to help, like quickly it picked up on TikTok. Hopefully we'll remain in stock, but it's been difficult. We've been ordering and ordering. Wow. That's a great, I mean, yeah, good job though.

23:00It's so interesting to see how a new selling avenue, like a live social selling or a TikTok chop can really just completely flip the script on what it means to launch a product because that experiential version of the storytelling can come to life and all of a sudden you're not relying on like three images and a couple of badges and you know some text to get the use case across for first-time parents who are the best parent buying audience new parents have the as a