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Podcast Summary: E107 - It’s Never Been Easier to Make Money Online (Here’s How) | Hudson Leogrande
Podcast Details
- Title: First Things THRST
- Episode: E107
- Guest: Hudson Leogrande, founder of Comfrt
- Description: Hudson discusses building a seven-figure apparel brand while navigating the challenges of the e-commerce landscape and the importance of leveraging AI and influencer marketing.
Key Topics Covered
Introduction
- Hudson Leogrande introduces himself and discusses his recent success with a viral hoodie product.
- The host and Hudson emphasize the rapid growth in e-commerce and why creators need to adapt.
Viral Hoodie Success
- Product: The "airplane mode hoodie" integrates an eye mask and multiple pockets, achieving 100,000 units sold in 48 hours.
- Sales Growth: Achieved $50 million in sales for the month following the hoodie launch.
Manufacturing and Supply Chain
- Initial manufacturing through Alibaba, leading to the need for better supplier terms.
- Importance of negotiating favorable payment terms with manufacturers to prevent cash flow issues.
The Role of AI in Scaling
- Hudson discusses using AI for content automation and creator approvals.
- AI tools are utilized to analyze user-generated content (UGC) for performance predictions.
Marketing Strategies
- Transition from Snapchat to TikTok for brand awareness and sales; the pivot caused by algorithm changes.
- The significance of relatable, authentic content over celebrity endorsements in influencer marketing.
- Experimentation with new ad formats, including street interviews, to increase engagement.
Creator Collaborations
- Emphasis on selecting creators based on authenticity and comfort on camera rather than follower count.
- The importance of scripting content loosely to maintain authenticity while ensuring key marketing points are covered.
Future Growth Plans
- Intentions to expand into international markets, particularly Europe and Canada.
- Strategies for retail expansion, moving beyond online sales.
Community and Culture Building
- The significance of creating a strong company culture and hiring passionate team members over agency reliance.
- Hudson shares insights on the importance of mentorship and continuous learning in entrepreneurship.
Final Thoughts
- Hudson encourages aspiring entrepreneurs to embrace failure and be willing to take risks.
- Reflects on the challenges of entrepreneurship, including the emotional toll and the value of persistence.
Key Takeaways
- AI and Automation: Crucial for scaling e-commerce businesses; helps in content approval and performance analysis.
- Authenticity Matters: Building trust through genuine content rather than relying on bigger influencers.
- Negotiate Wisely: Importance of favorable terms with suppliers to maintain cash flow.
- Embrace Change: Understanding market dynamics and consumer behavior is essential for growth.
- Risk-Taking: Successful entrepreneurs often face significant challenges and must be willing to fail and iterate.
Relevant Links
- Hudson Leogrande on Instagram: [@itshudson](https://www.instagram.com/itshudson/)
- Comfrt Website: [Comfrt](https://hackyou.media/)
- Digital Playbook: [Digital Playbook](https://www.digitalplaybook.net/)
- THRST Clothing Brand: [THRST](https://thrstofficial.com)
- Bioniq Supplements: [Bioniq](https://www.bioniq.com/mikethurston)
This episode serves as a valuable resource for aspiring entrepreneurs and established creators looking to leverage modern tools and strategies for online success.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:28If you don't learn AI, you'll die. their ways and they think they know it all. Whereas the younger people are more open to trying new things and accepting that they might be wrong. That's the one thing anybody watching this, like make sure you. Now, before we jump into today's episode, I just want to mention that this podcast is brought to you by me and everything that I have built to help you guys level up. If you want to transform your physique, build muscle, lose body fat, build strength, then you have the thirst app. This has everything inside that you could possibly need to get yourself in shape to hold yourself accountable as well.
0:59I also have the digital playbook, which is a step-by-step guide to help you guys build a following, monetize the following, and also build a strong personal brand. This is everything which I have done over the past nearly 10 years to allow myself to live a life of financial freedom and also geographical freedom. I can basically do whatever I want. Life is good. And I also have my newsletter, which has been revamped where i'll share exclusive podcast insights my raw thoughts on business fitness and much much more so if you're interested about any of those check out the description you'll find the links to all of them let's get cracking with the episode what's up guys welcome to another episode of first things thirst i am back in new york city and i'm kicking off this trip with an amazing guest hudson leo grande did i say that how's the pronunciation That was good.
1:52That's how I'm going to say it every time. Where's that come from? It's Italian. Okay. Yes. Nice. Yes, yes, yes. Happy to be here, brother. Yes, it's long overdue, to be honest. We've got a lot of similar friends and mutuals, a lot of people who are killing it in the business space. In fact, one of our friends recommended that I hit you up and do this episode. So we're making it happen. Let's do it. How's things going with you? Business, life, everything good? Everything is good, man. Life is good. The business is good. And just scaling has been, it's been crazy for us. We were projecting a lower summer in sales just because of the seasonality of the products that we normally sell.
2:34But we dropped this airplane mode hoodie and it went crazy viral. We did like 100 ,000 units in 48 hours. We had our biggest month ever. We did like, I think like 50 million last month. nothing it's been fucking crazy what is it uh it's so you have like this hoodie that like it comes over a little bit further than other ones and then there's an eye mask that's built into the hood that comes down so if you want to go to sleep on a flight instead of like getting an eye mask you put the eye mask uh like from the hood so you take out from under it and then it like is attached inside the hood so just like a cool and then we add like a ton of pockets and just like fun stuff like that but um yes i'm curious to know when it comes to coming up with these new ideas and products for the business are you still coming up with them or is it is it now like a conversation you're having between the teams yeah so it used to be it used to be me and then i'll be honest like i don't think my designs were like great i think they were just like i just saw cool brands that i liked and was like oh this could be cool if we tried this but now it's like may uh is my vp of product and um then we have like uh like a product designer and then we have a creative director that works with us on that and then jared who actually intro'd us he's like my brand manager and he's great in fashion so we kind of like collectively as a group now there's like four or five of us that whenever we decide to launch something we we all just collaborate on it together but it used to be me yeah thank god it's not yeah so when you when you started the company it was predominantly done by you you had the idea and you thought okay let me try and bring this to market and you one thing which i wanted to ask you was how how did you find the right supplier because obviously you wanted to get the material right you wanted to get the fit right yeah so we so what we ended up doing was we initially started on alibaba so we reached out to a ton of manufacturers um and then we sent them like we sent them about six of my favorite hoodies.
4:34And I said, can you make almost like a hyper hoodie? We want it to be a little bit more weighted than a normal hoodie. We want it to have a softer fabric to the touch, like softer than everything. Honestly, I would say the closest in comparison to us is like Abercrombie and Fitch, like their soft AF line is like amazing. So we got a lot of inspiration from them. And then we just sent it out, developed the product and worked with a bunch of manufacturers. And we found one we really liked. And then we like, we outgrew them very quickly. So they had to hire more people just to work with comfort. So they've been with us since the jump.
5:06Now we have more manufacturers. You outgrew them because they couldn't handle - They couldn't handle the order volume. They were smaller manufacturers, so they had to keep outsourcing to other mills for fabric. So we ended up getting more manufacturers, but we've kept the one that we started with, which is really, really cool. I bet they're happy with that. Yeah, oh yeah, they're very happy with that. We're happy with that. One of the things that I think people need when they're talking about e-comm is like your terms, you know, when you're, when you're paying for like, when we started comfort, our terms were horrible.
5:39The worst terms ever we were paying a hundred percent, uh, before the product shipped, we didn't even have like 30 days where we would own like it. We didn't have 30 days of selling the item. And so we were had horrible terms. That's the one thing, anybody watching this, like make sure you negotiate good terms with your manufacturer. Yeah. Well, I get, this is the thing, I guess, if you're, if you're starting in the econ world and you're looking to place orders, how would you know about having these terms in place like you've never experienced it before it's almost like you have to experience some kind of setback or just like some nightmare experience where you're like okay let's make sure that doesn't happen again or you meet someone like we were just talking about like when i met davy um davy fogerty he's the owner of the oody so when we met initially you know one of the ways well first of all before we get into him if i was starting over again i would just plug everything into chat gpt5 i'd be like what do I need to look out for?
6:34What are going to be the biggest pain points in my business when I'm scaling? Um, you know, this is where my brand's at now. This is where I wanted to go build me out, you know, this detailed, you know, like, you know, year kind of like run and just tell me like what we're going to have to do along the way. I think that is like a really good way to kind of mitigate risk. Cause yeah, you're right. Like who the fuck is going to tell you? So Davey was the one who told me to hire very early on. Like when we were, uh, two years ago in 2023, we did like 16 million. At the end of that year, we were on a run rate to hit 50 million.
7:06And he asked me who my team was. And I was like, I have three people on my team and they're on, most of them are on Fiverr and Upwork and we're outsourcing them. And he was like, well, your company's going to drown. Like you're going to fail. He's like, you have a great brand, but it's going to die. You need to hire this person, this person. And then he asked me, what are your terms with your manufacturing? I told him and he was like, those are shit. He's like, you need to negotiate better terms. So then my team flew to China and, uh, and then we have, uh, manufacturers in Cambodia and Vietnam, but we went to like the bigger people that have deeper bank accounts that can fund this, where if we place a$30 million order, you know, we have to pay maybe, uh, sometimes they're net 90.
7:44You don't pay anything for 90 days. You get 60 days of selling on that. And that like change it can change your business it can make or break your entire company yeah so yeah i would say like mentors right and then and then like yeah you have to you have to utilize chat we use it so much so i guess like if you're going to ask it questions now at this current point in time and you're wanting to get its feedback or guidance to what degree of accuracy would you say its answer is because from my experience as a coach this is like why i used to do full-time used to coach people i would from time to time ask chat gpt questions or get it to make some sort of a training program or nutrition program for me because i want to see what it would say and it's quite good but it's still not quite there yet well we've had instances where like i'll say something and i'll catch it and i'll be like that's wrong and they're like oh we're so sorry like we we've corrected our answer and i'm like how many times yeah how many times have i not caught it yeah um I think you have to use it.
8:48You can't rely on your brain to just be like chat GPT. You need to have a really good combination of both. So at this stage in the game, let's just say I'm drafting up an outreach message for, we just did it this morning. We were outreaching to people on YouTube. i'll have the idea of what i think would be you know just like enticing for them but then i'll throw it in chat gbt5 just came out two days ago i threw it into chat five and i was like make this really enticing sophisticated and make it feel like it's very exclusive like we're not sending this out to a lot of people and then it redid my entire message it's like a great copywriter claude ai is also a great copywriter so i'll use stuff like that to tweak it and then And sometimes what we do now, which is a very interesting thing, is we'll actually take all of our creative content, like all of our UGC videos, and we'll upload them into this bot where it's like a framework from ChatGPT where we upload videos that have been winners that have made us a ton of money.
9:51And then we have the bot actually rate the new videos coming in, and it rates it 1 to 10 and tells us why it will blow up or why it won't. And then we test it. So when we get like a couple thousand pieces of content in a week, we'll have some of the girls have access to it that work with the company and they'll upload their videos and they'll say, oh, this is a seven or this is a 10, or this is what I could do better. So we used to do manual approval. Now we just use chat to approve it. And we just say, this is what works. These are the different styles of videos that make sense for the company.
10:22Take these, upload them. Let me know how they look. And then when they look at it and we post them and they do well, we're like, okay, we have this thing trained now. So those are things that we use too. Like it's supposed to make your life easier. I'm not going to say I'm the best with AI, but like, I mean, there's guys that we know that are doing unbelievable. Yeah, well, some of the people I've spoken to on the podcast who are just talking about how much AI is going to take over and change the game. It's making me think, okay, I really need to look into this. The next 20, 10 years, 20 years, the game's going to change.
10:55We got to think about it like this. If you're talking business in particular, Like business, just a broad spectrum, like people are getting replaced now with AI. In my industry, it's like, if you don't learn AI, you'll die because the companies that are utilizing it are able to do things at lightning speed and you're still doing it manually. So the company that's doing it manually is going to have a way more difficult time learning the systems and processes that we have that we could just quickly tweak on AI opposed to like you hiring a new person because they're not doing a good enough job. Like that's where it gets scary.
11:31So like even TikTok shops, we use a bot called Yuka AI and the AI bot, you'll put in the parameters of the person you want to reach out to. So you'll say, I want them to make this amount of money every month in GMV, right? So they earned over 50 ,000 a month. So you know they could sell a product. Their estimated post rate is 95%. On TikTok shop, normal backend, you can't do that. But on AI, you can literally like filter out everything you want. and then it will automatically outreach to their inbox on TikTok. And then it goes right to your sample requests on the backend in TikTok shop. So you could just like message 5 ,000 people a day, get 3 ,000 people that want to get a product.
12:10You ship it to everybody, you flood the market and you win. That's where AI is like, yeah, that's where it's going to be. I can see you're passionate about this as well. You love it. Because you know what, when I learn it, because I feel like how you feel, I'm like, fuck, I got to really learn this. And then I go to this like tea shop in Miami me where I work out of, it's like a Kratom tea shop. And there's this kid that always comes in. He lied to me first. He told me he was 20. He's really 16. Comes in after school. He works. He has an AI company. We work with him now. He's 16. He's like a little hustler.
12:41And he showed me like 50 things that could help my business and help automate my life. And I was like, I have no idea this exists. A kid in high school knows more than I know running a business. I'm like, you saw I'm passionate about it now because i feel like i if i'm not pivoting right now like i don't know when i will you know taken over by this wave of teenage millionaires dude they're saying ai is going to make more millionaires than like any industry it's yeah it's bonkers so i know you've mentioned this a few times on other podcasts and i don't want you to have to repeat yourself and like the whole story of how how you grew you're your two main businesses there's the teeth whitening one Yes.
13:20Which is called Purely White Deluxe. Yeah. Would I be a good model? Dude, you're great, bro. You could... Sales just went up. So you've got that one. I got that one. Which does good, but it doesn't do as good as... As comfort. Yeah. No. But you still... I guess that's your... Deluxe White is your baby, isn't it? It's my baby, dude. I wouldn't even be here. We wouldn't be talking if it wasn't for Purely White. That business was just... I mean, talk about not knowing anything. Yeah. like five years, nothing. And yeah, I've talked about it. I think about this now that I'm on more podcasts. I'm like, you know, people might hear it like almost sounds redundant when they ask for my story, but a lot of people don't know who I am.
14:01So it's like the more people that - Do you know what's good though? You've done this without a huge personal brand. No, yeah, no brand. Dude, no one knew who I was. Like nobody - That's pretty cool. I didn't want anyone to know who I was. I wasn't focused on like fame in a sense. Like I didn't care if people knew who I was. I just wanted to make money because I was so broke. And then when I finally started making money and people like, yo, you got to go tell your story. Like, this is nuts. Now when people come up to me, like if I'm at a restaurant and people like, yo, I saw your podcast. I'm like, that's, I never had that.
14:32You get, I mean, you're huge on, on social, but like, for me, I'm like, this is cool. And you, you almost want to give everybody the same amount of time. Cause you're like, I'll sit down with them. I'll talk to them. Cause I wish I had somebody when i was growing up to like be that person for me i wish i found a mentor that made youtube videos that was like always raw never like hid from like what really worked for them like never was like trying to hide the secrets of like how they built their brand i wish i had that so yeah purely white eight almost 10 years now how did that do so well because there is no doubt a lot of competition on the market when it comes to making your teeth whiter yeah so why did that one back yeah we um so so we developed a very interesting method of how we well first of all it failed horribly facebook meta ads nothing worked the bit meta ads still don't work for purely white it just is not a good but it does for comfort for comfort it crushes because it's different right so there's a few different things uh the aov right so the average order value of comfort is way higher than purely white deluxe that's one two clothing is way has a way bigger TAM.
15:41So the total addressable market of comfort is everybody and anybody. Purely white is like, how many people whiten their teeth? Okay. Now how many people go back and buy more products to whiten their teeth? Very few. So you're thinking that like, okay, well, everybody has teeth and we're solving a problem. If you're using fluoride toothpaste, you shouldn't because there's issue now that are coming out with fluoride or you want to use nanohydroxyapatite, which is an agent that helps whiten your teeth. So we want to come out with all these cool products. People are like, I don't really give a shit.
16:11So, so we, we had to do a new way of building the brand, which was Snapchat. So we were the first company ever to work with influencers and content creators on Snapchat. We would take a regular video that people would post and we would go and put a cold link, like a traffic link to purely white deluxe.com. No one knew who we were. We weren't running ads anywhere else. We were not running Google shopping, nothing. Everything was just straight to website if you buy it amazing if not you know we're probably never going to see you again why snap because so i had a friend that the company and what year is this by the way fuck covid like 2020 right when covid hit yeah 2020 damn so so that's a while ago now it feels like not that long we he's like dude i'm getting three million views a day on my snapchat yeah yeah he's like, he's like, bro, let me just throw up a post with purely white.
17:06All of a sudden, first thousand dollar day. I thought that like something, I thought we got like someone sales accidentally leaked into our Shopify account. I was like, this is crazy. Cause we were only making like a couple hundred bucks a day at most. Cause we were doing like, like very like one-off TikTok promotion videos. But then when Snapchat started, we scaled it to like a thousand creators and we were doing like 10 million a year with purely white. And then all of a sudden Snapchat Snapchat changed this algorithm and it went from, now you get paid every nine posts. It's like their mid-roll program.
17:39So they pay you a percentage of the ad revenue that Snapchat generates. But what they did was they didn't say this, but they lowered everybody's views tremendously because they didn't want to make the big payouts. So all of a sudden you went from 3 million views on a post to now I got to post a hundred times a day because every nine posts is now an ad and then I get paid a portion of that ad, but now my video only gets like a hundred k views a post so they really made it where you have to become addicted to like posting um like every single day and that's how you make your money so purely white did that but then the next year when they changed the algorithm we went to two million bucks and the company like was in debt and then we figured out tiktok and then tiktok was like a huge lever for us to make money so that was why yeah that was like purely white's kind of like upcoming success but now on tiktok shop we're the number one brand in oral care so we just flooded the market with content made really relatable content with day-to-day people no celebrities and we just continued to pump out like really good products that people really loved and that was that's that side of the brand yeah so when it comes to the game of running ads do how how well do you understand it because this has been like a thing with me i've hired people to run ads yeah and the annoying thing is usually with a lot of things within my businesses i try to understand as much as possible so i know whether someone is doing a good job or not yeah but i never really have gone too deep in the world of running ad like i'm there's too much going on for me i don't want to be a master of how to run the perfect ad and how much to spend on ads and things like that so how do you know when somebody is actually like really good at ad buying and spending yeah spending the money yeah is that what's called a media buyer yeah media buyer yeah so and i didn't know what that was until like last year i have everyone always said media buyers i'm like the guys who just run ads i was like can you guys the name for everything that you you'd be surprised there's a ton of media buyers that are you know first of all ads break at scale so as your company is scaling and you have great creative, that great creative may turn into average creative.
19:48And then that average creative may turn into bad creative as you scale the budget. So at a thousand dollars a day, the ad may be amazing. It may be super profitable for your brand, but what's the goal? Scale your company. So as the business grows, those ads will start to die out and you'll start to see which ones float to the top and are the winners. With media buying, it's very, you know, it's very structured. So I'm not a great media buyer, but I understand it well enough that I can look and see things because that's the problem. People will hire a media buyer and not know anything and then they don't know if they're doing a good job.
20:20And then when they're like, well, we're not getting the results we want. Is it really because you're not doing a good job or the company in general is not doing a good job? So we hired two great media buyers that work at my company now. You know, comfort spends around half a million dollars a day. So at that level of scale, it's like, you're literally just coming in buckets and you're just dumping them onto Meta. Like it's a lot of money and we don't understand how much money it really is because it's all digital. But if I was delivering half a million dollars every day to Meta's doorstep, we would get an idea of how much money we can blow too.
20:53So the media buyers are really good at structuring ad accounts. They're looking at incremental growth on other channels. How much money are you making from the overflow of TikTok? How much word of mouth is coming from, let's just say TikTok shops to measure the halo effect of people who see us on TikTok first, but buy us on meta. How do we measure that? So you have to get attribution tools like Northbeam or WorkMagic, or some people use Triple Whale. Those are things that you have to really look, and it's very granular. Because at one point, you can't rely on in-platform data. I can't look at meta and say, oh, we're crushing it on meta, we're good.
21:32You can't trust anybody. You definitely can't trust Snapchat. They'll say you have a 50 ROAS and you're a billionaire. Meanwhile, like you're, you're losing money because the attribution tools are so underdeveloped. So when you use something like a North beam, which is like the Lamborghini of, of like tracking, it's like, you really get to look at like, okay, how do all these channels correlate to one another? How do we actually make money? What's working? What's our mirror? Like what's our combined ROAS? How are we, you know, leveraging certain things? And I think that's really hard for like someone who's like, I'm a media buyer.
22:07They don't know that stuff, you know? So it's just trial and error. And then also AI can help because you can, you know, really throw a lot of stuff in there and see, you know, how can we measure this better? Okay. This is what you found. Let's go try this now. So I don't, I don't think there's like the perfect media buyer. I think it's just like people who are willing to learn and like not old enough where you can't teach them new tricks, you know? going back to the early days when you when you started comfort and you you were finding these first few influences i guess like that maybe the the small influences micro influences how much were you directing them when it came to creating the ads and the the content because i've heard you talk about this before and it sounds like you you know a lot about this yeah And is that something that is self-taught, something you just understand?
22:57Yeah, I think it's just something I understand. Well, I'm really good at understanding consumer behavior. I look at like what evokes emotion, like what gets you excited? Why did you start going to the gym? What was the real reason, right? So there's an emotion behind you going to the gym every day and working out. I look at people when it comes to purchasing power. It's like, what makes you really click buy? What was it that happened that made it like a hot point? Like the hot point for people varies, but it depends on the product. So when you're buying a piece of clothing, like there's only so many things that I could say to you that would get you excited about buying our product unless I build more meaning behind it.
23:33So we donate to mental health charities, like a ton of money. We make sure that we're treating our creators great. I have girls that make 200 grand a month. They're, they have 40 ,000 followers on TikTok. They're millionaires. Like we've created this crazy culture. and I always look at it three pillars is unbelievable marketing incredible product quality and then you have to have like a really great community of people so when I look at content the script like you just asked me like do I script them out do I make them follow a certain criteria not really it's a very loose script I say hey this is what's worked in the beginning it was hey this is what I think will work and then when it finally worked and we had data like historical data being like, okay, these hooks work great.
24:18These middle of contents work great where you're having this try on experience. It's very personal. And then the call to action is very FOMO based. Like it's always sold out because we are, or, you know, you can't, if you can get your size, you got to get it now or they're on sale or whatever it is. Um, and then when we try that enough and you find what wins, you duplicate that over and over again. So I would just, when a new person comes on, we onboard them, we give them this introductory video. It's like a 30 minute kind of video where where we break down, you know, really what you're getting involved in.
24:48But then we show them what our best videos are. And we say, this is what we recommend you do. If you don't want to do it, it's completely fine. They usually follow like half and half at the beginning. They do their own thing. Then they do what we think works. And then what we work, what we think works does better than they go all in on kind of that style. But we did that. And then it worked up until a certain point. And then we were like, how do we shock the market? Then we started podcast clips. And then we started street interviews where we would like have people go on a podcast, on a real podcast, and then we would do some like ones where they're staged and we would have people make content in our hoodies talking about their experience and how they love it.
25:24But people on a podcast like us, they want to listen to us more because it seems because of this setting that we have something important to say. And that's the same thing that translates through ads. With street interviews, it's very engaging. It's very interactive. You find some random person off the street, you throw a hoodie on them and you ask them to give them your experience and then they're like, oh my God, like blah, blah, blah. And then people are engaging with that because they, they just, there's more dopamine hits that go throughout those videos. So we try that. Do I know it's going to work?
25:55Not really. No one's ever done hoodie videos, trying it on, on street interviews, but it crushed for us and was one of our most profitable ads ever. So I think it's like, when I look at content now, it's like we have data, but in the beginning, it's just gut. Like, why would I buy? Cause you always have to look back. Like, why the fuck are we buying what we're buying what is making us do that and then you have to reverse engineer it into like how do i now sell my product you know so it's really just thinking outside of the box and trying to do something a little bit different if it doesn't work it doesn't work if it does then okay let's go in you gotta be yeah you can't be nervous to test everyone gets so freaking nervous like they just get like no one wants to take the first step and like fail but it's like always failing forward.
26:40Like you always have to fail to get to a level of success. No one just became millionaires by like not doing anything. Like they failed hundreds or thousands of times before they figured it out. People are like nervous to fail. And I think that's hard. Like you were saying to me, like how, before you got involved in YouTube, it took you like a couple of years because you didn't like want to do it. Right. Like maybe whatever the emotions were that you were having. It's the same thing with e-com. Like when you have to tell all your friends that you're starting a business and everyone's like, okay, like, let's see how it goes.
27:12And then like, if it fails, like you look like a failure to your friends and your family and people will like be like, yeah, I told you like, that wasn't a good idea, but then it could go the other way and you could like pop off. And people were like, I knew you could do it. Meanwhile, they were projecting their insecurities onto the entire fucking time where they were like, well, I don't know. It's like, no, you don't know. Cause you never did it. I I'm doing it. So like, You can't tell me what's going to work. That's the hard part. It's listening to the right people. And then most of the time, we take advice from the wrong people.
27:43And that's the hard part in e-com. It's like people are so nervous to start something. How many DMs I get where they're like, I want to start this. Do you think this is a good idea? I'm like, dude, go try it. And then you'll know if it's a good idea. And if not, go pivot 50 times. There's a guy that I met yesterday. He just started consulting with me. He owns a company called Her Fantasy Box. It's like a feminine hygiene brand. it's going to do probably a hundred mil, almost a hundred. Oh, I think I've heard of that. Yeah. He told me on the phone last night, this was a conversation I had coming out of dinner last night.
28:13He said, I tried clothing. Didn't work. I tried this. Didn't work. I tried that. Didn't work. And then I found this and it worked. I'm like, so you really tried everything. Like you're a hustler. He's like, dude, I was not going to stop until I figured it out. Like that person always wins. Yeah. Like you put your money on this, like putting your money on Tom Brady. Like on the super, he's just going to win, you know? So that's the difference between, and I don't know where we were, but I just think that's important for everyone to know, like take the fucking risk. Yeah. We'll get back to the podcast in a second, but first of all, I want to say a massive shout out to Bionic.
28:44I have been using their supplements for the past four years. I never knew what supplements I needed to take. I'd always go into the pharmacy and buy a load of random bottles and end up popping pills all day, every day, not having a clue if I was consuming the vitamins which I should be consuming at all. But Bionic came to save the day. They are a tailor made supplement company that will put together your own specific formula based on your activity, your gender. I have Bionic Pro where I get the blood test done every three to four months and based on that blood test I get my own personalized formula.
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29:19For those people who don't want to do a blood test or don't have access to that then you can go with Bionic Go where you just have to fill in a short questionnaire and based on that questionnaire you will get your tailored supplements with a surprisingly high degree of accuracy so stop the guesswork sign up to bionic and ensure that you remove those deficiencies and build up your immune system i guess with the success you've had with comfort have you noticed a lot of people trying to copy and paste that model with not only the strategy but with the actual product itself oh dude yeah like and even with the podcasts you're doing, do you ever feel like - Bro, everything, Gap just copied us.
30:01Yeah. Gap, like the brand that we all grew up, maybe not where you were from. No, no, no, they were - Yeah. Like Gap, where we all grew up, like fucking wearing Gap. I didn't know they were still around, to be honest. Bro, me either, until I get 50 DMs and they're like, yo, what's up with Gap? So they partnered with this company called Bass. By the way, shout out to Gap. Okay. They worked out with this company called Base, which is a very good travel brand. They did an incredible job with marketing. They make great products. I have nothing against them. They've done a great job. I think they're around 200 million a year or so in rev.
30:36Gap, we do more revenue than Gap does online. Is that an American brand? Yeah. Okay. So they were like dying on D2C. So Base collabs with them. Great idea for Base because it gives them way more visibility to their company because Gap is Gap. They come out with this travel hoodie that has an inflatable hood. That's their different piece, which is not unique because there's other brands that have done inflatable hoods. But they put the pockets in the same place the comfort pocket is. Then it's all these different crazy zippers. And then they come out with an in-flight pamphlet. Like, you know when you get on a flight and you have the pamphlet of like, this is where you're, you know, like, you know, where the life vest is.
31:16So we did our own pamphlet where we did like, you know, like comfort airways. Yeah. They come out with gap airways. Then they copied our exact pamphlet. I'm like, dude, it's crazy to me. Cause that's one brand that I was, it was rare. I thought that'd be very rare for a company of that magnitude to like really copy paste and then like work with UGC creators to try to get it out there the way comfort does. But again, what are you going to do if you can't beat them, join them. And like with other models, like I do consult for brands and I teach them this strategy and it works really well, but they're in different verticals than I am.
31:52And in the contract, like obviously they can't go resell it as their own. It's like proprietary. But when I share this stuff on like a podcast, like clothing brands will go do it to the point where there's companies in other countries that have literally copy pasted mental health charity donations, website, like very similar websites, hoodies slightly weighted, but like everything we created that was never done before, like copy paste. And I always say more power to you so it doesn't piss you off it doesn't piss me off it doesn't piss me off because this is why the chips that i'm after are very different than everybody else like i'm going for billions when i come into your market i'm going to fucking annihilate you like let me go to canada and have my 3pl in canada any brand that exists in canada they're done anybody in the uk okay, done.
32:46Any of these companies, even Australia, like we come to Australia and we put our marketing and systems and operations in place. Like I'm confident in our ability to take over the market. So like you can copy me and do whatever you want. Drake said at one time, he's like, it's all fun and games until I want to play too. Like I want to go play in those markets now. Like let's play that game because you copied me. So now it's only fair that I come into your market and I do what I want to do in America. So I think it's like not to be pissed off. I take it is it's flattering in a way because it means that we're doing something right.
33:17Because I've taken, I would be lying to you if I said that like, I don't take inspiration from other brands or I don't take inspiration from what people have done before me. You have to look at the writing on the wall. Like the dinosaur marketing is dead. You have to look at what works. We look at videos from, I'm partnering with a goalie. They're a vitamin brand. They're huge. They have cracked the code with influencers and UGC creators. They're the only brand in the world that have more influencers than comfort. They're a vitamin brand, lower price point. I'm friends with the owner, D, great guy.
33:49We're doing a collab with them. He's going to teach me stuff. They just broke into the Spanish market. I'm going to look at how we do that. If I would be lying, if I said like, I wasn't so overly intrigued by what they're doing and I want to learn it because the one superpower that entrepreneurs want to learn is like, if you teach, like Davey taught me stuff, right in the beginning and then i just became a professional at it if you can teach me something my goal is to try to leapfrog you like i want to learn what worked really well for your company and then i want to become better than you at it and that's the goal you want to just be the best you can be right like if i want to get look good in the gym remind me we're never having any conversations you might you might take me no dude listen i mean if i want to look good in the gym I'm like, after this, we're going to Equinox and we're going to work out.
34:37Like, fuck that. I wore an oversized shirt for a reason today. So I think it's like, you got to be humble and you have to understand like, you can't have ego attached to it. Like, I want to learn. I know nothing. I want to learn from people who are better than me. I never want to be the smartest guy in the room ever. And I think that, yeah, like it doesn't bother me. I think it's just maybe I'll learn something from them. maybe they'll crush it in the uk and i'll be like oh this is what the inflection point was in the brain this is why they started crushing it out there okay i think this is why a lot of younger people tend to have more success than the older people in the game because the older entrepreneurs are very set in their ways and they think they know it all whereas the younger people i think are just more open to trying new things and changing and you know accepting that they might be wrong and there's more to learn yeah you i mean i like i said i learned from that 16 year old that goes to the tea shop.
35:32Like, dude, my brother, my little brother's 22. He teaches me shit all the time. I'm like, this is happening because you want to have your ear. Like you want to have the ear of like the younger generation, you know, like it's the same thing with like, when we sell the clothing, it's like, if you look at comfort, if you look at white Fox, you know, white Fox, if you look at white Fox, they have a chokehold on high school and middle schoolers. That was their bread and butter. Everybody in high school wanted to wear white Fox study with the big puff print on the back. Now comfort is starting to creep in, in America.
36:02It's white Fox and comfort. And that's it. Those are the two brands in high schools and middle schools that everybody's wearing. So if I would be lying to you, if I didn't like go look at white Fox and say like, how did they go do this? Like they're killing it. You know, they did half, I think they did half, half a billion last year. Like that's a huge brand. So you're figuring something out and their marketing is not even geared towards their hoodies yet they sell so many of them so it's like we have to figure out how did that happen why did it happen they did a different strategy they worked with like bigger influencers like very pretty um influencers that have bigger followings and they would just have them be partners almost like a fashion of a partner and then they would just have every girl that would look up to these people seeing that they're a partner with white fox and then all of a sudden everyone's seeing it in school and then it's like monkey see monkey do it's a very good play and it worked works for fashion over too that's another way to kind of scale your brand too without micros so at the moment you're predominantly in the u.s yes almost all okay so you basically you crack the hardest market which is great do you have any physical stores was all online that's next we're doing retail and international expansion we'll be in the uk next year we'll be in uh we'll have we ship to canada now but we'll have a warehouse facility in Canada.
37:22If I'm living in the UK, I can't even buy it right now. You could buy it, yes, but there's like the whole tariff thing was a little bit hard and then customs was a little bit hard. The whole goal is if you don't want to pay tax duties, the shipping to get all of that in is very expensive. So sometimes it's the cost of the product in shipping and that doesn't make sense. So we have like, I would say we have like maybe 50 ,000 customers in the UK, but like we don't ship a lot because it's just so expensive for them, you know, but until we're going to, you know, creep into those markets. A lot of people also do this thing where they ship out of China, uh, worldwide and they don't put warehousing in those countries.
38:05They just ship to those countries and then they get it like a pulse check. They're like, oh, does the UK like our products? Okay. They do. All right. Now let's go put it in. It mitigates a lot of risk. we're not going to do that because we already have some data that it will do well but like for a brand that like is watching this that's like you know i want to go international and they're a china-based manufactured product you just get a 3pl in china and you just ship to all these countries because the goal for us is like how do we take like 30 million a year from sweden how do we take you know 20 million a year from switzerland how do we take you know 20 million a year from norway like how do you get into these markets and creep in and start taking some some market share yeah because like fashion can differ a little bit the culture can differ a little bit we want to go to the cold places you know we want to be well yeah i want to be in a place where it's cold all the time that gives me a better opportunity to sell to a customer yeah you know in the u.s we've defied seasonality yeah we've somehow figured it out that like it doesn't matter if it's the middle of summer like we could beat our q4 numbers last year in summer like that is very unlikely and it's and we weren't even assuming that would happen this year if i told you like what we did last month i thought we would do i'd be lying to you i was like there's no fucking way yeah yeah but so with this strategy of expansion i guess probably a better conversation to revisit in a couple years once it's been successfully implemented but at this stage having not yet done it yet how what's your game plan partnering up with someone or yeah probably like probably like for when it comes to the international side it's it's tricky um because there's different accents and you know you don't want you want to make sure that you're buying from somebody that you know usually that you buy from someone that's from there so what we want to do is like go to the UK and get all UK based creators and then just duplicate what we did in America here.
40:02So we think that like, if we go to the UK, if we go to Australia, if we go to Canada, um, and then if we, we really want to go into Europe, like those, like Germany is a very, like, it's very good for fashion. And like a lot of people buy, like, there's a lot of brands that I know that have sold in Germany that have crushed it. So we're like, we're looking towards certain places in particular. And like the game plan is just like duplicate what we've done here, but over there and then like look at the mannerisms and the way that consumers buy products in those countries and then just kind of mimic that yeah yeah so when you when you're looking i guess you're probably not doing as much as you used to but when you're looking to collaborate with creators what are like some of the top things that you would look for i guess you would scan their feed their pages looking aesthetic their style of content and videos is like okay this this can work maybe there's a certain look they need to have i don't know like so first of all who would you how do you go about choosing and then second of all what's the approach so the way that i look at it is like when when we work with creators following is irrelevant that the follower count does not matter especially now like it's doesn't matter you're not even seeing who you follow anymore yeah it's like it's literally dependent upon the content and then the algorithm will decide shall we show this to this amount of people let's just show it to everyone 100 % so we look at like um we look at really the aesthetic and the personality that's it so the aesthetic is where do you film your videos is the lighting good do you understand lighting properly do you um now do you have a sense of fashion and style and then the other piece is like, how are you well-spoken?
41:50Are you comfortable on camera? Are you always doing dancing or are you talking because you feel confident talking to your followers? Now we have worked with creators that were really not confident in the beginning talking to the camera. So they would just do voiceovers. So they would, you know, try on the product and then they would just voice over the whole time and it was easier for them. But my goal is like, when you're talking to somebody, it's way more authentic and it feels more personal opposed to like me doing like a bunch of things and then voiceover and what i'm doing um so we really like to look at people that are comfortable in their own skin and want to make content where they're talking about their experience with the brand so those are all that i look for like you said there's a correlation between more the more they talk the more trust they have with their followers yeah i think the more they talk the more that it becomes like you and i talking like i told you i used to be nervous on podcasts i used to like say oh did i say that right or did i did i slur my word or you know people do that and I can't edit that.
42:48I mean, we could, if we messed up on this podcast, but like people there, like a lot of the time they're making live content, especially if they're live streaming, which is the future of content in China, they made, there was a guy that made$2 billion in 12 hours of live streaming or 14 hours of live streaming. So you did 2 billion in revenue in 14 hours. Companies don't even do 2 billion ever. Like the biggest companies in the world may never hit 2 billion. You know, so it's like for you to do 2 billion in fucking revenue in 14 hours. Yeah. That guy's selling comfort. Yeah. Yeah. I want that guy.
43:20Yeah. I want to, yeah. I'm going to hold that guy hostage. So like, you know, you've, and China's five years ahead of us, you know, they, they, they adopted, uh, live shopping and TikTok shops way earlier than we did in America. So, and then the same thing is going to happen in Australia. It comes out in Australia this year. What's going to happen there? Company like us can come into Australia when the product launches and will annihilate the competition because we have more time understanding the way that TikTok shop works and they're brand new, they're babies. So for China, it's like they've already, we already have to look at like, what did, what worked there?
43:57And then how is that going to follow suit? TikTok is already preparing to do live streaming here. So live streaming is you can't edit that out. When you're talking on the camera, you have to be 100 % your authentic self. If you mess up, make a joke out of it, Like really catch yourself and be yourself. That's the people that we want because those are the people that when they make content, they're not going to be upset when they don't have success right away. Yeah. Our creators make an average of between three to seven videos a day. Okay. So three to seven videos uploaded a day that run on all channels.
44:30So they upload it on TikTok and it goes on every other channel we advertise on. So they're getting a ton of different cracks at a successful video. And then we do that across two brands. is this is this on their platforms their pages on different yeah so it's called spark ads so we do like like you'll post right and then i'll take your ad and i'll upload it in my back end and then i'll put paid ads behind your video yeah so it's like whitelisting on meta yeah so like we do that on meta too with like certain people and it crushes usually on meta we'll use like a bigger name because people will recognize the name but i have people on meta that i just do whitelisting with that do 15 20k a week like it's just once you figure out what works and the scalability of the content and like we talked about earlier like there will be like points in the business where you're scaling and the ads die out once you find like an ad that can like sustain that amount of spend you you're good yeah i thought you were against working with bigger influence yes so i'm against working with bigger i was against working with bigger influencers for two reasons one reason is a lot of the time they're like pre-Madonna's.
45:39And then the other thing is like their manager wants to talk to you or this is my rate or I don't give a fuck. So the bigger people that I work with, like even if I - There's no guarantee that it'll work as well. Correct. That's why we didn't do it. That was the only reason why I was against it. It wasn't like I like have like a hatred for like people that like made it on social media. I love it. I work with some huge creators, but only on whitelisting and only on meta because I know that like their following can correlate to higher sales but i only pay them commission so now that the brand is where it is like in the beginning i wouldn't recommend this yeah um but once a brand has a name and it's scaling i have my buddy you met josh goldie yeah yeah josh uh he was out with like josh mooney and those guys so josh makes content he has like what 400 000 followers on instagram yeah he makes money every week he makes content and then we'll have like jen selter who is out of the original, the original OG makes content for us.
46:3813 million followers. Like it doesn't matter. Um, you know, we work with some of the bigger names, but like you'd be surprised. Like sometimes you could get someone that has no following that just makes better content and they win. So we try to do both, but, um, yeah, I would say like we, yeah, we whitelist or spark ad on Tik TOK, everybody's content. And then we'll take that content. They'll upload it to a Google drive and then we'll have my media buyers go in and take those ads and then we'll run them across all channels so that's the way that we do it what have you noticed and what direction do you see all these different platforms going in because i would imagine you kind of have to have a different approach for each platform and how do you decide how much attention or how many of the creators that you find on specific platforms like you you must know now with all the tracking and everything where the larger percentage of the revenue is coming from like for example tiktok shop if a large chunk of that is on tiktok then it would make more sense okay maybe we double down on tiktok yeah which of the social media platforms are maybe not meta meta is meta is way this is instagram and facebook yeah instagram and facebook are always going to be for at least the next five years the way that brands at scale can get can make more money like tiktok you're capped, even though you're not, you are, uh, there's still beta.
48:02Their ad platforms are not amazing yet. They're, they're not there yet. TikTok shops has a lot of flaws, a lot of issues, a lot of glitches. Um, their algorithm is not perfect. It changes. Uh, there's a lot of problems with the backend. So I would say like you're maxed out on TikTok shops. If you want to be profitable, you get maxed out pretty like we like maybe, maybe a hundred million a year we get maxed out at with comfort but the halo effect to other channels is great and then on top of that like meta you can scale infinite yeah you could literally scale i i'm gonna like q4 we're gonna spend like a probably like a million a day on just meta um meta has that capability if i spent a million a day on tiktok i'd lose a shit ton of money yeah yeah you just do like meta will always be the gold standard of advertising tiktok shops would be where i would start if i was starting over tomorrow, I would put my brand on TikTok shops because I can get traction and I could become like this, you know, one video goes viral and all of a sudden your business has some sales and then that gives you a track record.
49:04And then you find ways to perfect your product and you get consumer feedback. Like I would start there. Um, and also like, it's all in app, your website could be shit, but if you're have a TikTok shop listing, you could be fine. Website sales are way harder. there's way more that goes into it you know so yeah i would say meta definitely is like the way to go for sure have you found it hard to be quite disciplined and stick with the core products within comfort and you know instead of trying to experiment with like oh let's try and do like all these different yeah yeah because i have a swimwear brand i mean it's like minuscule compared to your brand but i remember i'd experimented with the it's probably men's okay and i was like oh why don't i try bikinis tried bikinis disaster like just i needed a completely different approach to try and sell bikinis versus selling swim shorts yeah so like have you ever thought about trying to sell different things or you're like no let's just yeah yeah we have we got into blankets which was like you know different but it worked um there's things that i feel like i know would work ironically i feel like actually swims like bikinis for you would work um i think that we could actually get that to work yeah but like if you were like selling men shorts and then all of a sudden you you came out with hoodies it's like why are you you're you're you're doing bathing suits why are you going into hoodies or why are you selling like you know why are you selling like something that's very like left field, like, whoa, why did you do that?
50:38I have ideas, but I'm also crazy. Like I've, I like, I like to do weird shit and like, see if it works, you know, like, but my team now is like, no, it used to be me and I could kind of just do what I wanted. Now my team's like, are you out of your fucking mind? And I'm like, like, we want to come out with this hoodie where you can put all your snacks. Like it's like snack, it's a snacks hoodie. and we want to do advertisers of people going to the movie theater and you know how like you would hide snacks to get to the movie theater so we would do that and then it's like that's cool like to me it's like we could use it as like when you want a snack on the plane or we might do a snacks hoodie like with an inflatable hood you know we may do some fun stuff like that where like we're very different but we're also using things that we know have worked in the market like look Gap just did it but there was brands before Gap that did it so maybe we try that with like our own little twist on it to make it more enticing for somebody at a way better price point.
51:32Those are things that I would get involved in, but it's like, we're coming out with stuff that has no, a lot of the stuff we do has no data. Like the eye mask hoodie really had no data. Um, so you don't know how it's going to work. It's just all marketing at the end of the day. And the product has to be great when they get it. You don't want to like ever have it where it's like the marketing is great. The product shit, they get the product and they're like, wow, I fell for the marketing. Fuck this company. You don't want to do that, you know, cause that, that will kill your brand right away. Cause word of mouth travels faster than anything else but like yeah there's been times where i've thought about things like uh you know we're getting into like more like everyday wear like uh like men's tees yeah um i i think it will do good but i don't believe it's going to replace hoodies but is it a risk yeah you're breaking more into like you're breaking more into like a one-stop shop for all clothing opposed to like just being like known for one key product yeah you know have you ever had any of your creators think oh i'm making quite a bit of money off this why don't i go and start my own company actually no um i think they you know it's interesting they know me well enough uh they're on calls with me every week yeah they've watched me like they've watched what it took to get here and they watch how stressed out i was and i think they see the stress and they know hard I work and they know how difficult it is.
52:51Because for me, I sacrificed all of my 20s. I'm 29. I sacrificed every single day of my 20s, 12 hour days, no days off, no vacations, nothing to build this shit. So like, if that's the life you want, I like will say, go fucking do it. I'm the first person that's going to say, try it, you know, but I don't know who really wants that. You know, look at your life too, dude. Like you've built something incredible. I know that, you know we don't really know each other too well before this but i've i've heard about you and i know your work ethic is unbelievable it's like how do you you know think about if we knew the journey we would be on before we started like if we could feel that emotion and that pain that we felt on this journey imagine if they put it all in a bottle and you drank all of it right before you started yeah some people would think twice um and i think that's very it's an interesting kind of thought to have yeah i made a video on that my latest youtube video was about the lonely chapter about how you with a lot of these entrepreneurs and craze whatever it might be that you go through a period that just sucks yeah where a lot of time you're kind of you're on your own in a sense yeah because you just have to kind of hide away get everything if it's the start of the business you're almost doing everything at the beginning yeah and there's literally no time for doing anything else.
54:08Yeah. Until you're like, okay, maybe I'll start, you know, letting other people have some control of the company and hiring people. I'm surprised you did just three people for so long. Dude, it was because you know what, there was a fear of delegation. Yeah. I was nervous to let go of the reins because I didn't want to, I thought that I did it the best. I was wrong. There's people that are superior to me in certain levels of the business. my CFO is, I don't even, I failed math every year in high school. How the fuck do I know if we're profitable? Like I know money comes in the bank and I know that we're spending X amount, but like when you look at working capital and product and looking to buy for four or five months down the road, I would have, the company would have failed.
54:53This is conversations I had with Davey, my COO plans inventory. I don't know how to do that. You know, my head of product, my VP of product, like they're unbelievable. They know how to work with manufacturers in ways that I don't know how. Now there's things that I know that they don't, that I could teach them, but that's the, that's the beauty of being a founder. I can look at everybody and I'm still me, right? Like I'm still the guy, like you come to me when you have the great idea and I'm the one that can kind of help you with that idea. And I have had to gone through, I've gone through so much emotion and so much growth and so much fuck ups that like, there's not something that I really haven't seen.
55:28So if you have this idea or if you're dealing with this problem in the business, I'm there to help you. But for me to say that I could do all of your jobs would just be, that's blasphemy. You just can't do that. So I think, yeah, that's why we ran so slim for so long. Even now we're a very slim team. We got like 40 people. What's your thoughts on hiring someone in-house versus working with an agency? I hate agencies. I would never recommend to work with an agency ever. But do you still work with agencies? No. okay so you have no no we did you no i'm sorry in the past did you yeah yeah we well not a lot but we did a couple times but like agencies never care do they just don't know they don't give a shit they care about the money they don't care about the brand because they're working with loads of other brands and it's like whatever as long as we get paid the reason why i can sit here and take this podcast with you is because i trust that my team loves my business as much as i do if they don't have that passion and drive and fire to be great then like the agency is not going to have that emotional attachment to the business the way your employees do because i make all my employees watch the law of attraction i make them all watch uh certain things and i make them understand certain emotions and i always reiterate the goal like um the energy has to be infectious they have to really feel like they know what they're doing every day and what the end goal is they can never feel clouded.
56:57Agencies are never going to give you that much time where they understand your business model that like, you know, they're just, because remember the founder of that company is very passionate about his agency. He's not very passionate about the business. So it's a little bit different. But I would say, yeah, hiring in-house is the key. If you could hire in-house all day, every day, because you build community and culture within the company. I haven't had to fire anybody. That's pretty good. actually I like you really hate difficult conversations we fired one person we gave him like a week yeah he would dude in the interview he was killer and then we had to fire him you know we just weren't aligned nothing against him but like when we hire like we hire we literally ask people we're like you know this is a startup right like you know that you're gonna not work a nine to five like you know like you're gonna live this fucking company and they're like yes so those people bought in and i've had to have some serious conversations with some people that work here but like in the beginning and then like once we had like a meeting of the minds they're like the best person to work with in the world yeah you have those hard talks early on yeah not when it's too late and the business is already already fucked are they all in miami the team no they're everywhere so we're all remote we have no headquarters uh even though la like my my chief of revenue and growth she purposely hires she's probably gonna watch this podcast she hires everybody in la so that like whenever the time comes that we want to have an office like she's like doesn't have to travel so she wants everybody to be in los angeles so like that's where most of my team is we have miami new york la and then some people like sprinkled like across the country okay so it's a lot of group calls and zoom and stuff there's a zoom call probably going on right now Like every day, every other hour, uh, and, and everyone's held very accountable in the beginning.
58:49You have to almost not micromanage, but you have to like, let people know that you're watching until they know that you're always watching. And then they just do the right thing. Even when you're not, you know, cause you gotta be careful when you hire, especially when you don't have a shit ton of money and you're like, everything that you're doing is like crucial to the brand. Like the brand could die. and then you were hiring this person that's getting paid 200 grand a year, got to make sure that they're actually, they're making you money, not losing, you know, you're not costing you. So what are you doing on a day-to-day basis?
59:21I don't think I actually have heard from a previous podcast what it is that a typical day would look like for you. Day-to-day is putting out a ton of fires. Like it's never the same thing. It used to be the same thing. I would go, I would have like eight tabs open on my computer. I'd go through every day the same thing. Now it's more like, okay, I got a call from this person. This is a problem. We have to fix this. Oh, we have this issue here. Or, oh, we have this new product that's not picking up as much as we want. How do we build a game plan around it? Like it's more assisting the team. I'm really like working for them now.
59:54That's the crazy part. It goes from like you're hiring and they're working for you. And then it comes to you work for them because they're going to need you in every single thing to like approve and or help with like big risk. so that's that's really it like the day-to-day varies you know you try to give yourself a lot of time um but you just get called into everything and there is no off you know like 10 o 'clock at night you could get a phone call from someone in la at seven o 'clock and they're like i need you you're there you know you so are you giving yourself any time to like have a vacation or you just if i go on vacation i work yeah you know but maybe when i exit uh we'll have some fun with that have you got you got a target number i imagine yeah yeah i think we'll take comfort to a billion next year nice yeah i think it's still all yours yeah yeah yeah so uh where can people find you my instagram is it's hudson i-t-s-h-u-d-s-o-n i don't have tiktok so just instagram yes no youtube yet no youtube yet no not yet soon yeah nice thank you very much for watching guys see you in the next one
From the publisher
Produced by Hack You Media: pioneering a new category of content at the intersection of health performance, entrepreneurship & cognitive optimisation.
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Hudson Leogrande is the founder of Comfrt, a rapidly growing apparel brand that’s rethinking the way creators build businesses. In this episode, we unpack how he’s scaled a brand to seven figures while staying almost entirely behind the scenes, and why he believes most creators are missing the mark when it comes to monetisation.
Hudson shares hard-won lessons on building a product people actually want, crafting content that drives sales without being salesy, and the mindset shift from influencer to entrepreneur. A must-listen for anyone serious about turning creativity into real commerce.
00:00 Introduction
01:20 Kicking things off in NYC with viral hoodie success
04:40 Finding the right manufacturers and negotiating better terms
07:36 Using mentors and AI to scale smarter and faster
10:52 How AI automates content and creator approval
13:36 Purely White’s rise through Snapchat before pivoting to TikTok
16:45 How changes in algorithms nearly sank the business
19:17 What makes a good media buyer and how to track performance
22:26 Scripting influencer content and learning from audience behaviour
25:15 Street interviews and podcast clips as powerful ad formats
28:52 Getting copied by Gap and taking it as a compliment
32:11 Learning from global brands to prep for international expansion
36:10 Why Europe, UK, Canada and cold climates are next
39:34 What they look for in creators beyond follower count
42:05 Why talking on camera builds stronger consumer trust
47:09 TikTok Shops vs Meta for content and sales strategy
50:00 Testing blankets, tees, snack hoodies and what to avoid
53:25 Why top creators rarely leave to start their own brands
56:56 In-house hires over agencies and building a loyal team
60:00 What his day-to-day actually looks like as a founder
62:11 Scaling Nude while keeping focus on what’s working
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