Advice Line with Tim Ferriss

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2:30Hello and welcome to the advice line on how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz. This is the place where we help try to solve your business challenges. Each week, I'm joined by a legendary founder, a former guest on the show, who will help me try to help you. And if you're building something and you need advice, give us a call and you just might be the next guest on the show. Our number is 1-800-433-1298. Send us a one-minute message that tells us about your business and the issues or questions that you'd like help with. And you can also send us a voice memo at hibt at id.wondery.com. And make sure to tell us how to reach you.

3:05And also, don't forget to sign up for my newsletter. It's full of insights and ideas from some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs. You can sign up for free at gyros.com or on Substack. And we'll put all of this info in the podcast description. All right, let's get to it. Joining me this week is Tim Ferriss. He's an entrepreneur, investor, host of The Tim Ferriss Show and author of many books, including The 4-Hour Workweek. Tim, it's great to have you back on the show. Thanks for having me back. So nice to see you. Thank you, too. Tim, you were first on How I Built This Back in 2020. And as always, for anyone listening, if you haven't heard that episode, it's so good.

3:41We'll put a link to it in the episode description. So check it out. In that episode, Tim, we talked about your time as a student and learning Japanese and how you got a sales job out of college. And then you started your own business, a supplement company. And then, of course, you published your first book, which many people know you for, The 4-Hour Work Week. And initially, you couldn't even find a publisher. and the story of how you managed to use your blog to get it out there and sold millions of copies, became a massive bestseller. And of course, since then, you've written several other books.

4:10You've launched a massively successful podcast, which hit a billion downloads last year. Congratulations. Thank you. Give us a little bit of an update about what's been going on in your life since we last spoke. Well, there are a number of simultaneously running chapters. So supporting a lot of early stage science. And then I would say every three to four years, I want to try something completely off menu professionally to see what I can learn. The angel investing after the success of the first book, the podcast after the third book, et cetera. And now I've spent two years working on a card game.

4:51This is a tabletop analog game that is called Coyote that is now launching everywhere. I think part of your story for people who haven't heard it is that you kind of follow your passions and your interests in ways that have led you to do not just interesting things, but things that have been lucrative that have worked out. Like your podcast was just kind of a started out as just a fun little project, which turned into a real business. Now you're doing a card game, which is totally out of left field. Tell me about how what inspired this idea? So I tend to explore these off-menu, out-of-left-field things for skill development, learning, and new relationships.

5:38So the podcast, I launched it as a lark, but I basically wanted to ask myself, how could this win even if it fails? And I did the same thing with angel investing, just treated it as paying for a business degree. so in this particular case i'm looking at it the same way and it came about because i have seen in my audience as sorely needed as an antidote to digital malaise and loneliness which is in person social time yeah with something that is a light lift so how could i design a game that takes about two minutes to learn 10 minutes to play that can help people offset their screen time and all of the things that come with excessive screen time with family, with friends, that hopefully makes you a little bit smarter, right?

6:28And I wonder whether some of that came out of your own experience. Like, did you find yourself maybe at certain points in the last decade, just being, you know, a slave to screens, to your phone, to whatever was in front of you? Oh, for sure. This is basically creating what I want more of in my own life, certainly. For the last, I'd say, two, maybe three years, I've had no social media apps on my phone. because if you think you're going to use discipline to beat teams of computational neuroscientists and statisticians and computer scientists who have billions of dollars at stake in ensuring that they can overcome any type of resistance you have to using their program or platform compulsively, you're just bringing a butter knife to a gunfight.

7:25And I think it's uncontroversial when you look at scientific literature. These technologies, in fact, there are costs. So my thought is just offset it. Try to offset it a little bit. And I think that in-person still counts. We are not evolved for two-dimensional screens at 18 inches 10 hours a day. That is not what we're evolved to handle at all. but uh i really think that there is a quality of life value to in person and we see some countervailing trends so for instance in new york city these massive game nights in person have become a big thing running clubs people getting off of dating apps i think that at the very least you know micro dosing analog is a good idea yeah i agree with you i mean it's We just had a there's a crisis in attention.

8:21And this this is relevant for entrepreneurs, right? Because I think many of the entrepreneurs I interview on this show also have multiple interests. I mean, their their passion might be their business or the thing they started. But I think that in many examples, the sort of the underlying foundation for their success has to do with being interested in lots of different things. And I wonder how you find those things. I would say that I just I throw a lot against the wall. And part of the reason that I do many different things, by the way, some of them have been dead ends and failures. But if you look at, say, the angel investing, it's still going.

8:59You look at the podcast, it's still going. And these are things that provide energy and recharge the batteries. So the energy that you might get from playing a game, spending time with two particular friends, you can transfer that to everything else that you do. and that's part of the reason why I think a lot of startup founders in particular could benefit from a little bit of identity diversification if your entire identity and self-worth is wrapped up in your company there are too many factors outside of your control that can give you a real curveball type of damage and I just know dozens of founders where if they have a bad quarter or they have a bad year.

9:41They feel like a failure. And for that reason, having a few concurrent projects allows you to make progress in other areas to offset lack of progress in another. And then you just, you're like, okay, this is the one out of 20 that seems to get me super excited for some reason. Let me just follow that scent trail and see where it goes. I love that. All All right, Tim, let's go ahead and bring in our first caller. Are you ready? I'm ready. All right. Hello, caller. Welcome to the advice line. You're on with Tim Ferriss. Tell us your name, where you're calling from, and just one quick line about your business.

10:17Hi, Guy. Hi, Tim. Hi. I'm Lauren Menard. I'm usually based in San Francisco, actually, but I'm in my hometown in Beekmantown, New York right now. I'm the CEO and founder of Gob, and we are on a mission to reinvent single-use personal care products that disappear after you use them, as they should. All right. So what's your product? Our first product is a single-use foam earplug made entirely out of mycelium. Which is for mushrooms. Yes. It's the root structure of a mushroom. Amazing. Congratulations. Thanks for calling in. So Lauren, the products that you have now, they're earplugs, like regular earplugs, except I guess, and I've always wondered this because I've used earplugs to lots of people.

10:57You throw them away and they're probably mainly plastic. Yours, what, they biodegrade? Yeah. So normal foam earplugs, they're all made out of pure petroleum. They're polyurethane or PVC, and they're really bad for you and the planet. And ours are bioengineered material foam that's actually biofabricated. It's grown into its form. Wow. And how did nobody ever think of this before? You know, that's exactly why I started the company, Guy. When I had the idea, I was like, why has no one done this yet? Yeah. Tell me how you came up with this. Are you an engineer by background or tell me a little bit about what you were doing before?

11:39So I'm an industrial designer. I was running a design agency. I thought that was going to be the rest of my life, working with large Fortune 500 companies, helping them bridge the gap between mass manufacturing and better materials. And you launched the business when? When did you launch with Gob? Just the middle of March this year. Wow. And tell me a little bit about how you're doing so far. I mean, you're selling mainly to who and what kind of attraction are you seeing? Yeah, so we sell directly on our website currently and also in a number of music venues. And that's a bit about like why I'm here and asking you a question.

12:15Go ahead, Lach. What's your question? So we're really lucky to be gaining mega traction in the live event space with actually a national partnership with a massive company that owns many venues. And at the same time, we're growing a really strong direct-to-consumer customer base for sleep. So my question, and I'd love both of your advice, is around how to successfully scale two very different verticals simultaneously without losing focus. All right. Awesome questions. I'm going to bring Tim Ferriss in. Tim, questions maybe for Lauren or thoughts about her question? Lauren, if you had to focus on, say, the venues or the DTC.

13:02Oh, gosh. Which right now, let's just say you had to make a decision. Which way would you go and why? Oh, that's really tough because on the sleep side of things, we're getting customer feedback. We're getting a lot of rave reviews. I feel like we're really finding that need and we're meeting that need. On the venue side of things, however, we have access to guaranteed eyeballs. thousands, sometimes tens of thousands in a night. And basically, we're meeting people in these cultural emotional moments. And Tim, you were mentioning IRL experiences. That's where people really connect with brands. So that's why I'm so torn.

13:43Guy, do you mind if I riff for a second? Yeah, please. Okay. I would actually be curious to know if you think it could make sense to build up your coffers and generate a nice, healthy, reliable stretch of income with the music venues. And that puts you in a position to experiment with different ways of acquiring customers on the D to C side. And then you can make an informed decision based on at least some math and history, which way you want to go. Do you have any feelings on where you want to go with this company for yourself? Do you want to be some type of investor-backed company, or do you want to maintain control and remain private?

14:34Great question. So we are actually investor-backed. We raised a pre-seed last year of a million and I'm currently raising our seed on a safe note. So we do have that outside investment, but basically because my dream and my vision of this company is to build it into a new category. And I intend to find these kind of forgotten about single-use personal care products and adopt biomaterials that can meet the need, right? And because of the nature of biomaterials, There needs to be a little bit of R &D that requires some funding. So basically, that's why I've had to do that thus far. But I intend to build this into a very large company.

15:19I want to take on 3M. I'm an ambitious person. I know 3M. Yeah, I can tell. All right. I want to pass it over to Guy because I feel like I'm hogging the mic here. No, no. This is great, Lauren. I'm curious, with AEG, how does that relationship or how will it work? Will they sell the earplugs at their concerts? Yeah, so we pay a marketing fee or sponsorship fee to be there for the full year at each venue. And we keep 100 % of the revenue. And we sell both at concessions. So we have these little light boxes near all the cans of drinks. And we also have gob green bright vending machines. Right. Okay.

15:58Are you able to work to make independent deals with other music festivals or are you exclusively tied in with AEG now? We are their exclusive hearing protection, but we are not exclusive. We can definitely work with other venues. One of the things I think, of course, where you are in San Francisco, outside lands, one of the biggest festivals where people would be more receptive to really listening and hearing about the story. But the other thing I keep thinking about is airlines, where people have time to really look at a package and open, particularly in first class when they get people get these kits in first class and they get a card with all the information about the products in there.

16:40And to me, it seems like an opportunity to get this in front of a pretty influential group of people. Have you approached airlines? We have, yes. And we're definitely going down that path. It takes a bit of time. But what's interesting is some of our angel investors have invested because they have received those kits in business class. And everything is quote unquote sustainable, but they still have the little foam earplugs in the plastic pouch. So that's actually a fun fact that that's what actually led quite a few people to investing in my company. Tim? When you are, so you're planning on raising around in the not too distant future.

17:16What is the slide in that deck going to say for how we plan to use all your money, dear investors? The deck is together. So I've been pitching. I'm in it. I'm in it. So basically the funds will be used to set up operations. So we manufacture in the United States and we need to scale up our operations because right now we're building all of our product. in a tiny little space in San Francisco and definitely need to move that into a 3PL on the East Coast because that's where a lot of our traction is. And we're also using that capital, but I would be lying if I said I wasn't using some of it for marketing, right?

17:55Yeah, sure. But I do have a bit of an allergy these days to advertising heavily on social media because it's just like so competitive and saturated. So I want to use that in smart ways to do IRL experiences actually. Well, and also, I don't know if this is part of your deal, but if you have sponsorship deals, right, hopefully you have the ability, I don't know if this can be negotiated, but to use that brand on your website as exclusive hearing protection provider to X. I don't know if that's something you can finagle, but using that as part of your marketing for social credibility for some of the DTC stuff.

18:39Yeah. But what I'm hearing from you, Tim, is that this ability to capture eyeballs and capture people in real ways in these B2B spaces is maybe more impactful gaining trust of consumers. Is that what I'm hearing? I think that that's one way to approach it. I wouldn't say it's more effective writ large, but it may be more effective for your stage of funding, if that makes sense. Because if you were like, all right, we're going to go full D to C, you're going to need more than one person to do everything that will be required to make good use of investor funding, to make that count as, like you said, in a very competitive, certainly online landscape, which is why you lean towards IRL.

19:25But if you had the right employee or contractors for selling into more, let's just call it venue conglomerates that run multiple locations, you could actually get a lot done with one full-time, one part-time, or several part-time. And I think that's harder to do direct-to-consumer, if that makes sense. It does. That absolutely makes sense. I agree. I keep thinking about Monster Energy drinks, right? And what they did and how they scaled so quickly was they made a decision when they were launched. They were going to work with motocross and MMA and heavy metal concerts. And so they focused on those three areas, targeted those fans, those kinds of people.

20:10They were going after men who loved heavy metal music. And Monster became the number two bestselling energy drink very quickly. And it's interesting here because you've got the music venues, but it sounds like the sleep side is really where you see an opportunity. And I wonder whether there's an opportunity to partner with some of these brands that are known for sleep, you know, a certain mattress brand or something connected to sleep, if that's something that you want to move towards. Yeah, that's a really great thought. And it's complicated, right? Because the use cases that we're attracting are so opposite.

20:52And so those brand partnerships feel very important. And because they already have leverage and they already have an audience, which is really nice and good for us. And I will note you mentioned Monster Energy. I am very lucky to have just hired the ex-VP of cult indoctrination from Liquid Death. he just joined our team this week and he's going to be going out there and trying to get as many new brand partnerships as possible so i'll give him that task of looking more into the sleep side just as much as yeah the venue side awesome uh lauren what is the the retail price yeah so we sell our smallest skew which is two pairs for five dollars four pairs for ten and before us the venue was selling one single pair of foamies for between five to ten dollars oh yeah so we're right in there yeah in a really good position yeah there you go lauren menard the brand is called god birth congrats good luck keep us posted thank you so much what a pleasure all right thank you thanks lauren awesome thanks i love that idea it's a cool idea one earplug like hack that i used when my kids were little when they were babies we would go when we get on an airplane because you get an airplane with a baby and you almost oftentimes you'll sit next to somebody you could just tell they're just like oh my god i gotta sit next to this person with a baby for the next four hours and what we would do to disarm people is i would go to the people in the row in front and behind say hey i have a baby there's a chance he's gonna cry but i brought some earplugs and if anyone would like some please take some and i have the bag and i'd pass it around and nobody would ever take the earplugs but they would always be so nice to us because we just made that gesture.

22:40So hack for any new parent. I love that. Bring a bag of earplugs costs you$4 at CVS or $9.95 if you get gop. My buddy had an adjacent strategy, which was anybody want a vodka tonic, I'm buying everybody drinks. I love it. That's great. That's great. A little bit more expensive than earplugs, but yes. Not usually exclusive. All right. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with another caller and another round of advice. Stay with us. I'm Guy Roz, and you're listening to The Advice Line right here on How I Built This Lab.

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26:32Welcome back to the advice line on how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz and my guest today is entrepreneur and investor Tim Ferriss. And we are taking your calls. So hello. Hello, caller. Hi, my name is Emily. I own EB & Co, which is a women's accessories brand based out of Kansas City, Missouri. We specialize in sizeless gifting and we have mainly hair accessories and jewelry. We were founded in 2012 and yeah, a Midwest girly. Nice. Emily, welcome to the show. So EB & Co accessories, so like hair bands, like are you selling rings, earrings, bracelets? All of the above and more. Earrings are kind of the big hero products for us.

27:16I have a manufacturer in India that I work with that does hand beaded stuff. So we have some custom headbands, scrunchies, all the fun things that make an outfit look more finished when it's not. Awesome. And you have a brick and mortar store in Kansas City? I have two brick and mortar stores. I also wholesale at the airport and I rent booths inside other stores as well. And are most of your sales coming in through the store? Are you also selling online? Where are you seeing most of your revenue come in from? Well, last year was a bit of an outlier because Taylor Swift wore my ring and we went viral.

27:55She wore one of your rings. A bit of an outlier. What was the ring she was wearing? Well, it was Travis Kelsey themed, of course, guy. Oh, wow. It was his jersey, and we developed a relationship with Donna, and we kept gifting her things that were Travis Kelsey-themed that we created. Donna's his mom, right? Yeah, my apologies. Okay, I got you. Okay, so you made rings that had, like, his jersey was on the ring? Yep. Okay, I got you. So Taylor Swift wore one of your rings. Yeah, to the AFC Championship, which qualified them to go to the Super Bowl. So if you can imagine my mind being blown and then all of a sudden like that Shopify ding happening and it was just like ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

28:40Okay. Now I'm looking at it. Now I see it because you've got these rings with the jerseys. So you have Taylor Swift wore one of these rings and I imagine it had an impact on your sales, right? Yeah. So my sales went up 50 % from 2023 to 2024. Wow. Wow. Amazing. So yeah, we doubled and it's been bananas. It's been a wild ride. And I hope to give her the biggest bear hug someday. I bet. All right. So tell us what your question is for us today. So my question is, in 2024, my brick and mortar sales went up 37%. My wholesale orders went up over 300%. And so I'm trying to decide, even though the majority of my business, about 90 % of my revenue coming in is in that retail direct to consumer.