How Matt Kelly Built Spacegoods into £3 million D2C Brand in 16 Months

0:00Hello there and welcome to Hungry. Hungry is the podcast for the next wave of challenger food and drink brands looking to pour gasoline all over their growth. Each week we'll interview successful founders, thought leaders, unpack their lessons and provide you with the toolkit to scale super fast. I am Dan Pope, I am your host and without further ado, let's get started.

0:25Hi there guys, thank you so much for listening as always, it means the absolute world to me. Before we jump into this episode, I need a really big, big, big, big favour. I have pitched to some massive guests, humongous guests, and unfortunately they've said no because my subscriber count isn't big enough. Please, please, please just hit the subscribe button on Apple or Spotify or follow. Ultimately, it helps all of us bigger guests equals better conversations, equals hopefully better insights for you, which means you can scale hopefully faster with a little less stress as well. So please hit that subscribe button and yeah, enjoy this episode.

1:00Hey guys, absolutely puzzling that Mackenzie Jones are extending their partnership with Hungary. So gassed. In case you have been living under a rock, who are Mackenzie Jones? They are FMCG recruitment specialists. They work with some amazing brands, Lucky Saint, Real Superfoods, Hunter and Gatherer, and Purdy and Fig. Also with some of the big poppers, the big boys, the big G's, PepsiCo, Unilever, Campari. I've known Billy for Yonks, Paul for the last year. He's a top bro. They're just super kind and lovely. and they're just dedicated to our wonderful space, our wonderful industry of buccaneering challenge brands and that they're so much more than a recruitment business.

1:39Check out the podcast for them. It's epic. I've even introduced Mackenzie Jones to some amazing brands and they've really helped them scale. If you're looking to hire, just reach out to them, have a chin wear, get in touch, do yourself a favour. Thank you. There's a horror story in food and drink that absolutely no one talks about. It surreptitiously scurries through the underbelly causing throbbing headaches, wasted money, huge amounts of pain, dodgy barcodes. So many brands do the hard work. They create the product, name the brand, open the bank account, and then they cut bloody corners online and they order a dodgy barcode.

2:13Not sorting your barcodes out is like scoring your own goal before you've even laced your boots and got on the pitch. It's a souffle of aggro. You know, you've got to relabel products, waste time. I've even had a pal who lost a planet organic listing, so they had the wrong barcodes. but thankfully not all heroes wear capes gs1 uk are the superhero and they are the solution barcos from gs1 uk are globally recognized uh trusted and accepted by all retailers and marketplaces giving you the confidence to sell your products anytime anyplace anywhere but gs1 uk are so so much more than that they really are kind of a spring well of advice for buckingering brands 95 of their community are smes you can get free tickets to events and invites to talks big big picture opportunities who's like to plant organic boots and Sainsbury's and help you know with advice like exporting there's just so so so much and look don't say don't treat you there's an oh so special offer through the podcast get 20 % off your first year's membership with GS1 UK by using the code HUNGRY20 at checkout thank you so much hello there people and listeners of the Hungry podcast today I'm absolutely thrilled to welcome Matt Kelly onto the podcast Matt is a designer and an entrepreneur and founder of Space Goods.

3:29He's also the host of the Midnight Pod. Matt was the founder of a group of six to seven figure online DC websites and brands, which he set up after he dropped out of university from a burger bar. This was between 2017 and 2019. After that, he founded Midnight City, the jewellery brand, grew that to multi six figure business. He exited business in 2021. Seven figure, I should say. in 2021 he found a neon beach an led neon brand um which he created from his laptop turned that into 7 million um revenue with a team of 40 designers remote i'm so hopefully i've got that right as well mate um and is now the founder of space goods which is a wellness brand and a coffee replacement using mushrooms i'm actually loaded up on the stuff now and you guys very kindly sent me some it's it's a bagging product like I've been smashing it back um not getting the jitters from usual coffee and kind of a slow nice energy so thanks mate appreciate it all good so so what I love is your your your like your one sentence line I think it really speaks to me as well which is the creative pursuit of a creative pursuit of a greater self i really really like that and i think i try and live my life through that with this podcast with writing but i'd love to know like what in one sentence is your definition of creativity well firstly i'm really good at these cringe fucking romanticized slogans that somehow just stick but because i don't because i'm not trying to be a really boring brand i just stick them all over the product so like another why I came up with is nothing exists until you create it which was like the name of this 80s movie we made which I suppose is probably the most creative thing I've ever done I think was making that movie which is really pointless for marketing a DTC brand but kind of partly why I did it because most of marketing is actually really boring and sadly very plain so I suppose creativity I think it's just I think it's doing shit your own way and not just falling foul of copying what everyone else is doing which is what I do genuinely believe 99 % of brands do and actually probably ones that are way more successful than me also do a lot of that and maybe that makes a lot of sense because you're copying well you're copying and emulating things that work whereas at least with this brand I do genuinely think I've done something a bit different and and most brands in the space tend to lean one way you know the brown black white cream very literally vanilla whereas I've just tried to ruffle a few feathers and do it differently like it looks a bit illegal it's pink call it rainbow dust it's all a bit over the top and tongue-in-cheek which may be means it probably maybe I'm gonna have to pivot away from that if I want to scale it to where I'd like to I don't know maybe it's not mass market enough being so niche like visually but I suppose that is creativity to me it's like actually coming up with something that is objectively new and doing it in your own way to some extent and yeah I definitely haven't figured it all out but I think at least with the first product well our first main product I was it's pretty creative um and yeah yeah it it stands and i think what you so rightly said is it stands out i don't know where i've listened to quite a lot of podcasts and prep for this but you said our product stands out like a sore thumb in a good way and i think it's uh it is so when i when i saw the branding it is so different and the fact that in a holman bar at shelf as you say it's all fucking creams and bland and and this stands out so vividly i think a big part of from everyone i've interviewed is they say like a a brand is the extension of a formidable founder it's like the shadow of a formidable founder it's a david ogilvie quote what would you how what part of your soul has gone into that brand in this in this space goods yeah i think i've always been obsessed with like synth wave and pink lights like it's funny every flat i've ever lived in i've always been known as the guy that never has bright lights and at night time has 15 fucking purple or pink neon signs and i did used to have an led neon sign business which went very big and went very wrong which we can maybe get onto i don't know how much we're going to cover on that but that was one step in in in the direction of creating stuff that's pink and beautiful and i don't know i've always been into like movies and i i find most of life very mundane and quite difficult to deal with so maybe adding color and like i listen to a copious amount of music that's probably like really unhealthy i don't know what i'm trying to say like um i suppose it's the i've always felt drawn to a late night pink kind of aspirational romanticized aesthetic whether that's anything to do with mushrooms or not and then i just applied it to a product that i thought was interesting that i made for myself really um so arguably i'd be a better film director than i am like d2c founder even though i've never made a movie um but i've always just felt drawn to like cinematic shit and stuff that escapes reality to some extent like visually um i don't know if that makes any sense i probably sound like i it does and i like it because what you said there is you you're you're approaching this brand more like a film director i know you're not but like the input into the brand is so different from every other supplement product that it looks completely different do you know what i mean and i think so many people as you said every other brand looks the fucking same does the same fucking thing and it just looks it looks bland doesn't look an actual brand that stands out yeah what was what you said you listen to a copious amount of music what sort of music do you listen to and what sort of films do you watch with what sort of films have been the inspiration for the brand do you think i think when i'm working on brand stuff i mean i have a very eclectic taste in general but a lot of synthwave stuff so like i love a band called called the midnight which is maybe where i got the midnight pod from they're like a an la based like synthwave duo and the music i i use in the early film was actually like an instrumental from their shit i might get in trouble for using that but it's not exactly that famous so like stuff like that i love um i love bands like the 1975 i mean i like romantic shit basically stuff that makes me feel like I'm in a movie um in terms of actual movies I'm obsessed with horror films which is probably even the most horror films are shit I'm just obsessed with horror films like I have this idea of somehow doing a product campaign where I get to wear a prosthetic zombie outfit and somehow make that relevant to selling supplements so try to figure that one out um I got really into like the 80s aesthetic with the movie Drive with Ryan Gosling which is like 2011 11 i think um so anything that's like night time 80s aesthetic i would say um there's a theme here i'm just i think i was born in the wrong era but yeah where yeah i was gonna say where does that because it is a consistent uh theme across everything you've done from well in the research i've i've done right where would you say that comes from because you grew up in in york you grew up in like the north of england would you say that's got like an impact into how you came obsessed with like the razzle dazzle of la and the yeah i don't know i mean maybe i just always felt drawn to something that felt like really unrealistic and fantastical or whatever um because i had such just a normal kind of boring upbringing like most people just like middle class state school never saw anyone that really created anything i don't know that probably sounds really cynical but i always call myself like a a cynical optimist i don't know if i get that from being northern and always having a chip on my shoulder but then also wanting to create cool shit um also like i traveled a lot when i was like in my early 20s i was like a full-time nomad so i don't know if i got inspiration from that but like palm trees sunsets and shit i've always felt drawn to which is kind of ironic when i live in london which doesn't really have any of that ever um yeah i really don't know i've just always and i've always felt that and i've got a twin brother who's nothing like me who probably would never even think about these things so there's an argument that it was like nurture rather than nature and i don't know maybe i maybe i had an experience on mushrooms many years ago and maybe that altered my perception of the world but it's hard to define the because what what you've said is like like space goods is the kind of the first iteration or first product to launch and you you think is correct if I'm wrong here but that in micro dosing in the future will be something that you can eventually sell am I am I right in saying that if I've got that research right yeah you are that's where it all came from it came from i didn't sit down and go i want to build like a consumer supplement business like the initial idea was i think psilocybin and microdosing will be the like the biggest thing ever to happen in the wellness industry if it becomes legalized and it's probably going to take 10 to 20 years and it's probably going to be in a pharmaceutical setting before it's ever allowed to be sold d2c on a shopify website but that was like the the grand idea and i thought well this space and then mushrooms functional mushrooms not magic mushrooms it's kind of a first step in that direction and building a brand that looks a bit psychedelic and implies going down that route could be a cool way to build a product and i the actual idea for rainbow dust was i wanted to create a legal alternative to a psychedelic microdose so ingredients that collectively imitate the effects of a microdose that was my idea in other words it's a mushroom coffee right or a coffee without the anxiety is probably the most the friendliest way of describing it that the most easily understood but yeah it does feel similar to a psychedelic microdose which i've done many times myself um and i just created the product for me really um because obviously you can't sell class a drugs on the internet for very long at least i didn't plan on doing that so so i created a supplement that ultimately that's kind of how i thought about it and positioned it although you know there's there's a million problems that come with that because you can't even have the word psychedelics on your website if you want to run like instagram ads which is basically where i built the business so kind of frustratingly had to move away from that exciting like change the world narrative to just be like all right how the fuck do we sell more mushroom coffee well we probably have to position it as a coffee replacement or coffee upgrade which is what we do so yeah it started with the whole idea around psilocybin and psychedelics but i actually frustratingly can't really speak about that like customer facing because it just doesn't fly in terms of running ads which is how you build a supplement business so yeah i've had to be quite pragmatic about how i approach it because yeah i've got this grand vision of change the world with psilocybin but i also need to have customers and grow revenue and if you're going to have investors and so on they're probably not going to like you selling class a drugs on the internet so there's that's your that's your yeah there's a bit of an irony in it all that's your cynical optimism i think mate having the big grandiose vision of i think i think ultimately it's going to be a big from what i've read and listened to i know tim ferris is a big uh proponent of of micro dosing i know he's i think he's invested a shitload into it from what i've from what i gathered with some of these mushroom experiences um how would you say is there a specific mushroom experience which has unlocked your creative pursuit of the of the greater self because i've listened to again other podcasts where i think i listened to one with james smith or maybe it might have been chris williamson actually i don't know if you know those podcasters and they said they'd had these uh mushroom experiences and their like whole view of everything changed what's what's been that for you i'd like to say there was some really romantic specific time where that happened but I wouldn't even say that there has been um I mean I've definitely had many experiences on mushrooms over the years I've always thought it was very profound and much better than any of the other substances which people can legally consume on a daily basis i.e.

15:50alcohol which I think plagues a lot of our society even though I still drink it um but yeah I mean I couldn't pinpoint a specific time or experience I think it's just been a more a gradual intrigue and going down the rabbit hole of first I took mushrooms in Amsterdam years ago like a lot of people in truffle form and then I got interested in microdosing which for anyone that doesn't know is taking a sub-perceptual portion of a psychedelic substance to experience very subtle effects basically typically kind of easing depression anxiety helping people deal with certain shits that they couldn't otherwise deal with um so yeah I've had a few experiences but probably not as many as many people would think given i'm trying to spearhead like a global mushroom transformation i should probably go and do ayahuasca that i'd be more qualified to speak about this and run this brand but honestly yeah i've just done mushrooms a handful of times and always enjoyed it and then i've microdosed more regularly which i thought was very good um but yeah it's illegal so you can't really talk about it which is also a bit of a difficulty with this topic because so many people are doing it and it's a bit of a gray area but it's technically illegal even though it's not going to do any harm to anyone so yeah yeah sorry i think i've lost you there slightly no i think the well yeah as i say tim ferris has been like betting the house on it being the kind of the cure to all for for veterans coming back from the war for all of ptsd and stuff like that when you said it helps you work through shit that you couldn't work through otherwise how well the basic science of psychedelics and psilocybin in particular is that essentially allows your mind to break out of stuck thought patterns um that's kind of one way of putting it like if there's lines in the sand that you can't get rid of you know negative self-talk whatever it allows you to create nuance like neuroplasticity is essentially like the benefit of psychedelics which allows people to view things differently and think think about things differently um i guess for me like when my previous business fucked up which was the neon light one and i had to put it into administration in march 21 when i was 25 and didn't have any investors that was a fuckload of emotional pain to deal with and that's when i really got interested in microdosing for the first time and started doing it and i found it very helpful um because yeah i think that was probably the roughest experience a mid-twenties bootstrapped entrepreneur could go through and I've probably downplayed on a lot of my podcasts and so on and the first ever podcast I made was actually speaking about that experience which was very therapeutic and probably helpful but that was really when I went into the into the rabbit hole of microdosing and I guess kind of adaptogens and nootropics and ingredients for wellness more generally and that's ultimately why I got into this space and started building the business um i'd left my previous two businesses largely because one of them went tits up and i had to put it into administration and got bought out um but then also because i was going to move on to something anyway and do the next thing because i've always been a founder but i wanted to do something that was maybe a bit more positively impactful in the world rather than just selling fucking chinese necklaces forever which there's nothing wrong with that i know plenty of people that do that and it's potentially an even bigger market but at least with this i I feel like I'm creating something that is like net beneficial for society.

19:18And granted, it's only a mushroom coffee, some people would say, but I get messages every day saying, you know, people have cured their anxiety or, you know, it's helped their ADHD a lot and so on. So hi there guys. Super, super quick one. I write a weekly newsletter called Hungry Friday Feast. It goes live at 8am every Friday. I'm pouring my soul into this bad boy. It's probably my favourite creative ender I've ever done. I basically pick apart all the biggest lessons, all the biggest learnings from all the wonderful guests and throw it into a feast or a newsletter. We've got over 1 ,200 subscribers.

19:54Come and join the party. I'm going to put a link in the show notes. It's right at the top. Subscribe. And if you are already a subscriber, please just forward it on to a friend. Do the amount of favour. It would mean the world to me. Anyway, back to the old episode, boys and girls. as i say like i'm a coffee fiend i'll bang through so much coffee and i've been basically taking out two coffees a day and having this and it is it is just a smooth calm uh energy and it is it is a banging product and it does give you the creative impetus for sure just to click on that point in time and i think i know you've talked about it in loads of podcasts i don't want to butcher the point but i just think it's important for our listeners to get some context but you talked about that time in 21 when the business went tits up and i think there's two quotes you said you said i was ready to fucking kill myself as which is what you said on one podcast talking about that period and another podcast you said i was like a phoenix from the ashes and grow and like rose from the ashes and i think lots of that that will give a lot of people listening to this podcast power to realize that when you're when you're fucked on the floor you can get back up and you can keep going and they're never going to have to go through what you went through but just to give some context like what happened with with the sign business and how did it go pete tong and then we'll get on to how you you rose from the ashes yeah i mean very long story short went from doing like a million quid a month in sales from my kitchen entirely bootstrapped profitable going great but probably like a lot of businesses in 2020 because it was in 2020 when it grew and I was also running my my jewelry business at the same time so I had two businesses collectively doing about 1.2 million a month in revenue when I was 24 so like I hadn't raised a single penny of investment so going pretty well um yeah the long story short the neon one went tits up because a supplier ran off with loads of money they got paid up front essentially had gone bankrupt in the background because of covid and I hadn't had hadn't done my due diligence and had paid them too much money and very complicated supply chains were making b2b signs basically It was all sold online, but most of our customers were barbershops, people that wanted custom stuff.

22:08So everything was made to order. Massive A.V., very complicated product, huge shipping costs. Yeah, so it very quickly went from having over a million quid in the bank to being insolvent and not being able to pay fucking creditors. And loads of orders disappeared. I was talking three million quids worth of orders that didn't get delivered during peak season Q4 while I had a primetime TV ad campaign slot with ITB because we did a Love Island campaign, a Love Island collaboration campaign. So you kind of have to laugh at it now because it was absurdly big given that I was the only shareholder and had a team of people in the Philippines.

22:43I just thought it was normal because that's all I'd ever really known. It was like scaling online businesses. But that one just went too big, too quick and was built on pretty rocky foundations in hindsight. I didn't have any experience or expertise around me because, yeah, I've dropped out of the union and just started building shit on my laptop. thought um so yeah very quickly I would call it a real life MBA and learning how to deal with a business when it goes tits up and bringing in the fucking administrators and doing the process properly and customers getting their money back ultimately at the expense of my equity and mental health and then I worked for six months with the business that bought that business on a salary for the first time in my life a nice salary granted but a big like a big pay cut from what I was used to i guess um and then at the end of that period decided fuck this i want to do my own thing again sold my equity and that for a bit of money and then that was september 2021 um and for the first time i had a blank slate first time since i dropped out of uni i was like i don't actually have anything to work on right now so i started a podcast and started building this brand around that time basically um but it was incredibly rough and i'd be lying if i said i was actually over it even now like i still have fucking therapy going over that because there's still a lot that that I haven't probably come to peace with, to be honest, because it was financial fuckery, which I think is definitely worse when you don't come from money and you've worked your ass off for five years prior to get to the position to even be able to do that in the first place.

24:10I didn't have any money given to me ever. Do not come from Silver Spoon background, which, to be completely honest, a lot of founders do. I find particularly in the consumer product space in London, naming no names. But yeah, and then it was also just social media abuse. like I was getting death threats for like three months I had to change my phone number I just had to move where I lived it got that bad like I had the daily mail at my door threatening to expose me as a fraud even though the absolute opposite was the truth I had lost like over a million quid and didn't know how to pay back creditors that I had taken on debts from to try and solve the problems so yeah um it's pretty rough and yeah probably I definitely still have PTSD now like about the shit people said to me and made me feel like and i get ever since then i've probably been incredibly paranoid about you know the internet and what can go wrong but it's also given me a very thick skin i don't really think anything stresses me that much anymore because it's like fuck it i got through 2021 when i was two and a half stone heavier broke out my ex-girlfriend probably because of the the fucking shell of my former self that that made me become and yeah i don't know i just think even now i think there's a lot of talk about entrepreneurship it's about failure you know fall down get up again but like how many people saying that i've ever actually experienced a failure and i'm not talking about you can't get the business off the ground because you're a shit of selling stuff i mean building a massive business and then having it go wrong i think that's what that's an actual failure not like oh i can't sell my fucking crisp brand to tesco i've put three grand into it boohoo that's just you don't know what you're doing but failure when there's half a million instagram followers you've got two million quid in secured creditors at you know literally sending you letters and you've got fucking a dedicated facebook group with pictures of you as a child in because you've got some nutters on the internet that somehow think that's okay because they didn't get their product in time for christmas so yeah it was a a brutal combination of just like online abuse and financial fuckery and you know I'm long past that business now and I've started another one.

26:17Everyone tells me how successful it is. But yeah, there's a lot of pain that I've gone through, just in entrepreneurship in general, which every founder does, but also that business going wildly wrong and then having to start again from scratch. And yeah, it wasn't easy to dust myself off from that and go again. And I think my self-confidence has been eternally damaged from that, if I'm honest. but obviously I've just yeah I've managed to get up and do it again and I think I've got a much better business now but it's much fucking harder to start DTC brand now than it was even two three years ago and I can say that because I was doing it two three years ago and I was objectively worse at what I'm doing but it was way easier and I grew way quicker you know a lot of investors I speak to and so on tell me how amazing I'm doing now but I don't believe them because I was doing you know two three times the numbers back when I was 24 which is also something I'll probably never get over until i scale this business to 10 times what i've done in the past so i've definitely got a massive chip on my shoulder to outdo my previous self but it's just doing it in a much harder market um which maybe we can get on to but yeah yeah we're gonna that's 100 we're gonna explore that mate is how building you know d2c brand now versus versus 20 kind of i think 2019 was called the heyday period yeah as as you've said but what you've said there's super powerful and i think you're right like failure getting not getting his chris brand into tesco is not is not a failure like that's just a a knock is all it is but i think i've everyone i've interviewed this is a serious failure that has had like is people are trying to assassinate your character i think is what i've i've garnered yeah what you said i was ready to fucking kill myself like what was the worst specific moment during that hell period and what was the steps you took to like to beat to be the phoenix from the ashes do you know what i mean because i think that will help a lot of people who aren't going to go through anything anywhere near as hard as what you've gone through yeah i think there's like two two periods i can remember where i think it's like rock bottom and they're very different one of them was when i just knew i knew i knew it was kind of irreparable and i would ultimately lose the business and that was probably in like february 2021 and that was also around the time where i was literally having had to change my phone number because people were calling me a scammer and all this shit so it's pretty difficult to deal with but you just have to fucking get up and deal with it and then i think the second most difficult period was when i found myself in like october 2021 i actually have a video on my phone of me just filming it and being like this is the worst period of my life but i'll probably get past it whether i'll ever post that video anyway i don't know but i'd just broken up my ex-girlfriend which by the way it was never going to work anyway like i don't regret that but at the time it was fucking miserable because we were living together and so on so you know my business has disappeared i'm back to square one i'm like two and a half stone heavier than i was now or previous because i just became a fat fuck in hindsight because i just pleasure eating um stress eating so yeah but probably that um they jump out i was like two times i just thought fuck this this is really difficult and especially when you have nothing to work on um but then that's when I ultimately started working on the next thing um and then I got into like running and that really helped me end up running a really quick marathon and that became like this good story that I put on my youtube and so on um probably need another challenge like that because that definitely helped me get out I actually feel like I'm in a bit of a secondary rut right now to be honest maybe we can speak about that but yeah um I started working on the brand and I just literally wrote down like what what do I want to do next?

29:56I'm obviously going to start something because that's all I've ever known. Like I would literally rather jump off a bridge than work for someone else. As dramatic as that sounds, but it's literally how my mind works because it's all I've ever known. I think any true founder would say that and mean it, not just for dramatic effect. But yeah, then I guess I just fucking did it again. Came up with an idea and worked on it and made it a reality, which is a lot more work than it sounds saying that. But the fundamentals are, I decided what I was going to do and just started working on it. And it became a real product quite quickly.

30:29And then I started growing the business because I guess I knew how to grow a DTC business particularly. So I'd done it three times before at that point. What, just to give some context, I know you're open, you don't have to give the exact numbers, but what kind of revenue are you guys doing now with Space Goods? Yeah, I'll just tell you, we've done about three and a half million since we launched 16 months ago. It'll be about four million this calendar year, which is the first full calendar year. Yeah, I mean... And what split of that is D2? Because I know you've launched into Holland and Barrett.

31:02Yeah, it's really funny this. I'm going to get cancelled from the shit I'm going to say on this podcast. It's funny how everyone basically licks your arse for secondary retail, but it's literally... That was like a 30 grand order. It's like less than 1 % of revenue. But everyone's perception is, oh, you're the biggest brand in the world because you're in Holland and Barrett. I just find funny because no one gives a shit if you do 10 million D2C because they can't see your numbers. like when i was growing both my brands previously no one would have known about me as a founder at all even though i was probably doing twice the revenue of half the vc-backed startups in london and i didn't have any staff but because i wasn't on billboards or in holland and barrett or whatever it is no one would care and they just think oh this guy's just some fucking drop shipper do you know i mean so it's just funny i've i've talked about that different yeah i've talked a lot about that on this because my background is in in the retail space is is what i've worked i worked for a startup for five six years helped grow that and it was was going through that retail listing like as soon as you're in selfridges it's like fucking hell clap the batsman but it's like that may be 500 quid a month yeah people like find it so people are masturbating over you on on on socials like oh my god selfridges it don't get me wrong it's a sick store to be in but i think people get blinded in thinking that retail is is is the way it was the panacea to just make all build build a brand there's other ways okay so that's so that's great so three million four million this year that's firstly that's fucking sick that's unreal it takes a lot of time so congrats um and i honestly feel like it's a fucking tiny business i've done nothing in my life I speak to my therapist about this shit it's just like because my standards are so high and I think because I experienced such scale at a young age it's like until I'm doing 20 million I'll feel like an absolute miserable failure that's just the truth which is probably a very toxic painful trait to have but also probably a good one because I'd rather it be that way around than have raised five million be doing five million in revenue like a lot of brands that I could probably name but won't and think I'm the shit um whereas I guess because I come from an entirely bootstrap background like I did raise a bit of money for this brand which I can tell you about but wasn't like bc money or anything um so I'm comparing myself now to I guess easier times in sort of 2019 2020 when I was at peak scale with my previous businesses but also to a bootstrap business that had never raised a penny whereas now I've raised a bit of money and yeah I guess we are doing pretty well i mean there's a lot of vcs i'm speaking to and so on which i'm really unsure what to do about as well um but yeah so i just i probably don't give myself enough credit because everyone i speak to other founders particularly in this sort of space like supplements says that oh wow four million in like your first full calendar year working from a bedroom that's actually fucking amazing but i just don't think it is because i don't know because i've done bigger numbers before so like i i'm i'm not saying that to like put blow smoke on my ass because uh yeah i'm aware that it's like a decent sized business but yeah i just feel like i've achieved nothing with my life to be honest um and that's mad that's mad like and you're not the you're not the first probably exposing myself too much and i'll get some invested well no because i think i'm a nutter and we'll pull the plug on the town sheet but it is what it is well i i had that i've i have that with i go guys see a therapist as well like i used to be well like just partying was my sort of escape from that that negative self-talk and of course yeah sort of working working through it i'm actually taking trying to take well as of last week taking six weeks off the booze just to give a bit of a reset because it's just it was just ridiculous but it but it does in that moment of time soften that voice in your head and one of the things that i've sort of tried to do recently is i used to beat myself up so much that if i haven't achieved this like i've just hit 30 right as of like two weeks ago i was like i've got to achieve all these things by this age and i've just i i think actually sometimes goals for type a people who are so goals obsessed can actually be quite dangerous yeah honestly to be honest i thought i thought i'd have 30 million quid by now if you asked me when i was 20 yeah i don't so and i'm 27 and i get my problem as well sorry you can bring this back to actual shit you want to speak about because i'm very good at just rambling my problem and it's a blessing and a horrible problem is i have so many disgustingly successful friends that are self-made um you know like one of my best mates when i'm saying this he's like 24 and he's got a jewelry business called sanucci doing like 30 million in revenue and he's 24 and he founded it from scratch like and i've got my old flatmates running a shoe brand doing like 10 million plus in revenue my previous flatmates got a pet brand doing similar numbers like some of my investors are guys in their early 30s that built and sold brands for like multi-eight figures um so i'm like fuck i i feel like i'm doing absolutely nothing with my life but i guess if you compare i just don't that's the problem i have is i compare myself to the 0.01 percent which is good and bad but it's like going for your first fucking 5k run and comparing yourself to Elliot Kipchoge, you're always going to feel disappointed.

36:22But if you compare yourself to the average bloke that does the 5k park run and you're running like a 17 minute 5k, then you're probably doing all right. It just depends which way you look at it. It's how you look at it. I think with me, with therapy, it's all been about just perspective shifting. That's basically why I'm paying the bloke the fucking ape. Do you know what I mean? But I think what you're saying there is it's like two things. they always say like don't be the most clever person in the room is so if all your mates are like doing super well like that's sick because you're learning off them but then also the the tide the boats rise with the tide so i think i think it's just you're you're in a pond that is doing so so well that 0.001 percent that you're like beating yourself up do you know i mean yeah the in terms of so you said you're at another rut now yeah go on talk to me about that why yeah this is i feel like um it's definitely something i'm aware of now since my prefrontal cortex or whatever it is fully formed age 25 not 27 so i feel like i have a bit more perspective on the world i'm so i get so excited and i'm so good at zero to one i don't mean zero to a million in revenue i mean just like zero to one idea to business which i guess in my case has been zero to that first few million in revenue i find like really quite easy and and because i've done it so many times i i find i get really excited about creating new stuff and kind of that honeymoon period of a new business and then i get to where i'm at now with 16 months in or whatever it is which is still super early but for me it feels like a long time and i'm like ah fuck this is actually quite hard it's like i've kind of that initial turbo boost from newness has subsided and And now I'm like, ah, well, if I want this to get where I'm going, I need to probably spend at least another five years on it, which I am going to do.

38:17So I'm not, you know, I'm not saying I'm going to chop and change and start another fucking brand again, but even though that's what I did in the past. So I guess partly that, but then also partly think about a bit of a crossroads where I can have this kind of semi bootstrapped, I would call it bedroom size business where you're doing a few million in revenue, but you're never going to get looked at like a big acquirer because you're just too small, but you're also big enough to like have a nice lifestyle live in a nice central london flat have a decent car whatever but i've done all that before and it's not very exciting because i've done it all before so now it's like do i need to probably just put my balls on the line raise millions of vc capital like basically all the brands that have really scaled and like try and pump it to like 10x where we are now which to be honest is probably what i want to do what sorry to interrupt what what would you do with the vc money though what so what where would what would that enable you to do like where would you be spending that money well it's a lot of things i think retail is a massive part of it in product development for example i've got an rtd ready to do a canned version in development but minimums are massive it's always a risk doing a retail specific product when we don't have any retail listings apart from h &b so there's that side of things i think new markets is an obvious one um launching in germany netherlands you know europe then eventually america which is the obvious big one um but i guess beyond that it's just pumping more fucking marks and pumping more fucking money on marketing because if you're semi bootstrapped you know you have to watch every fucking pound a bit more whereas brands that go and raise millions and millions just say all right instagram here's 20 grand a day spend so because yeah i mean like if i had 10 million quid in the bank i'm absolutely certain i could get to like 50 million in revenue i'd just be spending a fuck load of money on ads and losing money which is what a lot of brands do um whereas when you're like when you're way less funded like i am compared to a lot of our competitors um you can't you can't spend 20 grand a day on instagram because you need to probably get a two and a half x return on that which doesn't really happen when you spend 20 grand a day at least not quickly so yeah um i guess it's just growing quicker it's not necessarily the only way to grow to like 30 million in revenue but i think you'd be hard pressed to find a cpg brand that's grown to like multi-eight figure revenue which seems to be the level you have to be at to have a strategic come and buy you for a revenue multiple which is probably the biggest opportunity to finally get rich um but yeah i think you'd be hard pressed to find one that's done that like bootstrapped um certainly a lot of the brands i look up to like you know trip wild cosmetics fuel grenade etc none of them have bootstrapped it um yeah arguably grenade did probably the longest of them all um but yeah it was also it's also a different time and all those brands launched pre-pandemic pre-iOS 14 pre-cax going up through the roof hi guys super super quick one so so excited look for years i've been badgering on about hungary the podcast you're probably bored to death thanks for putting up with me but hungary is also an agency and we look after one amazing brand called islands chocolate we've had a great time over the year we've won listings at load of wholesalers we've got milk and more we've got our first grocery listing coming very soon which is very very sick but what i'm thrilled to announce is hungary's merging with hc consulting um my boy harry clark and his wonderful team he's an absolute g they do brand strategy new business business and account management but why i really love working with harry and why we've got on so well over the last couple of months is harry was actually the founder of the boozy iceley brown pops so he's been in the trenches he's grafted his face off he's had the sleepless nights he's had the turmoil he's had the triumph he knows what it is to be a founder he is a founder and he's got a proven track record in grocery and out of home holy moly dips the gut stuff savile drinks remio gelato so if you're a brand and you're you're stuck you're looking for like new business help you're looking to scale drop us a message we'd love to chat thank you so much back to the old episode so jules the founder of grenades been on this podcast and all the co-founder and she was saying that the timing is everything and obviously there was that brand called quests nutrition yeah yes i remember them tom billio yeah tom billio and they'd followed that and they launched it in the uk and then she was like the timing was fucking unreal and we got kind of like and i genuinely think with this mushroom space this move away from coffee like the timing is is right because it is bigger in the in the states i think you're on to a winner there but she said to me and quite a few people have said this she goes the day i sold the business i made 250 mils fucking worst day of my life the day the money dropped in the account she said that i will really i really want that worst day of my life trust me i'll feel a nice bad day but you so do you think and then just to build on that the founder of uh tyrell's crisps royal chase he's been on this podcast and he said that his way of saying it was when you're in the winner's enclosure you realize all the fun was in the race aka the destination is the journey yeah uh so are you so do you do you are you so fixated on the destination that do you think that could potentially cripple you from enjoying the journey or how do you enjoy the journey of building space goods yeah there's a few points there i think the first point is i see like the end goal with this business is very much twofold and i say this very pragmatically and openly it's like any potential investor i speak to and whatever so the first thing is i genuinely would like to think i could work on slash in this space of trying to bring psilocybin to the forefront and masses for like the next 30 years and that would be great to have a positive impact on the world and blah blah blah but you need a lot of money and capital to do that and the pragmatic part of me probably largely because i've seen the highs and lows of making loads of money in my early 20s and losing a lot of it as well is i'd like to sell the business and fucking make 20 million quid because it just gives you more freedom and allows you to start more businesses and have a bigger impact like you know you can't really help anyone unless you've got capital to help their idea or their mission or whatever it is like i've never wanted to be the starving artist and i think a lot of people pursue like the creative aspect of something so much but they forget that it has to be commercially viable as well and i think i've maybe got quite a good balance between the two like i'm a creative at heart but i also know that if i don't sell any fucking products the creativity doesn't matter because it's going to be sat on a shelf and never reach anyone so but again maybe that sounds kind of cynical but it's also just the fucking reality like i need customers that like the product to grow the business and have any sort of impact otherwise it ain't gonna work and i'm gonna have to pack it in and do something else um the flip side of that and partly why i maybe feel like i haven't enjoyed it and haven't enjoyed the journey which is kind of relevant to your second part of the question before i go too off-piste is when i launched the brand like i made this fucking 80s movie i was so inspired about like i love the design of the product and i was so excited but then when you launch and start growing and have responsibilities and obligations and a small team to take care of and recently a slightly bigger team.

45:31I made some changes there that were quite difficult, but I'm having to deal with all that shit. And then it becomes, it kind of becomes like a fucking job and it's like, oh fuck, I'm actually not doing any of the exciting career stuff that I was doing at the start, but I'm doing the stuff that needs to be done, which is focusing on supply chain, cashflow, you know, looking at raising money. You know, I spend more time looking at fucking financial forecasts now than I do at new packaging designs. That's just the reality. Even though I still lead all the product development and everything you see visually is largely me and this other genius guy that works for me called Brad.

46:04So I find that balance really difficult because a lot of what I know I need to do just objectively isn't fun, isn't enjoyable. You know, it's fucking boring supply chain stuff. It's obsessing over CAC. It's making sure our conversion rate's higher. It's making sure we don't churn too much during summer, which by the way we did. and I was stressing through the floor about it and spending hours and hours crunching numbers because at the end of the day, particularly a D2C first business is, it's like day trading almost. It's what is CAC today? What revenue have we done? How much have we spent? Do we have enough stock?

46:36Is our cash flow good? So we don't fucking over order for stock for Q4, under order for Q1, you know? So I think, yeah, so it's not all enjoyable basically because you have to work on stuff that's necessary and not necessarily like fun. So I find the balance there quite difficult because I would love to make 80s movies and drive a fucking DeLorean through Mayfair all the time making like, you know, movies like I've done for the products. But A, they don't sell product, you know, fast performing UGC designed for TikTok generation does. And B, it's probably just a waste of money spending 10 grand on a movie that 4 ,000 people watch organically on YouTube because you don't run any outs to it because it doesn't convert.

47:16So that's just like the sad truth of some of the stuff I've done. is that the most fun stuff was just categorically the least financially effective and probably the most financially retarded. Whereas the stuff that moves the needle right now is performance creative, landing pages and having enough stock of the products that sell, which is basically Rainbow Dust because our Dream Dust product kind of flopped and I'm redoing it. It's a very simple business, but with that, it means that it's not all creativity and fun stuff. so it's almost like the thing we said right at the beginning it's the creative suit creative pursuit of a greater self it's almost like this this machine that you've built is it's actually not allowing you to be to be creative because you're getting pulled into the weeds of fucking excel and forecasts and cash flow versus doing the creative stuff and you've said many a time that you're at heart a creative and i i think that's for people listening to this which are founders of fmcg cpg brands there's a lot in that there's this the honeymoon period where as you say you've got all the the lust and the joy of the brand but as it gets bigger it's got to become uh become more grown up i want to talk about this this recent month if you're okay to talk about that i mean you discussed it on document documenting the journey and i want to talk about that but for people why i love that so much is basically i think every founders is having those voices in your heads but you just put it into document in the journey which is like 15 minute videos and i think i'd either i often think like fuck am i putting too much out on the internet because but i mean for anyone that's watched the podcast i think arguably from what i've seen i'm probably one of the most honest at least authentically myself people on youtube even though my audience is fucking tiny compared to anyone actually you know a proper youtuber or podcaster but i think there's so much just filtering reality these days that the whole idea of that series in particular is that it's literally unfiltered i mean i swear all the fucking times i'm demonetized um but that's just how i speak i probably say too much um yeah sometimes i think do i delete all of that and just fucking focus on my head shit but the whole idea of it was just it's probably quite interesting to look back on in 10 years and if i'm gonna do it by default if i do it anything other than entirely honestly then it's just not worth doing so yeah people watch that given it's me talking shit for 15 minutes on like a random wednesday evening in my flat so i think it's unreal and i think it's it's an honest lens into the workings of a founder's mind.

50:04Like, every founder on LinkedIn will be like, oh my God, everything's going banging. Yeah, I hate LinkedIn for that. Yeah, yeah, it's full of shit. Whereas like, what's the reality is they may post that on LinkedIn, but in their head they're thinking, oh my God, this is going wrong. How am I going to manage that? Have I raised enough money? And your documentary journey does that. But the most recent one said it's been a fucking rough month. And I know you said something, well, two things. The honeymoon period we've already talked about, then you said trying to act and be a startup adding too much in too much fluff and the team is growing quicker than revenue if we zoom in on that like so so what what happened and what do you mean by trying to act and be a startup adding too much fluff yeah i probably get well offend loads people what i'm saying about this and it's just my view but i think there's i think the first thing is i think there's so many brands that look bigger than they are but if you saw their pnl you'd be like why the fucked you have a shortage office but just do it remotely and actually be profitable because so many brands that if they don't raise their next round they're just fucked so i just never wanted to be in that position and it comes back to like the holand and barrett point i thought you know having an office and loads of pay employees would a look better for i don't know the fucking external world and maybe make the business more attractive to potential investors or acquirers and so on but b i thought that's what will make me fulfilled like it'll that's a proper business um so yeah that's the first thing um i think i just because of that i think i just introduced a lot of fluff like to give some actual practical examples because most people probably don't when they say things like that is like i spent loads of money on a pr firm and then i realized hold on this literally does nothing to our revenue it just sounded cool because i thought oh i'm a startup we should do pr it's absolutely bollocks just spend more on instagram ads and it would i guarantee that it's better for you as a business unless you're at like critical mass and you cannot spend any more money on instagram and you've got 10 billion quid burning a hole in your pocket which most startups probably don't so don't do that um yeah and then kind of just having too many meetings and I feel like a lot of people want to be seen working in a cool place i.e like Soho works have a fucking sticker on their laptop but they're less bothered about actually doing the work which in reality is just looking at screen and executing the tasks that need to be done rather than having a fucking certain branded chai latte working in a cafe which by the way I just do not think works you get no work done when you're just in a cafe you just scroll Instagram and get a coffee i don't know am i being super cynical and horrible no i've got i've got i've got the reality is just if you want to actually move the needle it's about just getting your hands dirty and probably a lot of that is either in an office or remotely like i am currently like i'm not saying offices about i'm just saying for like a lot of early stage startups i would question the value of having a fancy office with lots of people in it but then also it comes down preference because i think i kind of lost sight of why i got into entrepreneurship in the first place which always for me was like location and time freedom like i spent years living out in like bali and australia and so on which i fucking loved and as i got a bit older i thought oh i need to i need to be in one place with an office um where did that come from that that need that's for that's almost as you say to act like a startup and that security like where did that come from i think maybe it came from looking at other startups and thought they've got an office in london they don't have any like freelance remote team members i should do that but then i started pivoting more towards that i'm not saying i won't ever do that i just say i probably did it too soon and for the wrong reasons um and i probably lacked self-awareness doing that and thought yeah i need to be in one place we need to force everyone into a fucking boxy office nine hours a day and that's how we're going to grow whereas when you strip it back it's like we just need to spend more on Instagram ads and have a nice landing page which doesn't require which doesn't necessarily require any more team members or an office um so yeah I'm also I'm not sure I've got that right by like we got rid of some people and just decided that need to simplify simplify things and that was quite difficult um yeah how did you because people people listening to this we'll have to make tough decisions with letting go of people and doing the right thing for the business i know you had like an md come in like yeah what was the rationale and if you don't want to go here we don't have to but i'd appreciate it but what was the so so you bring in the md we you hire these paye employees what does the team at space goods look like and then how how has it now changed like how are you still going to grow where there's less people because ultimately less people means less resource do you see what I mean yeah so I think um I think because of my previous business where I'd been like I'd only ever worked with freelancers and outsourced agencies and never had anyone experience in the business I probably thought now to do it right I have to have loads of experienced people in the business loads of expensive experienced people because that will somehow mean guaranteed success was actually the reality is probably somewhere in between whereas i lean on experienced people like some of my investors now i don't necessarily need lots of employees um so yeah like the team now is basically back to where it was like six months ago which is slightly different to what it was for six months in between um i have myself myself and four other full-time freelancers which and by the way freelance i actually think there's basically no negative to having a freelancer over an employee because a lot of for example the core team right now is myself we've got an operations guy got a finance guy got brad who's the creative genius that makes all these movies and shit and i have a girl called lucy who runs all content stuff but then we also work with four different agencies so people hear like five people i think five people including me and think that's tiny but then it's like we've got a media buying agency who are investors in the brand so they do all that we have a web design agency who do a lot of landing page stuff alongside myself we work with our main supplier is effectively an outsourced product development agency as well so they do all our sampling and you know nutritional stuff and batch testing all that shit our fulfillment's outsourced with 3pl so it's like i'm not there's no one in a warehouse on my team so that brings down the headcount a lot we also have an amazon agency run our amazon we also have a content agency i would actually argue we have too many people even now um so yeah having a few more pay employees on top of that just in hindsight i don't i don't think made sense because i think the beauty of d2c particularly oh and we have a retail agency by the way which i forgot to mention um so there's a fucking lot of agencies it's not like it's just me and four other people it's like they're the call team at full time but we also lean on a lot of resource externally and i think agencies for a lot of things media buying probably being the best example having done both myself i've spent millions on ads myself in the past i've used i've hired people to do it in-house and i've used agencies and i think with something like that you're actually way better off having an agency than a pay employee because they have visibility over 30 other clients so in something like media buying when it's so algorithm heavy it benefits you by using an agency or a freelancer rather than a pay employee who's pigeonholed onto into your business especially when something like that ultimately doesn't actually take like nine hours a day it's probably an hour a day maintenance and testing so it doesn't doesn't make sense to have someone sat there twiddling their thumbs that's that's an overview of the team currently i mean yeah i brought in an md and i just in hindsight it was premature so we parted ways fundamentally and I think yeah it's just just a pretty black or white decision with certain things I think certain certain jobs as well they are harder to quantify with numbers like another person we brought in was a community manager which in hindsight was just again premature because it's not really stuff we're focused on for business right now what we're focused on is basically spending more on Instagram ads because that is actually what moves the needle doing random pop-ups here and there to be honest is probably just a cost right now it's probably not anything else um i think there's a time and a place for that and i think even for our brand that could be pretty soon it's just comes down to focus i think that the problem now i think is there are a billion ways well a billion ways to grow a business but also a million different distractions and so many people want your money for their services and different ad platforms want you to invest in them over another one but like yeah pretty much everything is a waste of time in a startup i think and you have to find the things that aren't a waste of time and for most d2c brands in my view broadly they are probably creating a great product creating a decent website or landing page and sending more people to that website or landing page and converting more of them because that is what drives revenue and that's that's kind of the most important thing when you're trying to grow a business it's not how many people do we have on payroll because that won't last very long if the business isn't growing boimi our beloved sponsor are helping build the fastest growing challenger food and drink brands look if you're a small brand just starting out and need your first indie stockist your first hundred stockist to wholesale boimi are the platform to categorically speed that up but if you're a big brand wanting to get bigger boimi are also insane they make field sales marble smooth silky slick they're just epic ollies ollies been on this podcast twice actually they saw a 29 uplift in sales when using boemy to check major malt listings availability insane 29 uplift by downloading an app insane lucky saying my boy aaron duff is coming to podcast in a couple of weeks weeks he uses it to manage the team of 30 people and they've lucky to have unlocked 500 draft listings by using boemy look you've got to get involved with this stuff it's absolutely insane and it will categorically change your life it's just the sickest platform I use it all the time at islands you've got an ability I think with every guest I speak to this I always see this one ability or super battle come through and I think yours is the ability just to be super militantly focused and simple, I know it's gone a bit off piste recently with those vibes but to be so cutthroat with it, and I think you're right like this this i think having a big team is a fucking swinging dick contest for when you're at house do you know what I mean it's just to be like oh I've got my team's doing so well we're going to go and do this like a way day we're going to do all this shit I mean so there's a weird there's a weird obsession with founders gloating about how much money they've raised and how big their team is but never like what their top and bottom line are people seem to shy away from like what how many customers do you actually have not like how much have you raised from VCs that are going to fucking screw you if you don't hit numbers I don't know like it's a strange culture and I think because I come from like just a bootstrap background where it's me and a bunch of lads in a sweaty fucking co-work space in Bali like running Facebook ads on a credit card like literally starting with a hundred quid I suppose I've just never subscribed to the idea that you should raise loads of money lose loads of money and hire loads of people just for the sake of it and I'm not saying all businesses do that because a lot of businesses you do need to raise loads of money and hire lots of people but I would argue that a lot of the businesses that do that probably I probably would be surprised to know how many businesses have tiny teams that are probably actually bigger than them.

1:01:35Like one of my investors and mates, and I won't say his business but he's literally bootstrapped. He's 27 years old and he's got a business doing 50 million a year. He lives in Northern Ireland. He would not put anything on social media. You wouldn't know who the fuck he is. You'd probably look at his website and think like it's some tiny little website. But he's probably bigger than all the VC-backed DTC brands in London combined. but you just would never know about him because he's not on linkedin isn't so house yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah it's not that there's anything wrong with that because i like so house as well and i've put myself on the internet and obviously to an extent want to look good but yeah it's just i don't know i feel like i come from like this deep dark underground of just like bootstrap bedroom founders and it's just a different way of looking at things to a lot of like the linkedin sort of pr brigade these days which is all about how many team members you've got how many mental health days you're doing which by the way is valuable because mental health has been probably the biggest challenge in my life but i'm also just very realistic about like team members don't pay the bills unless they're fucking bringing in revenue and growing the business and i just think startups are actually so hard i think people have lost sight to like how statistically rare is to actually succeed to like any level with like a style of brand so yeah like it's obviously going to be brutally difficult because you're trying to do something that most people can't do or won't do i completely agree mate and i what i want to ask you is there'll be people listening to this who have got an employee on their books who is costing them too much dough quite simply but they don't have the bollocks or not they don't have the bollocks they're just funny it hard to navigate that conversation how did you let go of those people like how what's the matt kelly way of being like how do you let those people go but is there any advice you give people who are potentially sat on the fence of it's so good we've got a team for linkedin purposes but actually they should probably let let some people go in order to actually move the fucking needle do you see what i mean yeah i mean well firstly i'm probably terrible at it because i'm really inexperienced hiring and firing people so i'm sure both of them would say i'm terrible at it but i think it just has to i think if you're transparent about the performance of the business i actually think a lot of employees don't actually realize like where the money goes and i'm not saying just team members in general but i i've actually had comments in the past from people that clearly never have never run a startup and never will that seem to think that revenue is money in a founder's pocket like it's actually wild like a revenue is not profit and secondly even if it was profit it wouldn't be in my pocket it'd be going straight back into stock i think a lot of non founders have maybe lost sight of like the fact that founders are working 18 hours a day and probably paying themselves last for like many many many years even if it goes well so i think just being transparent about the realities of that and yeah it comes down to performance really um i think any team particularly small ones to just should be like upfront about numbers i think that's very helpful like i think your entire team should know like what revenue you're doing like if that's on target or not so and and and where they where they play into that because yeah you have to it's like a well-oiled machine really and i think just being honest is probably a good place to start um and also being honest when when you're not hitting targets when your cac's too high when you're not growing revenue enough like ours was last month um for the past two months to be honest but if you pretend everything's perfect all the time i think that's probably a slippery slope particularly in the startup just in general the where i want to go now mate is is you said you dropped out of university rewinded back and i almost think you had this old mba that you you created yourself you you left Northumbria, went and, as you said, bootstrapping from Bali, maxing out an MX to build a DTC brand.

1:05:37A lot of our listeners are CPG businesses and what they do is they'll focus solely on retail and completely neglect DTC. Whereas you're coming out from the other way around and actually I suppose the value of DTC is you've got way more margin, got more control of the the whole customer journey but i'd love to go into like what are the principles of getting a d2c brand going say say there's someone listening to this who's got a product in sainsbury's for example but they're like right d2c could be a big play for us no fucking idea what to do i know this a lot of this will be really like obvious to you but for our listeners it won't be what are the top three things you absolutely must do and then what the top three things you should biggest mistakes that most people make when they're starting out like almost like put into noob language if you want to call it that yeah i mean just to be clear i'm a noob with retail so i'm kind of coming at it from the opposite way i guess the beauty of dtc is speed i think you know you can literally go from nothing to your first hundred grand in revenue in weeks if it goes well um whereas retail that's obviously not the case and I'm learning that.

1:06:44But fundamentally, D2C comes down to the golden ratio is LTV to CAC, really. So lifetime value in customer acquisition. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, if you can increase the distance between those numbers, your LTV be higher, your CAC be lower, then basically you've got a good business. Sorry, what are those? Just to give, sorry to put this in D2C for dummies language, but what are those for listeners? is lifetime value and CAC. Yeah, yeah. So LTV or LTR, so lifetime value or lifetime revenue, kind of the same thing, depends on where you slice it. It's just how much a customer will spend in their lifetime with your brand.

1:07:24So from their first purchase to their last purchase, or you typically would look at like a 12 month LTV. So how much they spend over a year. So in my case, that's how much Rainbow Dust has someone bought over a year. Whether they're a one-time purchaser or a subscriber, we're a subscription heavy business. so that's pretty good for LTV. And CAC is just cost to acquire a customer. So if you spend£1 ,000 on Instagram ads, say, and you acquire 100 customers, your CAC is 10 quid because you acquired 100 and you spent 1 ,000, right? Easy math. Yeah. So, yeah, basically, they're your metrics. And ultimately, D2C, you'll be running paid social, Google, TikTok ads.

1:08:04They're the three we do right now. So Meta, TikTok, Google. Right now, I'm spending about£160 ,000 a month on paid social. um which is quite a lot and yeah basically and then to do that we're running a lot of creative so you know 30 second ads you've probably seen them before like fucking pink packet showing it all blah blah blah like create yeah creative is the most important things we have a system for that which i've built up over the past year and a bit we test a front load of new creatives we run ads we primarily run ads in the uk but you can do it you can do it worldwide you run it to your website or a landing page most of us dedicated landing page you know someone lands on the page read about the product buy it whatever um so yeah fundamentally like our target cac so new customer cac is about 50 quid right now so we're willing to spend about 50 quid to acquire a customer most our customers now that we acquire do subscribe to the product we know that most of them stay on average between four and five months in terms of buying it every month so we know that our ltv is generally between 160 and 200 quid on a subscriber so that's pretty healthy you know it's to one ratio on the lower end like ltv's cac um basically a business that can spend more to acquire a customer is going to win in d2c long term and the way you can do that is you can either increase your ltv or you can raise loads of fucking venture capital because you know that eventually you're going to increase your ltv so right now if i could spend 100 quid instead of 50 quid i could probably spend four times as much on instagram because the general economics of paid social or just paid out in general is that the more you spend the more expensive it gets that's just how it works because you're competing with more brands that've got bigger budget so we're spending about five grand a day on ads right now um if we want to spend 50 grand a day i'm probably going to have to work out how we can spend 100 quid instead of or even 150 quid instead of 50 quid to acquire a customer and really that means we're probably going to have to look at a 24 month ltv to justify that because you know 150 to 200 doesn't really check out because there's no margin there by the time taking away cog fulfillment tax etc so i don't know if that makes any sense from for a beginner but yeah basically it's just driving more traffic to your website to acquire more customers with the main metric being how much you spend to acquire a customer but obviously there's loads of factors that go into that like conversion rate is it subscription product is it a one-time product do you have other products to upsell them on later because we have we've basically been one a one product business up to now pretty much we have our dream dust one but kind of fucked that up so i don't really market that we're launching a new flavor next week for the first time which should be quite cool for ltv because we can obviously upsell existing customers got a few other things in the pipeline um but yeah essentially whoever can spend the most to acquire a single customer wins because you can outbid everyone else and you can spend more on ads and if you can spend more on ads you can basically generate more revenue and that's how you grow a business so you know massive brands like Gymshark are probably spending hundreds of thousands per day on paid social I would imagine I don't know I haven't seen their numbers but just to give an idea of like how much brands actually spend on this shit um I mean when I was running Neon Beach I was spending 25 grand a day at one point on Instagram so you're talking like two million people every day seeing your ads which is quite a lot of people so that's that's like in a nutshell how I've grown every business I've ever created it's spending money on ads and when so when you say spending money on ads and you talked you said you've got this creative system so say you say you put 20 grand into ads for for space goods yeah look where's that money actually going is that on on different are you testing lots of different adverts like where does the because I think Like, I kind of get the landscape, i.e.

1:11:57the CAC and the lifetime value and kind of how that works. But then I suppose so many brands who listen to this are on, have a DTC business that does fuck all for them. There's nowhere near 100 grand. Like, how are you spending that money? Do you see what I mean? Yeah, I'm always amazed. I speak to a lot of founders that haven't really cracked DTC. And I say, are you running ads? And they say no. And I say, well, how the fuck is anyone ever going to know about your website then? like i don't understand it like where does the revenue come from if people aren't going to the website so yeah i mean so i said we spend like five grand a day running on ads i mean about 80 percent of that is on instagram so those are those annoying ads you see that say sponsored i mean people listen to this might have seen the brand or you certainly see in other brands you know athletic greens are going really hard on instagram right now i feel like everyone is being hit by athletic greens and huel and brands like that i know trip spending quite a lot on instagram as well see their ads all the time so yeah when you see that ad and click that's what i'm i'm i'm buying an impression basically so with pay social you pay per thousand pay per thousand people um so yeah that's pretty much it so i'm paying to put my ads in front of you so it's really important that my ad is good and that when you click the ad my website or landing page is good so there's a lot of variables and moving parts which is why i think d2c is like brutally complicated because there are so many moving parts to fundamentally just sell a product even when you have one product which is a bit more simple um and then also like ads on google so if you search like mushroom coffee you'll probably see space goods come up on shopping that that's a different ad platform so that's pay-per-click that's youtube and then it's same shit on tiktok so you know you you might see ads on tiktok it's the same model as instagram so that's where the money's going we're basically just buying impressions on ad platforms and it's very targeted you know we're targeting people that might be interested in wellness fitness mushroom coffee whatever it is i mean creative is probably the most important variable these these days because these ad platforms have such powerful algorithms so much data that you can almost just put zero targeting on an ad these days and just run a good creative and facebook will just but it will find you buyers it pretty much works like that what are what are the creatives that have worked like really well for you and what what are the and then what are the flip side of that what are the mistakes most people make with coming up with these ads you've seen yeah i think like a a general theme and stuff i've done in the past as well is generally stuff that is really cheap to produce works better it really says yeah honestly like it you you'd be amazed how many times i've done fancy like i mean even like those 80s movies i made that were kind of for fun like they just simply do not convert customers they're too long no one's got an attention span like that stuff that works well for us is like just really choppy stuff that we've done loads of ads that are like kind of pretending it's like a magic potion with like graphics and shit um stuff like that works pretty well i mean now we're actually trying to diversify a bit because almost all our ads have had like the same guy that's brad that works for me in the ads so now we're trying to pivot a bit more towards like a an affluent middle-aged female audience so using creators that are more in that demographic um but yeah it's funny like i've literally made an ad on my iphone and made it myself in 10 minutes and it's performed better than a fucking studio shoot that costs five grand so yeah I think like high production stuff should be on your website and then stuff that's on ads should just be all about performance um because yeah it's literally like it's like there's a science to it really it's you know how many people you're shouting the ad to how many are clicking through how many convert on the website it just comes down to numbers which is probably what takes a lot of like the creative fun out of it because you're not making a cinematic movie you're making a conversion ad and often you're testing like 25 of them every week so it really is a numbers game um but yeah it's pretty brutal it's just it's it's a numbers game and it's this huge um user generated content because now make i always thought i look used to look at like um i don't think i can't remember some of the brands that have done it but i've always thought fucking hell who's gonna buy that but it's mad that that actually converts what at least i watched one of your adverts i thought this was really interesting and it goes back to your point of brands founders being predominantly middle class right and it's like i went i went to a good school like i came from a good very privileged background but i think what's really interesting is there's i don't know i've discussed it with a few people in the podcast but it's like it's creating middle class middle class product middle class people create middle class products middle class problems and and the the the messaging is is very uh like oh hello mate like how you doing do you know what i mean like all throughout i watched your advert and i thought this is sick and i don't know i don't know what the reference is but it was a whole myriad of different accents all around talk about the product but you had like a geordie you had a prummy you had someone posh you had a female you had someone old what's the why behind that because Like that really struck a chord with me.

1:17:00Trying to think if I know the ad. I mean, that was probably just, that was probably actual customers speaking. And our customer base is very diverse. Probably more diverse than I first thought, to be fair. Because it's a pretty mass appeal product. But yeah, I mean, there probably was some logic to that. It might have just been a test. I don't actually know how well that ad did. It might perform way better if we all had a Southwest London accent. I don't know, but yeah. i think just ultimately comes down to knowing your audience right and if you want to build a mass market brand which i definitely do i actually think right now we're not mass market enough we're probably a bit too maybe a bit too pink and neon in terms of appealing to like a super mass market audience because ultimately anyone that drinks coffee is a potential customer in my mind whereas right now we're probably appealing mainly to early adopters that are like oh i want to try this pink thing whereas there's an argument to say like Karen in fucking Basingstoke who's never heard of mushrooms before might be a bit scared off by the fact that we're bright pink and you know we're alluding to psychedelics and so on so I think that's the challenge that maybe a lot of brands have when they're going from being like a big bedroom brand to like actually a big brand which takes a lot of time and requires you hitting that mass appeal particularly in the UK because we are like 90 % focused on the UK right now and I think I think you can get to 10 to 15 million a year just in the UK with this product um you probably well you definitely can't get to 100 million which is why you'd have to go to America if you want to go like huge level like that um but yeah where was I going with that I suppose it's all just testing and knowing your audience and looking at the data really um but but I'm also still very much figuring out my audience because when I launched the products I just made it for me I thought it would be like just kind of like entrepreneur bros that would try it like kind of biohacker types was actually like the loudest segment of our customers in terms of the ones that write the best reviews that email saying they love it and shit is generally like middle-aged women that have got anxiety which is maybe not surprising in hindsight but kind of surprised me a little bit i mean maybe it makes sense it's like a pink brand it's arguably slightly feminine although you can't say that anymore because it's 2023 um but yeah i'm always learning about our customer base really we do a lot of surveys like post-purchase surveys surveys to our email list and so on and it's actually a pretty gender well not gender neutral but we're like 50 50 male female in terms of our customer base whereas i maybe thought it would be more guys because a lot of our early marketing was kind of like entrepreneur focused whereas now it's a bit more holistic and holson the yeah no that makes that kind of does make sense i always think with every every product there'll be a surprising demographic and i actually i interviewed liv who's the founder of trip yeah and she said this thing about how because cbd back in 2019 i remember going to a trade show it was like it either looked like you're trying to sell pharmaceutical stuff or yeah like someone's trying to be like fucking snoop dog and sell some weird brand like that do you mean it was weird thing and what trick did so well is they kind of stole the cues of other categories as the kind of the way of saying it is they got all these kind of these pastel colors these soft colors and it basically allowed them to open up the market or their product to people who were interested in having something to calm them down whereas before like as you say karen from basing stoke is not going to pick up something that has any reference to pot do you know what meat so i think it's interesting similar idea i i reference cbd a lot to be fair when i'm trying to explain the concept of mushrooms because i feel like granted functional mushrooms and magic mushrooms are very different things but mushrooms on the whole i think are quite similar to cbd in the earlier days where it used to be very i guess i would associate like cbd or a lot of people would with kind of just like people smoking weed in their mom's basement they'd be like with cbd is that is that just like weed um whereas obviously it's not the same product but also now it's like you get middle-aged affluent women in their range rover dropping cbd and i think trip have obviously led the charge for that in the uk um but i think it's similar with with mushrooms and hopefully psychedelics long term is like massive stigma around it kind of seeing it's like dodgy um even now like my own parents like won't try my product because they're like oh it's mushroomed Is that going to make me lose my mind?

1:21:28And I'm like, well, no, but okay. Mate, your product arrives from my mum. I'm living at home at the minute. And my mum was like, what the fuck is that? Like, are you taking shrooms? I was like, oh. Exactly. So shrooms has kind of, has this sort of vibe around like recreational drugs. Whereas the reality is it's fundamentally just adaptogens that ease stress and make you feel better. so what are your what are your views on what are your views on on competition so now you've got like there's i think there's dirty in the market there's yeah there's that lion's mane is a lion's mane of mushroom sorry mate um there's another brand there's a lot of competition now what are your dirty i mean there was a lot less when i launched which is good and bad and it's good because you're early but it's also bad because it attracts a lot of competition when a few brands start like popping up everywhere and clearly doing like decent revenue.

1:22:24I mean Dirty were before me. To be honest, I don't know if they listen to this, but Dirty are really the only competitor I kind of look at and I'm like, fuck, I want to beat these cunts. Because not that they're cunts, but you know, just so to speak. I know they've raised a lot more money than I have, about 10 times as much. Pretty sure they're a bit bigger than me right now, to be honest. They've been around about a year or more longer. They've got a much bigger team. the shit that annoys me is brands that pop up literally copying my website word for word which there are a few i've got a list of them on like a google sheet but i guess with that such as if you're all right to disclose or let me what's the one if i'll name the one that's an exact rip and everyone can google it varietymode.com and it's called gold dust and the website is literally the exact formulation is a rip which not really much i can do about that but like it's just have some fucking uniqueness please like word for word the website is completely ripped we actually updated our website like a month ago so their entire website is based on my old website but anyone that looks at that you'll see exactly what i mean it's just the whole thing's just an exact rip even the imagery is like they just sent my images to their designer and said rip that they've actually ripped my nutrition table from the website and put it on theirs which is always quite funny but you know i think brands like that generally are quite small or won't last very long but it does piss me off when people just straight up because it's the opposite of entrepreneurial create creativity when you just just do a straight rip i mean it should be illegal but it's not really so yeah um i think the motion space is definitely getting more competitive but that every space does and that's why you've got to be i guess on the top of your game and stay ahead um i also think that competition is a good thing in a way though because it proves more mass adoption and it you know the more people that can see mushrooms are more people that can try it for the first time and then eventually buy for my brand or buy for another brand which generally raises raises the bar for every brand so and i think you know it's literally impossible to not have competition like everything is competitive you just gotta choose a market and be better than your competitors or at least be different or better in your own way so yeah some competitors really piss me off but some of them it's probably a good thing to have them in the market because it's proof that this isn't going away it grows it grows the category for you in terms of um so we talked about like the creative and the user generated content uh as as you say you've been doing this for so long mate and you've got this you're in this 0.01 percent of these of your powers are smashed in d2c what what is from that circle like what would you say are two principles about business or life that you've learned from this higher echelon of people that probably most people won't know like what would you say one or two principles are that could really help our listeners could be about anything um i think the first one is obvious but just work harder and smart than everyone else i just think at the end of the day 99 % of people are probably clocking off at 5 p.m every day and they're not working weekends and i actually don't i subscribe to that way less than i used to by the way so i used to be like if i'm not working and someone else is out working me and i'm never going to not be working all the time i actually try and take more time off than i used to because it's genuinely bad for your mental health but at the same time i think a lot of people are just quite soft if i'm completely honest like we live in a bit of a snowflake society these days i think i think everyone should run a marathon or something just to see what they're actually capable of um and i think i get that work ethic from when i used to row as a kid so i used to be on a freezing river at 6am when i was 11 years old and i ended up becoming national champion and all this and while that's no big achievement now when i was 16 that was my entire life because it taught me the value of working hard at something for a long period of time and suffering where you need to and in that case my legs would be burning in a boat and i'd have bleeding knuckles from rowing in the fucking ice cold and i don't know i think we live in this society where everyone wants everything now they want the lamborghini now but they don't want to wait for 10 years to get it they want to raise a load of money because they don't want the balls to bootstrap anything to begin with um so i think that's probably the first thing i'm not for a minute saying i work harder than everyone else because I think particularly in 2023, I think a lot of people are probably finding life and the economy quite difficult right now, whether they're working a nine to five or a startup.

1:26:59So I think we're all in it together in that respect, at least people that don't come from shed loads of money, which is 99 % of people. I think the other thing is just actually building a fundamental skillset across a large range of things because you have to be quite good at, you have to be really good at a lot of things, I think, to be well i would say this but just to be competent indeed to see it takes it's there's a lot of moving paths and you have to do a lot yourself to start with so you have to have some level of competence in product development branding digital marketing like there's nothing in the business i couldn't do entirely myself if i had to and and there isn't anything in the business that at day one i didn't do entirely myself and that's as far as customer service web design literally media buying in the ad accounts finance to some extent I don't do most of these things myself anymore but you know if it was if the whole world went to shit and it was me and a laptop with 10 quid to start again I could do it because I have that skill set to go from zero to one and yeah I think it comes back to the initial point it's like I think a lot of people just aren't willing to be shit at something and get better at it because my first ever brand I had a t-shirt brand called gentry club when i was 17 or 18 and it was literally a white t-shirt i got from gildan with a fucking shit logo stitched on it and everyone in school laughed at me and took the piss and i went to bed crying and i sold 300 quid in the first year and i spent three grand on stock when i was working in waitrose part-time on four pounds 17 an hour so most people aren't willing to be that that loser that spent all his summer wages on stock and didn't sell anything things he didn't know what the fuck he was doing because it's not very fun like it all it looks fun when you say oh we're doing millions in revenue you know i don't have to have a job on the side i live in a nice flat all this shit but most people aren't willing or certainly don't that they don't see the years in anyone's case of self-education and chipping away at stuff i mean i would argue that i'm i've been doing this a lot longer than a lot of people to the extent they're like that's probably why i feel like i should be further ahead in some ways because i've been doing it like full time for like nearly six years um but it's also taught me a lot and six years is quite a long time um so yeah i just think anyone that wants to start something just fucking start something on the side be really shit at it for probably a few years and gradually get better um and you know the best time to start something was yesterday or 20 years ago the second best founders now i love that i've got that it's the i love that phrase it's the best time to plant a tree was yeah i think it's yesterday or 20 years ago yeah i love that phrase so say say i wish i'd invested in bitcoin in 2013 right i didn't have any money in 2013 so i couldn't yeah but i'm sure i was saying the same thing about d2c in 2033 i wish i'd died in 2023 so here we are for sure so so in terms of say everything does go fucking peaked on tomorrow you've got a tenner you've got your laptop and you and i say like you you've got to get a brand a food and drink brand whether or not that space goes or not to 100 grand in in revenue per month what what are the steps you take so i always say you can lose money but if you if you do the right thing it's very hard to lose experience or your network and as long as you keep your integrity intact throughout then you'll probably be all right because i mean i guess the first thing i would do in that in that case is i'd probably go and raise some money off my network but if i didn't have that i'd probably get on tiktok and well i think you'd be i think it'd be impossible to start with 10 pound by the way just to be completely honest i think if you want to start a cpg brand of any kind or just a dc brand in unless you're drop shipping like borderline scam products from china i think you at least a few grand like probably five grand just to even be like remotely viable um so let's just say that first but from there i would probably get on tiktok and crack organic i mean i'm working with like this 21 year old guy right now he's running our tiktok organic because we haven't cracked it in like the first year and when i say crack it i mean this brand's getting millions of views organically which obviously the beauty of that is you're not paying for that granted it's not as targeted as paid instagram ads but you know now we've got videos getting a few hundred thousand views i'm trying to build like tiktok organic into a nice kind of secondary ad ad ad channel that obviously we're not paying for so other than the cost of making the content it's entirely free to go and get a video viral you just have to keep trying until you can get a video viral so yeah i mean i'd probably do something that was one skew so one one product to start with to keep it simple i would make the content myself and i would get on tiktok tiktok and crack the organic piece because there are brands that are doing that particularly kind of founder led ones where the founder is the face of the brand such as such as i mean i've seen this muslim quite quite unique niche this um i don't know if the right way to say it this halal supplement brand another guy that runs that and he's just cracked organic because it's a really strong niche so he's got a really big audience on there so that's one example i've seen quite a lot of beauty brands doing it in fact well one example this girl i've recently been dating actually she's she's been an entrepreneur herself so she has a and she does um she has a lash studio in guildford so she does like eyelashes people but she also started selling products to her customers and she built like a tiktok community so now she's doing like six figures organically just selling eyelash stuff so that's another good example don't know if she'll listen to that and get the shout out but i thought that was pretty cool so i actually think it's probably quite easy to get a brand to like 100 grand a year in revenue with like no ads at all whether there's any margin left there is different but it's definitely way harder to scale to like multi-millions you know 10 million plus in revenue like you definitely need a solid strategy of where you're going to spend money and you probably need to raise some money in this market realistically to even do that or start with like a decent amount of cash just in terms of ad spend stock etc but how yeah how do most brands with d2c piss away their margins i know again i'm coming to this almost from the opposite to you mate like i know how in retail you can easily piss away money and you end up with fuck all left in the pot right but in d2c from from someone with like more of a retail background we i've always looked at it if this thing is like if you can crack it it's like the enigma because obviously you've got the cost of sending it to the customer the cost of of getting the customer but then other than that it's kind of it's just the cost of the 3pl like is there ways that will like watch out where people can piss away money yeah i've just i've got hard stuff in like 10 minutes by the way just like five to four i'm gonna have to go um yeah i would say i think i think two things firstly not knowing your your true margin because it's always less than you think because fulfillment payment processing fees fixed overheads that you probably don't realize that they just rack up so easily um even just shit like paying that a lot of people just don't account for that when they're starting a business which is i mean i'd be gooey that when i was like 21 i didn't know what the fuck that was and it's such a huge part of your margin is particularly when you're selling to uk customers um so just knowing your actual margin i think it's the first thing because i guarantee it's less than you think when you account for everything just just on a basic gross margin level but then the other biggest variable cost is marketing so if you know if your cac goes up then overnight you could go from having a profitable business to having a loss making business and it depends what the strategy is if you're growing growing a subscription business like i am we are definitely more focused on growth than you are on having a really great ebda margin and you've raised a bit of money so you know it's budgeted for then i would say that that's the other thing because and it also depends i think being clear on what the goal is which is where i've i've had to have a bit of introspection myself is are you trying to build a brand that does 300 grand a year revenue makes 60k profit and you're making a bit more money than you could in your day job and it gives you location and time freedom and happy days or are you trying to build a business that's doing 10 mil revenue makes a million profit that you could potentially sell for 10 million quid in a few years time which by the way is probably the ideal i think that's way fucking harder to do than it was in 2019 and i know a lot of people that were doing that but now are struggling to even make a profit because largely because ad costs have gone up you know the economy has definitely turned a little bit or are you trying to do what i'm probably leaning towards myself which is figure out the best way to build a category leader which probably means raising a load of money and throwing money on the marketing machine while there's an opportunity in the market and the competition is relatively limited so I think a lot of people including myself maybe historically aren't entirely clear on what the goal is when they're starting a business because it will be way more painful than you thought it would be and I do generally think entrepreneurs are definitely mentally ill I mean I definitely am for just wanting to do it in the first place but even more so for continuing to do it when probably every sign was telling me to stop and fucking do something else two years ago but i think that's the stubbornness that comes with being an actual entrepreneur that's doing it for the love of the game deep down rather than what they think are the instagram trophies that they probably will never get along the way anyway such as the lambo and the fucking rolex definitely final question makes now you've got to run so I think I'll put a link to your YouTube and your podcast in the show notes especially for people who want to learn more about DTC, it's a sick podcast you've actually interviewed my very good mate Jack Rubin I love that episode, I thought that was really good oh yeah, I've actually got a call with him tomorrow he's way smarter than me yeah he's a G me and him used to do a lot of had a lot of good nights out in Nottingham when he went to uni there but you've grown that channel to you've grown your podcast to like 8 ,000 on YouTube, which I think is six.

1:37:14I've got like, I've just, I'm about to go into YouTube for this podcast. I think it's a good distribution channel. How the fuck do you get to 1 ,000? I just want to get to 1 ,000, but I don't know where to start. Like what are the things you've got to get down to get that, to get it? Well, I mean, with the podcast, I literally, I never even look at the numbers, to be honest. I just fucking, I started making it because I wanted to, and I interviewed a lot of my mates and then it became this thing. I think the reason it built, I guess it's quite a big following for such a niche podcast like i've literally been stopped in like italy from people that watch the podcast and said oh he's fucking changed my life and shit which is quite nice but i also laugh because it's like i'm not remotely famous at all on youtube or the podcast world but i guess for the niche it's decent i mean i think what i did well was just being outrageously authentic because i think so many people are just trying to be a version of not saying you're doing this but just in general they've started a fucking youtube channel or whatever because they want to be the next steve bartlett or whatever but they're not steve bartlett and they should really try and be the first of them rather than just like emulating what everyone else has done so even just shit like it became a bit of a meme and a thing on my podcast that we basically got pissed on red wine i'm trying to do that less now because i'm also trying to cut out drink but every episode was on my fucking sofa that my dog had pissed on with a pink light in the background and red wine it It was just quite a unique format.

1:38:37And I don't think anyone had done that or even has still really done that with like Legia entrepreneurs. And also everyone that came on had actually built a sick business and most of them didn't have a following. So it was like really refreshing, I think, to a lot of people because they'd never seen those sort of people put out content like myself as well as my guests, most of which are way more impressive than me. So... No, it's sick. I like, and yeah, I think you guys, you and Reuben were having gin and tonics, I think when I watched that one. Yeah, we definitely got pretty wavy on that one.

1:39:08That was about a year ago, I think. But then in terms of, was that just being consistent with YouTube or like how are you driving traffic to YouTube? I've looked at all this shit about like SEO, like is it some news? Honestly, I probably should do all that shit. I've never even done a custom thumbnail on half the videos. It's just like fucking filmed on an iPhone screenshot. I think I was pretty consistent. I think with guests, I've done 70 odd episodes and about 50 of those were like every week in a row. and then I took a bit of a break from it and went back to it and so on. I'm trying to pick it up again now, actually, but I feel like I've almost the same with the brand.

1:39:41I feel like I lost the inspiration of the early, the start of the podcast because nothing ever feels as fresh as right at the start. And then I also did have a few, I had one episode that got like over 100 ,000 views, which was with this quite well-known guy that's now got like 3 million subscribers. So I should probably do that way more tactically. The problem is most people I want to speak to don't even have followers. They're just people that build great businesses and you would never know about them unless you were like autistically interested in founders like i am so that's also a bit of a dilemma with it because if you want to grow it you've got to go mainstream and probably just get some cunt influencer on to be honest but i just also don't want to do that because the whole premise of the pod was like authentic real conversations with actual founders most of which are basically ghosts and pretty anonymous so it's a double-edged sword do i just get some only fans model on and try and get a million views to grow the the audience or do i just stick to like really sick founders that 99.99 % of the world will probably never even know about for sure right final question mate and this is a personal one as i say i'm trying to cut out the booze but what is your like routine in terms of of like the health because as you said you the phoenix rose from the ashes you're now like doing that what's your like routine in terms of like fitness and building that into your into building the brand while still saying staying safe yeah i I mean, last year I went through the biggest transformation physically I've ever had.

1:41:03I used to be a rower for like 10 years, so I was always really fit. And then basically I got a bit fat during COVID, probably like a lot of people. Then I started running last year. I got obsessed with running, basically. So I was always going to the gym, lifting weights, but I did no cardio. I was eating a bit shit, so I was kind of chubby. And then I just got in like the best shape ever last summer. I was ridiculously shredded, ran like a two-hour 52 marathon, which everyone said I couldn't do. That was like a year ago now. so i feel like i've also fallen off a bit since then i kind of i'm into like crossfit quite a bit now i ran i'm running an ultra marathon like next month so for me running was really good but i quite like the mental and physical suffering of endurance stuff so it's not for everyone but i definitely think that helped me a lot um are you doing that every day yeah pretty much i train like every day yeah and is that like a set time or is it like whenever you fancy it or what's the i'm honestly trying to figure out like a new routine right now because typically I train in the afternoon but the problem with that is people generally work like nine till five or nine till six so I kind of find myself not working with other people's routines as well if I'm doing that so but at the same time I find like fitness and I really want to do high rocks I don't know if you heard of that it's like this new kind of CrossFit-esque fitness competition because I mean I'm pretty fucking fit to be fair like a yeah i just enjoy it and i naturally quite got quite a good engine on me i suppose um but also just i think staring at screen all day is really bad for your mental health and i definitely struggle with that still a lot and i actually want to spend less time working on the business and be way more effective in the time that i am spending on it because i think i'm very guilty of just looking at screen thinking i'm being productive it was actually like six hours of deep work is probably better than 15 hours of fucking clicking between 25 different internet tabs so mate absolute pleasure Matt I'll put a link to Space Goods I think everyone should check it out we have a lot of retailers and buyers that listen to this podcast so yeah if you're looking for something new definitely trying to scale into retail so Rinhard and Barrett but I really want to be in Walmart to be honest so awesome thanks so much mate pleasure thank you so so much for listening to the podcast i really really do appreciate it if you liked that episode only if you liked it please do give it five stars subscribe tell all your friends families foes next door but one cat dog whatever please tell everyone about this podcast it means the world to me and i really want to understand what your pain points are as the new wave of challenger food and drink brands please do hit me up on LinkedIn, search Dan Pope, and hopefully we can together create a more meaningful and powerful podcast for the next wave of challenger food and drink brands.

1:43:52Thank you so much.