S16 E5: What $100M E-Commerce Brands Know That The Others Don’t

33:52And it's like, even in that group chat, there's not a lot of conversation around like, what do you think of this tool? What do you think of that tool? There's a little bit, but for how many people are in there now? Yeah. Cause you know why? But that's separate. Cause like everybody else is going to be like, ah, who's getting paid to say that? You know? Yeah, yeah, but in this, like, it's kind of the tone's been like. When it's a tight group like that, it isn't. Like, you know what I mean? That's like where you can talk about the stuff. Yeah, we kind of like, I started it and I kind of set the vibe around, like, don't come here to like spill any shit.

34:27And then like, but it's funny, this subject in general, because when I was at an agency, your newsletters were like the most poppin' thing of all time. and and so i worked on 30 brands in two years it was stupid yeah and um but like our founder and some of these ceos we would like uh i would hop in the work and like i just i just don't sundays were the worst stuff and then you get an email and be like okay bart like cool that we're doing this but sharma said dude and i'm like fuck this guy i know you know the biggest have you read about these five reasons why advertorials no you know what the biggest The disclaimer I need to always put is like, this is what, based on what I saw in the last maybe two to three weeks, this might not apply, but like find the golden nuggets that apply to you and take them.

35:14Use if useful. But they're so easy to do that. You like subscribe to a newsletter, you go on X. That's what I knew. And then you look at your business and it's like, oh man, I just, you know, I just saw 10 optimizations today. Why aren't we doing this? And it's like, I don't know, we, at Dad Game, we're always sending pictures of racehorses with blinders on. because it's like our goal is to sell hats and build community those are the two things yeah right and anything that can help that truthfully help it not like test out and try and maybe it'll work let's do that but everything else is a distraction that's good i think that um my heuristic for this right now and and the heuristic i see amongst like pretty good operators a lot of it comes down to we keep saying the same thing experience people who've done this two or three times have a pretty good filter just on their own right they also have a good network of a handful of people they can text and say have you tried this is it good right um before they like take demos right but uh tactics is a big one because everybody is worried that they're not using like the most the latest tactics and stuff like that and they get newsletters like yours and then they do what i call flyovers right founder flyovers where they're like why aren't we doing this with our landing pages forward yeah you've ruined many of the agency people i used to get those too yeah i used to get those flyovers i used to get how come we're not spending on cheddar tv yeah third love is doing a four hundred thousand dollar sponsorship we should be doing that like yeah no we shouldn't absolutely not let third love waste their money yeah exactly time for the retention tip of the week brought to you by instant if you run an apparel brand Here's something most people get wrong.

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37:26And number three, include a small incentive to come back within 10 days. Brands that nail their conversions flow for returns, they see 30 to 40 % of their returners convert into repeat purchasers. The ones that don't, those customers are gone. Their return was their last interaction with you, and it was a bad one. If you need help building smart post-purchase and post-return flows, Instant makes it super easy. Their AI-powered retention engine generates personalized emails for every shopper automatically. Check them out at instant.one slash Sharma. So here's my heuristic for it. In e-commerce, there are like five channels that work really well.

38:03And anything besides those five channels is probably a district, like there's like a couple others that I'm like, yeah, maybe. Okay. And the five channels are meta, Google, google amazon tiktok and some form of influencer currently i think the best kind of like roi on paying for influencers is on long form youtube don't forget app loving currently kind of cooking app loving is bubble app loving is bubble for me and snapchat has been in the group before it like it kind of hangs out on the bubble gets in comes out right like but if it's not one of those five like dude if it's pinterest and you're like should i test pinterest i'm like it's gonna whatever time you spend testing pinterest is going to end up being kind of a waste of time because here's what's going to happen you're going to spend five or ten percent of your budget there and you're not going to know what it's doing you're not going to be able to tell your attribution tool isn't going to tell you pinterest isn't going to tell you nothing's going to tell you like it's better for you to just vote like not even spend put it out of your mind don't do it right yeah yeah and like then yeah landing pages can help but then there's like a certain you could you should kind of say like so that's one heuristic is like if it's not one of those channels like good chance you can just back burner it from a channel standpoint and then what i like to do is i like to say like pick a section of the business in marketing.

39:19And I section it up like this. So paid acquisition, organic, like organic content, site, so like landing pages and stuff like that, and retention. And in a quarter, be like, this is the area I'm maximizing in. And do all the tactics there. All the other ones, save. That's for a future quarter. But everybody's on board when we do this quarter. like where do we feel like we're lacking at the high level the most okay we think it's retention yeah every tactic that comes up every tool that we think might be able to help every agency that we think can teach us something or help us out every coach like we'll we'll try everything there just to like we're on this like sprint of information gathering and testing things and we put it through a filter that doesn't mean we test every single thing you know there's a filter and and like a network of people like you said can help a lot like yeah i tried that don't don't bother or whatever.

40:13But like, just do that for whatever the thing is this quarter. And like, everybody decide that ahead of time. And that way, when the founder comes by and says like, yo, why does our organic social suck so much? I saw this thing that Alex Garcia posted that we should be doing a social show. And it's like, well, that's not our focus this quarter. And we already decided that up front. Right. So like bookmark that for our quarterly planning, and we can decide if next quarter organic is. So that's the best juristic I've come up with for it. yeah i like that a lot yeah i uh yeah no no notes cool notes parts like ours is a three year long if it will help us buy a sell oh the only thought actually that came up is like the reason people don't do that is because they have zero patience yeah and once you get some traction and you have some resource to yeah then you think everything else is just a waste of time because you're like i'm speed running now but you're not yeah you're speed running it's gotta be really bad right now with AI.

41:08You know what you should, oh, dude, the AI especially. Like the tools for it. That's if they're using it. Like 95 % of people are still not. Yeah, which is crazy. I would say if you're gonna tinker around with AI, like still confine it to like, if I were using that heuristic, I would still say like, so at Royo this quarter, it was site, right? Yeah. So I would try an AI tool or like set up a cloud co-work thing that would go spy on brands or do something like that. That would be like, okay, was this gonna help us optimize our gross profit per visitor which is what i'm optimizing this quarter on site side i'm launching landing pages i'm launching pricing tests i'm launching offer tests like that's what i'm up to this quarter so if i'm going to play with ai at all it's got to help me do that otherwise and are you using ai in any of that stuff you just mentioned not no i'm not no uh i i i've been i i dude i feel a lot of ai fomo like i don't think i'm up on it enough like when i hear that you've got like four open clause set up yeah i'm like dude i don't know i chat gpt stuff sometimes i like just got into using claude co-work and i'm like this is powerful i could use this for some stuff do you use regular claude as well yeah yeah of course yeah claude i find chat gpt kind of unusable now yeah chat gpt in my head is like you go you go for a drink at the bar with chat gpt but like you go to the office with claude chat gpt why is that chat gpt is Hermione Granger.

42:29Well, I don't know. But my only reasoning I can think of is the anthropic guys are apparently x early open AI people. Yeah. So my guess is like, they left open AI, and they're like, Oh, let's make the more like office friendly version. Yeah. And to their credit, they do like they plug in with Fireflies with Gmail, Calendar, Drive, like Slack, everything. And so you've basically got a second brain you can use. Yeah. Co work is like you can use co work for some pretty simple stuff pretty easily. Right? Like I would recommend but like, again, and confine it then to your like quarter focus. You know what I mean?

43:01Totally. So like I might set up a cowork thing where I say, hey, like here's my, here's like Facebook ads library every week. I want you to like, go look at, go search these five brands, use it in Chrome, go search these five brands, tell me all the ads that they've launched, you know, and click through the ads and then go to the landing pages and tell me if they've launched a new landing. The other thing, like going back to the network and you mentioned like if you started a brand before and you have a network, like finding people that are well-versed in all this stuff. Like he could hit you up and be like, Hey, it's not worth it for Royal right now.

43:32Or I have a buddy who is like the head of, yeah. Is anybody using like a cloud code thing? Yeah. It's like helping with retention. Or like my buddy's like head securities engineer for Lululemon. And I'm just like, all right, let me know any other stuff worth for Amina right now. And he's like, Oh, you should maybe look at that. So like, yeah, the people that are already up there doing it, you should just hit them up and be like, I'm almost distracted by this. should I jump in and then you can get some better info that way. Because on our last round of shooting, you said you were just playing with everything, like all the AI, like the generators, the video generators.

44:03And I got stuck on five. And I'm going to be honest with you. I was like, I'm the worst person. I'm going to be obsolete next week because I'm not doing that. Yeah. You know what I mean? But I'm like, you have to confine it to your focus. Can I give you a real example of somebody who I talked to today and I think they will set up a clogged co-work thing? So they're maximizing in the category of, I'm going to call it creative. But they are, they do like viral apparel. Okay. You know what I mean? So like when a moment hits, they got to release a shirt type of thing. Yeah. And I'm like, okay, like how do you do that?

44:36And they're like, he's like, I just kind of use my taste. And I'm like, all right, you need to like take that out of your brain. Like go back and forth with Claude on it. Take it out of your brain and like set up some workflow for Claude co-work to go through on a normal, on a regular basis. So like every single day, twice a day, it's saying, hey, here's like four trends that I want to surface to you that like might be worth a shirt. Right. And I'm like, start there. And then over time, like maybe create a scoring system for like what you actually want to launch a shirt around and stuff. And I'm like, yeah, that will probably be a pretty simple setup for him.

45:12Yeah. And I think it will be incredibly helpful for him because right now he gets like basically four or five big hits a year. Right. And I'm like, can we make that eight or ten? Right. You know what I mean? probably just more stuff needs to come your way. Yeah, more context needs to be fed in. Honestly, the context being fed in is like, that's part of the reason why I think more people just need to play with any and every tool because you'll understand how the patterns of how these platforms work and how you need to feed information and what it does when you don't versus do. And like that first party data is about to be the most intense thing, right?

45:46Whether it's like two examples, It can be first-party data could be this conversation transcribed and fed into somebody's clod. Like somebody who asked this question could feed this whole conversation transcript. And that's amazing first-party context, right, that his clod is now going to have versus others. Another example is let's say you have Dadgang, and you're like, yo, I'm going to create a clod bot to come up with all my social media posts for stories, just for stories, right? And because it's stories, I want it to be more fast and witty and fun. So then you can go and create a Twitter account for DadGang and a Twitter developer account and feed that home feed from the developer API into Claude.

46:28And now Claude is just browsing Twitter as your customer, seeing what they would want to see or what kind of content they'd want to see and then use that to make creative and then post. Yeah. And, um... Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. Back to that. Like, first-party data, right? That is another form of, like, first-party data you can feed in. Yeah. But the more you can feed in, the more precise it gets. I do want to clarify something you just said. And you said that's why you need to play with any and all of these. Yeah. If you just sold your company and you kind of got nothing going on for a little bit, then you should be playing with any and all of these.

47:03All right, then I'll give you a list. Yeah, be more practical because people are busy. All right, go to Figma AI, go to Perplexity, definitely use Claude. I would check out Journey, J-U-R-N-I, getjourney.ai. I would check out Higgs field. I would check out Kiva K I V a. I would check out. Um, is this in order? Is this an unordered list? No unordered list, but they're all kind of different tools, right? Replit cursor lovable. Some are, are web route, uh, web creators. Some are for AI creative. Yeah. Some are, uh, like Figma AI. You can literally design now within Figma using a chat. Yeah. Um, and I would, I would, I would, yeah, even just those I listed, I would go play around with them and see where the limitations are.

47:45Yeah. And I would, I, here's, here's how I would structure like play around with because that's like a bit like how do I play around with it I don't even know sure um I would use something like Claude and say hey I uh have an hour this week I want to play with lovable I want to just like try something out with lovable or I want to try something lovable is a really easy one because you can do a project in there very quickly I want to try some of something out with Claude co-work uh what would be a good idea for me and especially if clog has a bunch of like you could ask chat gpt if it has more context on you but like um like i'm going to do this for an hour like what's something that could end up being useful for me even if it's just like organizes your inbox is that that useful no but like it's something play around with it so that you can do like don't go into it and be like let me push some buttons and stuff like that be like let me try and do something yeah help me set up my second brain within Claude.

48:41Help me build a landing page coming from Facebook traffic. Help me. Another one I did was like, you know, all these, because there's so many tools and people are going to continue to use different tools at the same time, there's no, there's no like USB stick or thing you can reference to keep everything consistent. So like, you know, create a folder of documents that speak all about your brand, your story, your tone of voice, your messaging, positioning. And then And you now understood how to create a memory system that you can then take as a zip file to every model you use. So it applies the same branding or tone of voice or copy, things like that.

49:15But yeah, I do think people should go in and figure out an objective and try to work toward it. Because if you have an objective like the landing page or organize my screenshots and rename the ones that are important and delete the ones that are not important, you're going to start to learn how they work and where things time out or where things fall or what you need to connect. yeah and um those are like those are like uh relearning the english language for the next you know 100 years and i and i would say yeah like to to kind of answer this person's question about shiny object syndrome what we're talking about is like you can go down this rabbit hole and get shiny object syndrome and be working on stuff that is not going to be helpful to you which is like you have to constrain it some way probably you need a time constraint on it and probably you need to say okay i'm only going to try and work on stuff that is in the product is then in the category of my business that I'm maximizing right now, which is creative or content or, you know, site or something like that.

50:08Just to dumb it down. You've got to get good at saying no way more. Yeah, for sure. Any, any founders that like have big brands. If you have traction, you do. Usually say, they usually end up saying that because it's so easy to say yes to every opportunity. And then, then once again, you're not working. You're just, you're just trying new things. The other one I'll add is Kive. Not, you mentioned a different one, but. No, Kive. kive that's what i meant not kiva oh yeah kiva's chocolate i think did you just think it was pronounced kiva be honest yeah i don't know all these weird ass names like i've only ever read the name chocolate brand i think oh yeah but kive has been kive is the one unreal insane for filler content yeah now another thought i had so like kive right like the photographs are almost too pristine and yesterday i was at a friend's office and he was shoot he was doing a shoot and the photographer put this spray in the air almost like hairspray and it's called atmosphere spray and then i was thinking wow how do you figure out like for a person who's just getting the kive how do you go figure out all the little things you can like now i can tell kive pretend there's atmosphere spray in the photo it'll feel more realistic like you almost gotta somehow study still the basics so that you can apply it in this world too yeah yeah the the really cool thing about kive and you know from from the the slack channel like i always post stuff i create in there And like the one thing is that you can take photography you find on like Pinterest or any photo you see on Instagram, like even one of your family.

51:33It should be like, hey, take this photo, keep the exact same feel of this photo, put X product on it. On, you know, in my case, it would be a dad gang hat on that person's head. And it is like 100 percent. Yeah. Yeah. Well, what's cool about that, Kaiv, is you spend a good amount of time defining the actual product image, right? Yeah, yeah. And uploading a ton of references, which Gemini doesn't, you don't do that on Gemini because most people just look for a one-shot response. But yeah, it's a sick platform. I tried the Google one, the Google Labs. Nano Banana? Oh, no, no, no. You're talking about Google Labs, the branding tool.

52:11Yeah, Google Labs branding tool, and they have a photo shoot tool within there now. But it's still like, hats are different. like you have stitching and realistic elements to it that like some ai platforms just can't get but but like we make a suede hat a corduroy hat and kive just nails the textures i'm like that's 100 bucks a month like it's ridiculous yeah do you run it as ads uh yeah but just for like product photography it's it's not great at video yeah plus you're not really supposed to yeah you know i love dad getting hats in a video and it's not a real person right right right those yeah there's there's i think some state maybe it was new york just passed a law on this yeah yeah yeah yeah that you you can't you have to like uh disclose if it's been a thing though like icon got in trouble for that too because it's like you can't you can't put fake people saying they love your product right right you already weren't allowed to do that i think but like you'd have to say it was an actor right already and now you have to say it's a fake actor now you have to say it's not even an actor yeah there's nothing going on just a computer um i like this question a lot so let me wrap on this shiny object thing yes i know more often um you just in real time watched us get shiny object syndrome on this podcast it happens to everybody and i think this like there is this world where like trying to be as efficient as possible all the time isn't the best way to operate a business.

53:39Like sometimes you do have to go down a little rabbit hole and be like, damn, I lost a half a day to that and I got nothing out of it. But like, that is what helps you gain context over time of like, oh, I can tell I'm down a rabbit hole. Let me pull out. Right. If you never go down a rabbit hole, you don't know that. Right. So, so I think you got to forgive yourself a little bit. Totally. When that happens. And like, sometimes. That's where the gold is sometimes too. Exactly. Sometimes you go down a rabbit hole and then three months later, you're like, hang on a second and a light bulb hits. Right.

54:07I always say that like super key roles in a company. And if this person's a founder or CEO, uh, uh, I was that it's the most efficient and inefficient person in the company. Right. Here's the best example I have. Um, I don't know how true these stories are. Maybe you do. There are stories of Mr. Beast going in just like sitting in Walmarts and watching how people like act in the candy aisle and like looking how often people restock his candy and stuff like that. And I think that there's like a story where he like made the boxes wider because of that, because he's like, oh, if I do that right now, they're putting two here.

54:43But if I make it a little bit wider, they'll actually have to put three and I'll take up more space on the shelf. And like, you know, it will like be like, so he could go to Walmart for five days and nothing could come of that. And it's just the highest leverage person in your company hanging out at Walmart. Or you realize, oh, let's make our boxes a little bit wider. And then not only will we be able to put two rows of chocolate in there, which I'm not sure if this is exactly the right story, not only we'll be able to put two rows of chocolate in each box, but they'll actually put three boxes up there.

55:17So we'll go from a row of two to six. And that will increase our sales exponentially in Walmart. right so it's like doing this thing that could end up being very very inefficient and then finding the most efficient unlock you know in the business totally that is the role of the founder and ceo so you do sometimes need to let yourself go down rabbit holes if you like if you feel like you're sniffing gold totally you know what i mean yeah and if you don't find it it's like all right fine you've built a bit of a skill set and you have knowledge now you learn more context yeah yeah I like this question.

55:52If you had 50K today to start a brand from scratch, how would you do it? And as of - We're all on red. Then start the brand. As of March, 2026, how would you start a brand with 50K? 50K, I mean, I would build a site and get a designer developer overseas, build a visual identity and a site for like 5 to 10K all in. Okay. I'd use pretty much the next 25 on inventory, 25 to 30. Yeah. And then use the last for ads. And you'd run ads. Well, it depends what it is, actually. If it's like, I've got 50K, you know, like if I'm in this. Are you sitting on a brand idea at all? Can you make this more real or no?

56:39Yeah. I mean, let's see. I am too, and I'll share mine too. Okay. Well, this isn't a real brand idea, but let's say you're starting like a kid's vitamin brand, right? You do the, yeah, design and site for 10. You spend maybe 25, 30K on your first PO. You go negotiate really good MOQ numbers. Ideally, you get, you know, something good there. You spend on boxes, you know, 3PL, and then the rest is just ads. Yeah, and you would launch on that ads? Yeah, because like a category like that, you can test it on ads. And then if it works, then you can do a proper launch. Yeah. I am proficient in meta ads.

57:23That's the thing I'm really good at. So I do gravitate toward launching on meta ads. But I don't think that that is actually the best way to launch a brand today in 2026. Like I do think TikTok is a better place to launch a brand. Totally. And if you're neutral, like you don't have a previous skill set in meta ads, then you should probably gravitate there. Yeah, totally. Yeah. And either make content yourself or be seeding product. Yeah. yeah Bart what do you think 50k you've launched you're like I would just put yeah yeah yeah well I didn't even need anywhere close to that so like I probably wouldn't spend it all depends what you're starting but like I wouldn't I think let me actually rephrase the question that they said yeah because the idea of this whole episode is like what are the like heavy hitters do that others don't if you had 50k to launch a brand and you wanted it to be one of those heavy hit like there you can launch a brand where you're going to make a decent personal income and it's never really going to get to 100 million you know but if you're like no my goal is to like make a heavy hitter brand and have like this huge exit in the end how would you like how would you deploy 50k inventory and ads as like the main places you spend because that's where you end up anyways yeah right so as your business grows we spent 750 bucks to start our business so it wasn't anywhere close to 50k that'd be nuts but like but as you build and you grow like your top top three expenses or whatever you want to categorize it's gonna like it's usually ads and it's usually inventory and then from revenue you're taking cash flow to buy more inventory but i wouldn't overbuy inventory for something that doesn't have you know some sort of early result so if you can somehow like half your inventory order to to test it to see if there's demand and then have a some agreement with your factory or whatever to like to re-up once that demand is proven then that's probably like a more efficient way to just have more cash still for other things as you're building but yeah i would still i would still go meta first and yeah um although tiktok's great i don't think it's great for every brand start yeah not not every no yeah like roy oh wouldn't have launched on tiktok yeah exactly because basically who we found traction with early on were 50 60 year olds who were like oh i can have lower blood sugar and and still eat bagels great not a lot of 18 year olds have that problem um the okay here's my brand idea all right so this is a i think that a business that could live on its own that literally anybody could go out and start tomorrow is a variation of an idea that I'll cite the corner office podcast for which is a super fun podcast if you like just like random business ideas that aren't necessarily e-commerce um he was traveling somewhere and he was like oh I saw this thing on the side of the road that said like hole in one win ten thousand dollars and it's just a golf like one hole on a green in a field and you're like i don't know 100 200 yards away i think it's 100 yards away yeah you get a bucket yeah and if you hit a hole in one you win 10 000 nice and the bucket i think is 10 bucks so they've mapped it out wow and and they're making some sort of profit on this yeah right i think you could do the same thing in a lot of different sports and i love basketball i think you could go to courts all over the country and be like three heads you hit three threes in a row I'll pay you a hundred bucks, 10 bucks to play.

1:00:51Yeah. And I think a lot, three threes in a row, I can take that. Yeah, you can kind of set it up anywhere. But a lot of people are not going to hit three. A lot of people that don't play basketball would do it. Three in a row is tough to hit. Like, look, there's some courts you go to, you're going to get hustled trying, you know, they can hit shots. But like three in a row, even for somebody - I almost think it's three out of five. This is basically the equivalent of that like - This was my variation. If you couldn't get somebody to play, I would say start on a make. You know what I mean? so three in a row you get to start there you go yeah so if you miss the first yeah your first make is shot one right yeah i think you could get people to play i've asked a bunch of people i hoop with like somebody came up to you and said that would you do it they'd be like yeah probably 10 bucks i'll take a i'll take a flyer on it but like and i don't know if that's the right math but you figure out the math where it's like i i like that 10 bucks to play 100 win three in a row if that's the right math where it's like yeah only one in 20 people win i have a margin right Already, I think that's a good business and it's good content.

1:01:49Right. Yeah. Now attach a brand to it. So everyone who loses, you're like, hey, man, sorry you lost. Here's my like shorts from my brand, from an econ brand. Everybody gets a pair of shorts, even if they lose. Right. I think this can be - Loser shorts. Loser shorts. Like, I can't shoot, you know, something like that. Or like a shirt that says like, I can't shoot, not a shooter. Yeah, yeah. Seg off. You know, like, and I do think like a comedic basketball brand would be funny. yeah like like slow white fat can't jump like you know that's what's on my shirt yeah and and so like uh everybody who loses like it's gets that um i don't know if anybody like i think you would have to make it cool maybe for people to buy it but i do think there's a bunch of people who would like ironically wear a shirt that says i can't shoot to their pickup runs you know what i mean um and and so like then you attach the econ brand and then i'm like i think you cash flow it just on the game honestly yeah and so i would i maybe would start this brand print on demand maybe just because it's like um quicker yeah this includes like physical activity setting up hoops and all that stuff so i think i'd go to cut like i think where i would spend my money is i would hit up some of the street interview people here in new york yeah to go to washington park and to go to the rucker and go to like oh my gosh you would rake some of the famous courts see i hear that and i'm like i'd rather sit in my boxers and make money yeah that's true well i'm not gonna go to the courts yeah fair i'm gonna pay pay some people to go yeah how many shots we get off today yeah well look actually i might go to the courts because i might just think that was need more shots please fix that is fun but it could be like the debate table at the college campus too where you're like you can't make three threes prove me wrong yeah it went a hundred bucks that's a cool idea too yeah you could go to every city like honestly just the content play there could you could end up building make a brand called three threes yeah just off that three threes yeah no that's so this is my idea for an e-com brand right now i think you could probably just do the game and launch it that way yeah i mean um and i think you could pod the brand if you want but you could buy some inventory like you i'd be fine to spend some money on like a low moq yeah the thing is if you do in e-commerce like an apparel brand and this is why i'm like okay to get to 100 million you do have to have a bit of a movement for sure you know what i mean And either you have to have a very innovative product, which I have no ideas, or you have to have a bit of a movement like dad came.

1:04:11And I'm like, I think that like hoopers who would like ironically wear a shirt that says I can't shoot or things. I think that's a bit of a movement in the basketball space where it's like a very cocky space. But I also think there's people who are like, yeah, no, sag off. That's fine. Like and then they'll hit a three on you anyway. You know what I mean? um like i i and it's more of a it's like a movement within that subculture um dude you should i mean utah has a lot of basketball dude i i have explored that look if somebody's listening to this right now and they're like that sounds dope i want to launch this brand with you what i have is some money and no time so if you've got time and then let's team up hit me up on x or whatever uh but like yeah i think that's i really want to see you try this i know i know you don't sounds so fun i know yeah and i the problem is i'd probably be like well i actually want to go do the content so then i would just spend all my time to go to the first one for sure the launch of your thing but like especially with some of these street interview like agencies now it's like you probably could be like yeah just like crank out tons of these dude and you could probably get them to give you a bit of a discount on the pricing by being like i'll split like off of the game like whatever we make off the game i'll split that with you totally you know you could go hire all the big basketball creators in different tier two tier three cities to go run these i know yeah yeah yeah and so that's once i had proof of concept then i would just go to like i mean tristan jazz is too big but like other like especially people who are that plays everybody one-on-one yeah yeah mk dude yeah oh yeah he would he i was thinking of him the whole time yeah these guys are too big that you're saying yeah you got to get the next tier down that's okay although that might be a good like face of the brand you know yeah yeah you could uh you guys both you know jack appleby yeah yeah he like i was like he might not be a bad person to partner with on total there's bucket squad too yeah right he's got his own right yeah you're like there's these and one guys i don't know if you've heard of them no but they're gonna yeah yeah hopefully bucket squad who already has a brand but these big creators could like easily just hear this and then pop this up at their next thing you know yeah no i and i literally think you like what i like about is you don't have to be famous this is my current idea it's like a carnival i'm very hot on this idea right now i just don't have any time to do it but um this is how i would look for some opportunity like that where it's like could i self-fund this with content somehow or could you know i don't know could i like what's a different angle you have to have either product innovation or a movement so how can i make a movement in a subculture or something like that that that's where i would look for so i would spend with 50k maybe a bit of money on inventory but i'd spend almost all my money on people doing this content.

1:06:51And if I spent 50K on that many videos and it didn't work and I wasn't making money on the game, because then I could potentially start to just self-fund it with the money we make off of the game itself. I think you need$100 in a basketball. Yeah, right. Maybe slower, maybe slower, but yeah. But then if it wasn't working at 50K, it'd be like a good signal for like, this isn't going to work. You know what I mean? Like with that many videos, this doesn't work or this isn't going to work. Totally. You know what I'm saying? That's what I would look for if I had 50K to start. The content behind that is so funny.

1:07:22Where can I say this isn't going to work if I get there? The content behind that would be so funny. I think so, yeah. It's like watching people try to make putts and stuff. Yeah, that they're so confident because it looks not that hard. You can do this with putts. You can do this with soccer goals. Putts is another soccer goal. Yes, literally whatever sport you like. Just think of a challenge where people are like, yeah, I can do that. Field goals. Yeah, totally. Tennis serves. Think of every 30 to 35-year-old dude you know who used to play high school sports. Who thinks he still has it? Right, right, right.

1:07:50Who's like, oh yeah, that's easy. I can do that. For sure can't do it anymore. Yeah. Goes and looks at their high school baseball trophy in the gym. Yeah, yeah. You get that$100. Yeah, yeah. Okay, I think this is a good around the table question to end on. Yeah. What is one thing you wish every e-commerce brand owner understood about scaling that almost nobody talks about?

1:08:16I would say like, you know, blinders on. Like you have to have blinders on even when you're scaling. You have to be very good at filtering through what you're doing and what you're not doing. Like that's really most of the game. The stuff behind that is what either gets you on a good path or gets you lost in the sauce. And I think a lot of people just assume they can like, you know, they can just copy what other people on the internet are saying has worked for them. and they think that's scaling or it's working for them. So it should work for me. But, you know, unless you put in your own, like 10 ,000 hours into each part of that, you know, you can't really like get to a point where you're scaling and like doing it properly.

1:08:53Yeah. Like you might just be scaling and running right into a brick wall that you don't know is right in front of you. Yeah. Yeah. Like, so - Blinders on. Blinders on. Yeah, I guess. So like, yeah, Yeah, give me an example of how, like, again, contrasting someone who's like, has momentum and then like fizzles versus someone who actually like hits$100 million. What does blinders on look like? Is it like the blinders fall off and that's why they fizzle? Yeah, blinders fall off. What does the blinders falling off look like? You know what I mean? Like, what do they get distracted by? Yeah, blinders falling off could be, oh, hey, we should do the CTV test.

1:09:34They're going to give us$10 ,000 in credits if we spend$20. Yeah, spending all the damn credits everybody will give you. Yeah. Or, uh, Hey, we should, um, our competitors on Tik TOK and snap. How come we're only on meta? We should be on there too. Um, you know, like that kind of stuff is, is where you want blinders on. And like, to be honest, scaling just means you figured out something that worked and then you're putting more fuel behind it. Right. And like you're, while you're scaling, you should still always be testing other ways. Cause like scaling is really just like, uh, it's like a vine, but like, you're going to have to build other vines off of that.

1:10:07that one vine is not going to always take you to the end. So I think, yeah, blinders on and figure out what works for you. It's not going to be the same thing for everybody. Yeah, if I were to tag that, I think a good framework is more better new. So you should just try and do more first. Before you do anything even better, you should just try and do more of whatever's working. And if that's not working to do more of it, you should try and do it a little bit better. And then new. New is the worst risk-adjusted bet. Totally. You know what I mean? Yeah, I just heard on another pod that like, you know, when people are like, oh, no, that already exists.

1:10:40We shouldn't do it. It's like, well, why not? Something that's already existed. That means it works. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's a good one. Bart, what do you think? Blinders on is probably he stole yours. Yeah, you might have taken mine. You said it earlier. A little bit. But like for I'm speaking for the people kind of in the in the beginning of stuff. Like, you know, we went from 100 hats to almost a million hats sold in three and a half years. but the one thing we like kept true and working at an agency and stuff was just like i would i would speak to ceos and cmos and founders all the time that were always worried about the other shit it was like always like so we did a million last year how do we do two million next year why let's come up with some arbitrary number that we have no proof no you know what the worst is uh a cfo being like so our sessions look to be up by 16 coming in march what can you expect for may sessions on the website yeah like what are you talking about i think i think a lot of scale and all that talk about going to the moon and all that shit needs to be like it needs to calm the fuck down in general like because everybody's talking about it but when we started building dad gang i was like let's see what happens right rather than like oh my god we sold 100 hats how do we sell 200 okay 200 how do we sell a thousand right like that was never the goal was to like wake up the next day and think of a of a scale goal immediately and i and i think a lot of people get an early win and then start thinking oh my god i need to be like eat sleep or i need to be like casper or i need to be like hard goal birds or what whatever you want to be like but like but stop thinking about scale so much honestly be in the business be working on the business and i think a lot of the time it does show up organically yeah and then when you do find wins that do work for you, lean into them more.

1:12:28Like, let's dumb down what scale actually is, like you just said. Yeah, I have like a, I guess, kind of hot take that like, I hate projections and I think most brands shouldn't do them. Fully agree. You are talking to one that does not. I know, and I love it. Most brands shouldn't do, most brands, the projection's not worth the paper it's written on anyway. Projections work if you've got like insertion orders for media with guaranteed CPMs and impressions and all that bullshit. So our 3PL asks me for projections. And this is why people do them. People get pulled into it by their vendors and you got to just be like, I don't know.

1:13:01No, no, no. But I will say I love our 3PL and I like doing it for them because they need to know during the holidays, do they need six people on the line? Do they need 12 people on the line? But what I do is like the simplest math ever. I'm just like, all right, last year on ads, we spent this much and had this many orders in December, right? We've grown as a brand. We have some momentum. I'm going to project like a little bit of a lift and a little bit of more spend. And so like if I'm spending this percentage more, I'm expecting this many more orders. I literally wrote this out on cardboard one time with a Sharpie.

1:13:36And I sent him a picture of a piece of cardboard. And they're like, all right, cool. Thanks. And then other than that, we're just. What I always say about it is like if you're projecting because you need to know how much stuff to order, that's like one of the only legitimate reasons to project. Yeah, it's physical. But you don't have to be ambit. like you should under like you should err on the side of under projecting that yeah it's way better to have more demand than supply than more supply than demand yeah you leave money on the table both ways but one problem is objectively worse to have and yeah uh so like just under projected a little bit but then people also tie that to their projection that they do to give their team goals yeah and so then they feel like they need to be over ambitious with their suppliers they get themselves in a cash i have a whole soapbox about why i hate projections they're just like ego numbers right right right yeah and so it's it's like yeah for the most part it's not like worth even doing and another thing is that you spend how long doing it when you could have just been like working on the business all that time yeah like i like what you said not like easy docs focused on focus on easing being in in the business like focus on activity or if you have an actual activity if you have a decent accounting team or an accountant just be like hey dude i need projections for the 3pl can you look at last year yeah err on the side of being conservative there you go boom tell cloud to do it and all the other platforms no literally um i think it when everything or uh what's one thing you wish every e-commerce brand owner understood about scaling that almost nobody talks about if i'm thinking about what do people not understand about scaling a brand to a hundred million that nobody talks about it's that it's just a different life and you probably you most likely don't want it you know what i mean i would say the answer is on the question, it's the brand part.

1:15:18Like no one knows how to build a brand. They sell products on ads mostly. Well, if you scale to 100 million and that was your intention upfront, I mean, some brands just like bop their way there, I feel like, you know what I mean? Because they just had so much tailwind in their category. Yeah. But if you're not one of those, I almost just, I almost said somebody, but then I was like, that's kind of mean. Yeah, you can think of like Liquid Death building a real true brand. Do you understand, though, that that's a different game that most of you don't want to play? No. Like, if you're watching this.

1:15:51Like, 40, 50 million raised up front. Yeah. You know, you're basically underwater. Yeah. Even building a brand like Jolie or, like, Eight Sleep, it's like, that's a different game that you probably don't want. Like, what you probably want is to make a lot of money and, like. No investors, no board, no nothing. And have time. Yeah. Yeah, and have time and be able to kind of do what you want and not have money dictate your decisions and not have like investors, board members, you know, having to feed a 50 person team, not have that dictate your decisions. I always wonder what's like, what's wrong with having a decent income brand that you can run for a long time.

1:16:27Doesn't get clicks. Yeah. When you post a Twitter thread about it, it doesn't blow up. Yeah. And people hate on it more because they're like, wait a second, I'm struggling to raise$2 million only to do$4 million and have investors breathing down my neck every other week and asking for a board deck while you're making$700 ,000 of personal income every quarter. Yeah. Yeah. You know what I mean? I know a guy that sells car wash, water filters. Nobody's ever heard of him or his brand. Yep. And guy easily brings in$2 million a year in personal income and nobody knows about him and he does not care to blow this thing up at all.

1:17:07Right. And he's been doing it for a long enough time now to be like, okay, it's going to stick around. My favorite one that we covered in season one is Rock Auto. Yes. Rock Auto. It's just like an online auto parts store. They launched in 1996 and they just own every keyword. Dude, they probably do 50 or 70 million with like four people because they just have all this SEO. And I'm like, nobody's ever even heard of these guys. Just crushing it, you know, all online. And it's like, yeah, that's the business you want. Now that's bigger than, But like you could do 5 million, 10 million and make a pretty good personal income and have pretty good freedom.

1:17:44100%. And that's probably the life you want. A lot of those people in Ecom Fuel. You know, like I remember one guy, he sells like truck radios on Shopify. Makes like six, seven million bucks. You go skiing every day, lives on the mountain. Just like, dude, that's a sick life. That's the life you probably want. And there's an article that's like, I don't know, back when articles were like really like blog blog posts were like oh that was impactful i think about that once a day yeah yeah back in back in 2010 uh somebody sold his business i can't remember this guy's name uh and he wrote an article called rich versus king of the world and i think that's what it comes down to is that like most people just kind of want to be rich they don't and when i say rich they want to have earned the last dollar they ever need to earn right like they They want to like not have money dictate their decisions and they want to have time freedom.

1:18:39Right. That's what most people want. Some people want to be the king of the world or have their like brand, their company, their thing that they built be the king of the world. Now, some people start out wanting to be rich. And then when the opportunity arises to be the king of the world, then they want that. And that is a category I could put dad gang in where it's like you might have started out just wanting sort of like money and time freedom. But then it's like, OK, no, we have this opportunity. And and like that doesn't come along very often. And it's okay to switch what you want. But most people don't actually want to build Jolie or A-Sleep or Feastables or something like that.

1:19:12You know what I'm saying? Most people like probably just want to make really good personal income and like be like the guy who sells, what did you say? It was like car radio or what was it? Yeah, truck radios. Truck radios. Like, dude, that's who you want to be. Or like water filters for car water. Like that's what you want. The boring industry. Nobody's coming for you. Nobody's knocking you off. I had a buddy nobody knew about either, and he just sold iPhone screen protectors on Amazon and, like, no brand, nothing. And he was, like, not huge money, but he was bringing in, like, 30K in revenue just by himself, didn't barely touch any product, and then, like, kept a few thousand for himself here and there.

1:19:55And then was like, this is awesome. Now I'm going to do phone cases. And he just kept going and going. And it's just kind of like, yeah, there's a lot of happiness in the building of boring businesses. And you can become, your brand can become this huge legacy brand over the course of 40 or 50 years, right? Like Carhartts or Stanley. I mean, they've kind of taken a downturn now. But like that can happen over the course of a really long time if you just are like, let me just build a business that like supports my life that I want. isn't there i i'm not nothing's coming to mind but aren't there a bunch of like businesses that started making one thing and then like 40 years later they're known for this thing yeah i think stanley is that is it yeah okay yeah they were always making some kind of like i think they made like uh like tupperware people put their lunches in okay construction workers yeah yeah but like yeah no anyway that's probably like the main thing that i think is like especially if you have a brand in the early stage and you're like man what do they do it like that all the people ask me the question like what are they doing i'm like they're doing what you don't want to do yeah exactly you know what i mean exactly you don't want to live like that guy you've asked me what breeze is doing all the time and i'm like i have insight on breeze and i'm like i just don't think you want that life yeah you know what i mean yeah and no offense to nick but they're playing a game that like most people don't really want to play yep you know or nick and erin i think they're killing it but they've decided purposely to play that game yeah totally yeah yeah yeah would you say that's like a common thread amongst these brands that people always hold up and say how do i be them for sure Yeah, for sure.

1:21:23And the answer is literally like, look, this is not, we're not building the next like electric car battery. There's a very proven thing of like what to do to build an e-commerce business. And the fact is most people just don't want to do those things. They don't want to get the eyeballs. They don't want to get the views, film content. They don't want to seed it out. They don't want to do this. They don't want to go negotiate for a partnership. Like it's just things they don't want to do. But the things are so obvious. We probably covered the entire thing on this podcast. Yeah. You know what I mean?

1:21:49If you watch one podcast and build an e-commerce, Yeah, it's probably the things are all there of what to do. It's just so you got to do them. Yeah, I always tell people are always like, you know, like, how do we get to the from the 20 million to the 50 million mark? Well, you got to focus on building a brand and you got to get eyeballs and you got to do this. Like they're like, oh, yeah, we thought that was the right. Yeah, you knew that was you already knew that because you got to 20 million doing that. Yeah, you just have to do it now. Cool. Nick, I don't know what you're up to. Just I guess we're pretty deep in the podcast to say that, but you just sold Charmer Brands.

1:22:19Yeah, not that long ago. and you're, I don't think you have a new project yet, yeah? Nope, not officially. So like, do you still do the newsletter? You still do the podcast? Yeah, yeah, still got the newsletter. Okay, yeah, I guess tell people. Well, honestly, that's what keeps me like super in the trenches too. Right. But. Yeah, so tell people where to find you then. Yeah, just hit me on Twitter, Mr. Sharma on Twitter, nick.co, my site. Nick at nick.co is the email. Write.nick.co is the advertorial thing. Yeah. Whatever you need, I got you.

1:22:47Thanks for listening. We'll be back next time to cut through the noise on CPG, retail, and e-commerce. If you enjoyed this episode, why not share it with a friend? And be sure to subscribe wherever you listen so you don't miss the next one.