Building Solo Past $1M in Only Year One: Help an Operator Out

27:12But the only way that's going to happen is if there's a real financial incentive for them to do it that's very clear to them. And that's your job. Your job, part of the sales process, is to help everybody that you're selling to understand how this is going to help you make more money to really go all in on me. and the roughest stretches in our growth with Simple Modern have been when we've just been thinking through the lens of like, how do we make more money? And when instead we just kind of come at it from, okay, how do we help Target make more money? And when we do that, inevitably our numbers grow as well.

27:50So anyway, that would be my advice as you're thinking about these partnerships. I think you're kind of in real time going through that realization of that deal that you did in the past. Like if I was gonna approach one of these other companies and be like, I want to make you a bunch of money. And I think that if I help you win, I'm going to win in the process. And here's how I'm thinking we set it up. That's one of the reasons why commission deals are like one of the clearest win-wins. It's like they have to generate a sale, but they know they're getting, you know, X number of dollars every time they do.

28:18One is I would probably raise the price even higher than I said earlier, right? I might even take this product to 3 ,500 bucks just so that you can then give$1 ,000 off as like an evergreen offer, right? Like, and look at Eight Sleep. I think the N8 sleep now is$4 ,500 as like an entry price for the latest model, but they're always running some sort of get$800, get$500, whatever. And then to tie it to Mike's point, this product, because of the high price point, is just very compelling from a commission standpoint. Like this product actually might work on TikTok shops because would somebody rather try to sell literally a thousand rich wallets or like one of these?

28:56You know what I mean? like you may like they have to sell hundreds of my products right and you know your thing especially if you're gifting one of these or you give them like a sweet deal to get in i think you can just make amazing content with it to keep going with that thought sean we had a product earlier in the year that just went kind of nuts on tiktok shops and we were trying to understand why it went nuts because it wasn't selling a lot in other channels but it was just kind of blowing out there's so much content being produced about it on tiktok shops and it basically went back to one person posted a video and sold like 10.

29:30And then a couple more people posted videos and one of them sold like 50. And then there was a person that sold 100. And what our theory is, is there must be some kind of software or chat groups or something where when somebody hits one of these and is like, hey, I just made$3 ,000 selling this product, they're like letting the listserv know or like everybody's looking at some kind of a software. And then it just exploded. so like but but it just kind of illustrates like if you're a creator you're like i am not this is a non-profit like i'm doing i'm using my time i'm doing this so i can make money and i'm going to go and post about whatever i think can make me money so when you've got something that has such a big upside like you make a video that pops off and you can make two grand off of it for selling a couple of cold plunges like that's really big leverage um so i think sean's right like i think that the high price point both works for and against you.

30:23And it could be the very thing that helps you to kind of lure some creators into spending some real time pushing your product. If you're scaling an e-commerce brand today, ads alone aren't enough. After Sell focuses on the one moment that every brand already owns after checkout and turns the post-purchase moment into more profit. Monetize every order with post-purchase offers and thank you page experiences without disrupting checkout or hurting conversion. Enterprise-grade tech used by Gap, Ticketmaster, Macy's, and Target, now driving results for brands like True Classic, Hexclad, Ridge, and Jones Road.

30:59I would know. This is the reason I ended up buying three pans from Hexclad instead of two. Aftersell has already generated over$1 billion in additional revenue for e-commerce brands, revenue that doesn't require more traffic or higher cap. So, check out Aftersell and tell them that the operator sent you. Go, Chris. Go ahead, dude. We're going to keep talking if you don't jump in. Yeah, I know. I've got a couple of questions about that. The price point is definitely one I'd love to kind of dive into a little bit more because I started selling the Home Plunge, the original product, now we have two, at$2 ,500.

31:33That's how I launched in 2025. Really not much room to run any sales there. And so then it didn't take long where actually the tariffs happened last year. So I panicked, raised the price$1 ,000 to$3 ,500. That was in April of last year. I sold zero. It was also when I had just turned on Google Ads and I was still boosting Meta. So I don't really know how much that's connected. Now, I've played with the price quite a bit with offers. The reason why it's at$26.99 now is because before that, it was$200 off. When you go to checkout, tax gets added, the price that that first digit turns from$2 to$3.

32:15I don't really have the data to prove this, but my intuition tells me that when they get to check out, they see the two turn to a three, it ruins the sale. And that's why I've started doing the 300 off. So I'd love to have like some sort of guidance. What you're telling me right now is great. Raise the price$1 ,000, but then get$1 ,000 off. Is there any more strategy to how you can really nail in what the offer should be, which is, I think, probably the next question on the list. I have a friend, Kyle, who has a company that sells Murphy beds. Again, this is like a$2 ,500,$3 ,000 purchase. And we were talking about it recently.

32:52They had like basically a perma sale that they ran and they wanted to get away from that strategy. And the kind of TLDR is like, it just did not work. Like the perma sales strategy really works when you get these really high price points. So I think that's probably going to be part of the offer. I think when you're shelling out thousands of dollars, you want to feel like you're buying at the right time because it's hundreds of dollars of impact. So now that isn't whether that means you're on sale all the time or you're planning to get all of your conversions when you kind of announce a sale and you're kind of like rolling those.

33:31I don't know, but I don't think that's uncommon to you. And, you know, like it's just as you get bigger and bigger, like the other thing, you are kind of capped on the top end by like there are solutions that are five, six, seven thousand dollars, right, that are like more permanent. So you do have some bounding. The other thing here is like I really would be curious how scale can get your costs down because that could meaningfully impact your business. When you're creating a new product that has not been manufactured at scale, what's your landed cogs on it? Well, this year, unfortunately, the shipping tripled.

34:10There's this new oversized weight, but we're working through that. Assuming I get back to the original landed cost next month, it's around$1 ,300. Okay. So my guess is that that can go down$300 or$400 with real scale just based on my experience. Maybe I'm wrong. And that's meaningful, obviously, in your economics. So to me, that's always the tradeoff that you're having to think through is like, is getting more scale and getting my cogs down, is that the lever? Or is going up in price, taking my unit volume down, but taking up my nominal profit per sale, is that the better strategy? And I've seen it be either answer depending on the brand.

34:51But I think that that's where your judgment as the founder or CEO is going to come in. You need to kind of figure out, hey, which of those levers is going to drive more over the next year or two's growth? Is it going to be getting more efficient or is it going to be just like, I just get my margins up on the sales that I do have? I'll just say on the permit sale, why is every master store always going out of business? Why is every furniture store always going out of business? And why is there a Toyota-thon every single month, right? And it's like, it is just when you have large, infrequent purchases, you have to make every customer feel like it's a good time to buy.

35:30And it's just the way of the world, man. I love that you're doing this because it was actually just maybe two, three months ago where this concept occurred to me. I was seeing some of my competitors running perma sales. And I just thought, I don't want my brand to have the sort of cheapened effect of always being on sale. But then I realized that, wait a second, people aren't coming back to buy another home plunge. Like this is a one-time purchase. Which is exactly why the perma sale thing works. The long consideration periods and the lack of awareness about the market is exactly why that strategy works.

36:07Like you can't run a perma sale on milk, you know, like it doesn't work that way. But on like very illiquid markets, it really works because, you know, I have I may not think about cold plunge prices again for the next nine months. You know, like it's just not a thing that I'm thinking about daily. So if you're like, hey, this is the market, but it just so happens that today is your lucky day. You know, it's 25 % off just today. Then they're going to be like, well, great. How lucky am I, right? Yeah, and also because you're dealing with low conversion rates, anything you can do to boost those conversion rates really matters.

36:40You know what I mean? Like, you know, Ridge, maybe 2 % of people are going to buy a wallet to land on my website. You might be 0.02%. It just takes way more effort. I mean, we talked about this. I had an eight sleep in my cart for five years or whatever, right? Been like, ah, do I want to spend four grand? Like, ah, I guess there's a sale. So I do think it's just, it's a way of the world. And that's why, like, you control your site, you look at your site way more. It's really just experimenting with how high you can go and then how much of an offer you can have, right? I do think there is, like, the shift between two and three is big, right?

37:15$2 ,000, whatever,$3 ,000, that's obviously more money, right? but I do think we could just work on that and then to your question is how do you figure out the offer? Always be testing the offer, right? The offer is after product, offer is everything, right? Like offer informs ads, it informs landing pages, it informs everything and like the offers, I can't, like we talk about ad creative way too often I think because like that should just be always on and you always should have new ads, It's like you're always going to find new ads and those ads are going to die out. They're like flowers blooming.

37:51But like the offer, one good offer can 10X your business with enough scale. And can last for a decade. You know, like there are businesses where like they, we were actually talking with Trevi about this yesterday. There's a great article, The Four Horsemen of LTV that Bill Gurley wrote years ago. And the point that he makes in the article is that like every business, their financial model comes down to like four or five kind of variables one is how many users are you acquiring what is the revenue they're spending what is the margin what is your customer acquisition cost what is your turn it's kind of some combination basically of those things because that gives you LTV and it helps you to understand how the P &L flows out but the the picture that he gives is imagine these four horses are all kind of almost like a compass facing different directions and they're tied together by ropes and they're all pulling in different directions.

38:43And so when one horse pulls in a positive direction, it's going to pull another of the horses in a negative direction. So what do I mean by all that? Well, like if your LTV goes up, usually what that means is your cost to acquire also goes up or, you know, there's some kind of or retention goes down or whatever. Like a lot of times you have to trade off one of those things to get the other. And that's what offer is. Offer is kind of trying to find the balance of these things that's best for your business. And ironically with Trevi, we had a point where we were trying to sell 28 packs at$19.99.

39:22And we did all of this testing on a bunch of different things. And all it took was us introducing 20 packs where one of them was$9.99 and the others were$14.99 and it totally unlocked the business. but it's so crazy how nuanced this can get. I think has been my big takeaway that like the right offer that's, you know, just a little bit more insightful sometimes can double your business and it's so counterintuitive, but that's what we're really dealing with is psychology here. So especially on big purchases, it's all psychological. Like if you think about it, it's kind of like you're a starving person that's got to catch a fish.

39:58And when you see a fish that is kind of like looking at the hook, You've got to get them on the hook because it's just so important for your business. So anyway, I think Sean's right. I would ruthlessly, relentlessly test on offer. I would try everything. I would not be afraid to try extreme things because any advancement in your understanding of offer will probably disproportionately power your business. And if you get that in place now, then when you scale, scaling is so much easier if you've got the right offer. I'll just add, because this recently was a discovery that's been working as well, is that for anyone else that's looking at or is doing high AOV products, when I was having my ad traffic go to the PDP and they would land and they would see$3 ,000, my bounce rate was 95%.

40:45And this year, I've started to shift ad traffic to my homepage, where they get more of the education and benefits first before they go to the PDP. and it's counterintuitive, right, for e-com, but it's actually been wildly successful. Nouns rate is down to 70%, conversions are up. Well, and there might be a room for counter-positioning here. The question is, what are you comparing this to? And it's like, well, if I'm comparing the cost of this to the cost of a knee surgery, right, or then like, well, all of a sudden, $2 ,500 looks really different when I'm thinking about spending five grand to have my knee replaced or, you know, and then all of the physical therapy or whatever.

41:23And I don't know what that is. I don't know if that's like a realistic thing that you could claim, but what you're positioning it against, I think really matters in terms of how people think about the value. Most AI tools right now are all promise and no delivery. You know exactly what I am talking about. Super fancy launch videos. This is why I'm loving what Rich Panel is doing. They have AI and support smashed together, made it practical, made it useful, made it valuable to brands today, not on some future promise. and instead of asking you to spend weeks writing prompts and uploading help docs and babysitting, they flipped the whole script.

41:59Their AI builds your support team for you and everything it needs. I've watched it. It works. It's freaking amazing. Rich Pedal even guarantees 50 % of your support volume will be automated by AI within 30 days or your money back. I call that a no-brainer offer. The pricing is also kind of wild, about 20 cents per conversation instead of most other vendors being like$1 to$3, which is a little nuts. If you are interested, go to richpanel.com slash demo, not for some generic demo, but to actually book a call and watch them build your actual support team. Once you find the offer that works, you'll feel it in your entire business, right?

42:35And unlike ads, ads are literally like doing crack. It's like a little hit every single time where the offer is going to be durable and last for a very long time. So find that offer. And then on the counter positioning, I think you fit at the perfect place in the market because the cheapest way to do a cold plunge is you put ice in a bath, right? And the people selling buckets are$500 or$800. And what don't you get there? You don't get control. You get the mess, the cleanup. It's outside. You have to be outside, right? That sucks. And then the most expensive way is you compare it to knee surgery.

43:09I think it's a great one. I think that's an amazing angle that you should definitely look at. It's like, look, it's going to be cheaper than throwing your back out when you try to pick up your kid. But also, going to a spa or sauna clinic or whatever is$200 a pop. So this pays for itself in a month, 10 sessions, right? And then the custom machines are$5 ,000 or$8 ,000. This is bringing the custom machine comfort into your existing bath. I think it's an amazing angle that I think you could really take to the moon. So I love that. You brought up conversion rate going up, landing people on homepages.

43:43Yeah, you should have dedicated landers, right? So like, yeah. And video sales landers, right? VSLs come from traditional old school affiliate marketing where they're landing on a very, very long landing page. And like there's a video from you explaining why you built this, why you got into it, taking them on the journey before they see the price, right? Like you're auto playing that video at the very top of the lander. We did this way back in the day with Quibids. And at one point it was one of the top 10 most visited sites in the world for like a week or something. We were pushing so much traffic.

44:20But it was like you hit it, immediate video that auto plays. And that is kind of the very introduction to what's going to happen next. I love that you guys are hitting on this right now because this is so like so many people have been bringing up IMH strategy this year because they're the big dog this year. and they're running so many different creatives, but they have an ad budget that just blows the roof off of me. And so at what point, at what budget, can I start doing exactly what you're saying, a different lander for every different problem to solve? Yeah, you don't have the budget for that right now, but you should definitely have a lander, right?

44:54You should have, and so homepage versus lander, that's the first test, right? You can set up that A-B test pretty quickly. You've already done homepage versus PDP and you've realized homepage is better. and now it's just to do homepage versus lander. And then let's say homepage wins, great. Homepage versus new lander. And you already have that ad budget and it'll cost you$1 ,000 to figure out which one's actually gonna drive better results, lower balance rates, higher conversion rates. And then it's just those incremental improvements every week trying a different move to the lander, right? I think Mike's painting you a beautiful future where you have tons of ad budget and we're gonna have the female focused one, the other one.

45:32But I know your business, you're only spending a thousand bucks a day right now, right? So it's like, look, we can take some time to get these learnings. You don't have to jump into them right now. But eventually, we'll get to a place where the lander is outperforming. And then that is another doubling of your business. You have an offer. You have a lander that actually works. That alone is$5 million a year. The beauty of only doing$1 million a year right now is there's so many ways to win. You only need to do one of these strategies. And now your business is five times bigger. Can I just quickly ask you, going back to your TikTok comment, um sean the last time we talked you had also mentioned tiktok shop and i haven't done it because maybe i'm thinking about it the wrong way i i simply just can't mass seed my product like it's too expensive to mass seed so is it still it i haven't done the research i really haven't even looked at it is it still possible to do it without mass seeding the product on tiktok to creators yeah you definitely can because it would just be people doing um like green screen voiceover being like like hey i got into cold plunging here's all the benefits here's a way to do it at home, right?

46:36And then they're just showing your videos. It obviously would be better if they have one and getting into it. But you're right, you can't see this. That's why I would have you film videos every Sunday. And it's like, you're setting up the camera, you're getting into the cold plunger, showing how it works. And now that is also a B-roll that your affiliates can pull from, right? Or it's stuff that your own account can post, right? The brand account should post sales videos. And look at - Sean, did you write on this? You're right on. And you prove you can sell it. You prove you can sell it, Christopher.

47:09And then you go to the affiliates and you tell them, Hey, I can't, it's too expensive for me to seed it to you, but, um, I will, you know, like you work out something where they pay it back through their commission on the first one or two sold or something. You kind of find some way to finance it. Maybe, I don't know. Or you let them buy it for cost. Right. Yeah. That was the other thought. Yeah. You'll sell some of them. Like if you're, if you're there posting, I think, this is a great product for TikTok, just the viral nature of it. The fact that it's a no-brainer, that you just like, it works inside your house.

47:41Like it is the perfect one that kind of goes well there. The problem, but obviously the massive price point, right? They're going to expect this to be 800 bucks or 400 bucks, which is like can't exist. But I think - I think you just realized a missed opportunity that I've been passing up on, which is I get at least one, but usually multiple. You just see creators every day that message me and ask for a product so they can create UDC, but nine out of 10 times, they're super small. They're just getting started. I think what you just suggested is something that I could at least try, which is say, hey, you could buy it at cost, create the content, and then pay his health back and see how that works out.

48:16Yeah, and once you start posting, you're going to have people in the fitness community who want these things, right? And just be like, yeah, hey, look, these things cost me$1 ,500 to make or whatever. You can buy it, and it'll be the best price ever, and just please post about it and tag us. And you could probably sell a thousand a year just doing that. You know what I mean? It's like, it's a pretty good business. Okay. We went through, how do I break my dependency on paid social? Not going to happen. We went through, how do I get into B2B channels? Not wholesale. I think we've got some good ideas around affiliate.

48:49We talked about how do I get into big box retail wholesale? I think the only place that's really going to work is Costco. I'm happy to make the Shields intro, but like Mike's right. Costco's the way to go. and don't waste your time with the Best Buy right now. It'll end up just bankrupting you. One thing you asked that we didn't talk about is, should I sell my$2.7 ,000 product on Amazon? So expensive product on Amazon. Mike, what are your thoughts? There's a bunch of different ways you can use Amazon and you can use how Amazon is set up to benefit you. This is not a product that you're going to ship into Amazon so that they can FBA it.

49:24And typically when you sell on Amazon, you want to use FBA because they give you preferential algorithm treatment and they take care of the fulfillment or whatever, but this makes no sense here. And in fact, the one way that this could not make sense for you would be if you sent some of these to Amazon because the storage fees, you have to sell them, whatever. But if you set up on Amazon as a fulfilled by seller, what that means is that you don't have to send them any inventory. There's basically no cost, okay? So there's no downside if you're set up as fulfilled by seller. So now the question is, how would I use Amazon?

50:00And this is kind of a sneaky way that you could use Amazon. Maybe you use Amazon not to try to sell any, but to establish a market price. It's on Amazon and it's$3 ,999. But I'm going to somehow reference that on my website, that here it is on Amazon. It's got 10 reviews. They're five-star reviews,$3 ,999. But today it's$2 ,700 on the website because the perma sale idea, what you have to do is anchor them to an idea of what's the value. And the thing that's great about Amazon is Amazon is shorthand for kind of like the public ledger of like, how do people think about this? What's this thing worth?

50:45So that might be an example. I'm not saying like necessarily like that's the answer, but that might, and if you sell some at$4 ,000, all the better. But like Amazon for you at this price point is likely any sales you're going to get are going to be a derivative of your brand. And so I actually think the most effective way to use it short term might be that it's as a framing for your website. Or you might find that just putting it on Amazon at the exact same price point as your website that you start selling some because some people are like, if I'm going to spend$2 ,700, I want to do it through Amazon where I know I can get my refund easier or like I trust that this is legitimate.

51:29Like I just feel uncomfortable giving a website I've never been to$2 ,700. But the great thing about being fulfilled by seller is that you can change your price basically as much as you want. There's no inventory in there. There's no risk. And so it just kind of gives you a public facing billboard where you can tell the story that you want to tell. And that's how I would think about it in this stage of the business. But personally, I really like the idea of using it to kind of establish, hey, the market price for this thing is way up here. And you're going to need to get some reviews on Amazon.

51:58So you're going to need to think about how to do that because you need some evidence that people buy this thing and like it. But once you have that, it's a pretty valuable asset. And it's never obvious to me why Amazon can't be part of a successful solution of selling any product, even if you're not trying to do a much of sales on Amazon. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are coming. Are you ready? Not in the normal marketing calendar offers prep sense. I'm talking measurement and attribution. Are you even going to know what winning and losing looks like when the big Q4 season hits? Reality is the businesses that win set up their measurement solution when the times are slow, not the night before the big weekend.

52:39There's a reason for this. You see, with Northbeam, you're getting a totally independent, completely new set of ad performance numbers with infinite look back windows. That means that the longer that the data grows, the more valuable it becomes. So when CPMs are spiking in November, you will know precisely where every dollar is coming from while your competitors are guessing. This is important. Black Friday is one in the summer, not the day before. Book a demo with Northbeam today. The link is in the description. Go check it out. it is very common for brands to sell for different prices in different channels and there is a reason why brands do that because it's advantageous to the brand and like i think that people really under people really overestimate how aware customers are of what you're doing with your pricing and in general but especially in different channels like i don't know what ridge's best buy pricing strategy as compared to their website at all.

53:38Like I know, Sean, we talk about Ridge a decent amount. I have no freaking clue. They could be charging 50 % more in Best Buy. I have no idea. And this is the way the customer is as well. Like they're just going to be, especially in something illiquid like cold plunges, they're just not going to really have any understanding. And in general, like almost all brands are kind of cluing into this idea that unless you have a really, really, really mass product where the awareness is so high that people start to kind of expect it to be a price that different channels have different price points that work for that channel.

54:11Yeah. And one of my hesitations is also just, I don't think I've ever purchased anything that's over a thousand dollars on Amazon. I'm curious to know what you guys' take are and if you know people that have, but I just, I guess my sort of, again, intuition is that maybe people aren't shopping for high AOB products on there and it just wouldn't even appear because of the lack of search demand, but I could be wrong. I think there's another explanation, which is like, you just don't buy many things over a thousand dollars on the internet period. Like, are you doing a bunch of over a thousand dollar purchases on independent websites?

54:41Probably not. You know, like it's, and that's why this is hard is it's just, it's very rare in your life that you spend 2 ,500,$3 ,000 just at one time on a thing. And like, that is, that is going to be challenging no matter what. If you go the other side, like I think trust matters more, the higher the price point gets. And so you either have to like one of the ways that Amazon can be great is Amazon does have high customer trust. And so like there's strategy where you're putting things on Amazon for the same price that you're putting them on your website. And I would bet that you would pick up sales.

55:19I guess the way I would kind of answer this question the best, Christopher, is by asking you a question. What would you see as the downside of using Amazon as a tool to grow your business? It would be the bigger margin cut as well as, and truthfully, I've really only ever had like one bad review that came through my review system, but the lack of control of reviews. Those are my two big things. I think the review thing is real, that when you get on Amazon, on your the one kind of vector that you do have to manage is you have to make sure that you're keeping that review up but there are ways i think to do that that are not excessively heavy lifts and can this uh this is a great time to actually segue into my support question because the review part of it i think the reason why i've actually only ever had one bad review is because i put so much manual effort and time into the current customer service so like instantly replying to emails, instantly returning calls, picking up the phone, everything myself.

56:23And so that is one thing that I'm like hugely curious on. How do I build a system around that to where I can get my time back, continue to grow the business while not losing that high touch and like really high quality customer service? We'll wrap up on Amazon and then we'd love to get the support on Amazon specifically. Mike said the killer line of this podcast, there's no product you sell on the internet that Amazon couldn't be a part of. It's just the reality is half of all GMVs happening on Amazon. I would just list it as a seller fulfilled item and somebody's going to buy it. It's like, yeah, it's going to be low volume, but your whole business is low volume right now.

57:02I think you'll pick up one, two, three sales or whatever, right? You'll just pick some up. Now you don't want to sign up for Vine because every Vine review is going to be a thousand bucks or whatever. But the other advantage of Amazon, specifically seller fulfilled, is you have way more control than FBA. And what I mean by that is, and this ties to your support, you can put your phone number in the box. You know what I mean? Amazon's not going to check that because it's not touching their warehouses. So you're starting fresh and this product will always be seller fulfilled. This is never going to go FBA.

57:34You just have way more support. It's technically probably against terms of service. I don't think you're going to get banned because they're never we're going to find out, right? Now, tying it to the customer trust, customer support you're currently offering, what's funny is you're the most AI-pilled guy I know, right? Like you're doing full-blown AI everything, but you will not do AI customer service. So maybe explain that to the audience. Yeah. So starting this year when Cloud Cowork really became accessible, even as an engineer, I know a little bit of code, but I don't really code on a normal basis.

58:07So Cowork was a huge benefit because it allowed me to just, when I knew I needed to improve my organic search traffic, but I didn't know how to automate that or do SEO or anything, I could literally ask coworker, hey, can you give me a detailed instruction list on how to build automated agents to not only write blogs, but teach me how SEO works, build the system, and it gives you a blueprint. So if you don't know AI for anyone listening, just ask it to tell you how to do it, and then it'll help you do it. And so it's been brilliant for every operation that I do as a business owner. Google, Meta, SEO, emails, web design, literally everything.

58:48And the reason why I haven't touched customer service with you yet is because my own personal experience with any sort of automation, like everyone knows the pain point. I don't know, I just got off a flight a couple days ago and you're trying to call the agent and you have to go through a phone menu. you have to hit a number five times and then says, hey, is this what you said? Yes. Is this what you said? Yes. You know, it just never understands you. Things have gotten better now, but that pain that I've experienced over time with so many different customer service systems like that makes me so timid to do any form of AI in it.

59:22Definitely open to exploring it now because of everything I've seen in advance over this year, but please, you know, educate me. I think it's gotten a ton better, Christopher. And like the way that I would do it is I would say this via email, it can be as good as you at this point. You can give it the context, you can show it your conversations. And like, I think there might be a hybrid model where it's like, if somebody's having a really hard time and you want to have a voice call and you're like, I still want to do that myself. I don't think the technology is there. Totally. But it like, there's so many ways to create a really good, really responsive customer touchpoint with SMS or email that is automated, that has the voice that you want, that has all of the context and information.

1:00:11I would make it part of your onboarding process almost, you know, like that there's some kind of like automated loop via SMS or email that you're like walking them through things. So I would say, look again, we did recently did an episode where we ranked a bunch of different areas of business and said, you know, among the four original kind of nine ops guys, how would we rank them? I think when we combined all our lists, customer service was like second or third. um so it's it's been consistently something that we've really seen work so but but again like maybe there is a hybrid here here for you where like there is some more personalized touch but i do think also the technology is going to get to the point where like it can all be automated and the customer can have just a better experience than even you personally can provide and and you're saying it but like hey your business cannot scale if you're doing customer support you know this Like, that's just the thing you're going to like.

1:01:09So one of the most helpful things I think for me to do in the business is to set constraints. One of your constraints is you need to be doing zero customer support in three months. And once you have that constraint, it's like, OK, well, this is my limitation. And so I'm going to do the absolute best I can around that limitation. But I'm just, if I can get to 80 % of me doing it, if I can get to 90 % of me doing it, whatever I can, that's what I'm going to be aiming for. But I'm not going to allow myself to do customer support because that does not drive getting new people in the door. That does not drive scaling or any of these other things that we're talking about.

1:01:44And so throw a constraint in. You'll be surprised at how good you can make the system once you like really embrace that constraint. If you're a founder using AI for analytics, you know the trap. Clawed plus BigQuery gets you answers that are fast and wrong. Or slow and right. Never both. The problem isn't your analyst, your data, or your tools. It's your business context gap. Sarah's IQ fixes that. Connor, who runs my marketing, cut his reporting time from 10 days to 45 minutes. IQ answers in plain English, built on your business logic, consistent, deterministic, and fully transparent with the assumptions in SQL behind every answer.

1:02:22Same answer whether you ask, your CFO asks, or your board asks. And if you're a Claude user, the IQ MCP is ready to plug in today. Claude plus BigQuery isn't enough. It needs your context. Get it at the link in show notes or go to saracenalytics.com to learn more. You're already A tier at Claude Co-Work, Claude Code, all that type of stuff. What I'll say, though, is if you're going to, if it's going to be a reason to stand out in this business, just hire somebody. it's like you can hire somebody in Mexico or the Philippines or South Africa and you can run the AI system completely on all email tickets or whatever but when somebody calls either you answer or they answer and like we're talking it might be 15 bucks an hour right and we've just outsourced something that you're spending all your time on right now because you can either serve your business or you can grow your business you should probably start growing your business or you can charge for it Christopher You can charge for like the white glove concierge support level where we're going to have somebody that'll talk you through things.

1:03:28It's an extra whatever. But like when the more that you're investing your time in customer support, what that really is, is margin compression that you're not thinking about as margin compression. Automated email slash human voice is exactly the model that I'm imagining. The reason I haven't pulled the trigger on it is because my competitors actually advertise that they have U.S.-based support. So I've also advertised that. And the moment that I go overseas because that's what's affordable, I lose that element. And so I'm wondering if I'm putting too much weight on that credential and I should just go for that.

1:03:59It sounds like I should. Yeah, look, and if US-based support is important, you don't got that many customers. Just hire an assistant for 22 bucks an hour and just be like, hey, sometimes people are going to call you and they're going to have questions if you can't figure it out and call me. It's like, you know, at your ticket, your scale of business, it's a couple orders a day. You know what I mean? And on all those orders, only 33 % should have a problem or need a solution from you. So it's just, it shouldn't be that much. And this should be the easiest part to get off your brain. So you could scale that number up.

1:04:28Yeah. And sometimes, Christopher, like the positioning, it's like, do people really want US-based support or do what they really want is they want somebody that can fluently speak with them about their issue, right? Like the issue behind the issue is I just don't want to talk to somebody where I can barely understand their accent. And so like, I'm having trouble communicating. That's what they're really saying. And so like, I actually don't think it matters where your person is. I don't think it matters if it's a computer. I think what people want out of the experience is I have questions. I want to be able to get answers from a sentient being that's gonna give me relevant information and not say, oh, you have one of these three paths.

1:05:06And if I can't cram you in one of those, then like, I have nothing for you. And so like, maybe that does mean that you're using AI voice type stuff eventually. Maybe that does mean that you're using somebody that's in a different part of the world. I don't think any of that matters. What I think I would do is instead I would emphasize that you could emphasize that you have 24-7 support or that there's something else about your support that you emphasize. You could emphasize we have a 99 % customer support satisfaction score, right? All of these things speak to the real kind of question behind the question, which is if I have an issue, are they going to help me fix that issue?

1:05:44And if you can kind of effectively communicate that the answer to that is yes, I think it's kind of like the made in the USA. People think made in the USA really moves the needle. It doesn't generally on sales. So like, I think it's probably more people are like, I wanna make sure that like slave labor didn't build, you know, it didn't knit my shirt or whatever. So anyway, think about what is the thing behind the thing and then you can do messaging around that. So you just saying this, I've known this and you saying it out loud is making it come true because the 24-hour, 24-7 support is huge. I used to answer calls on the weekends and I'd be out, you know, cycling around Golden Gate Park with my wife and I'd like have to pull over and pick up the phone.

1:06:24And so I'd be like, hey man, like my filter's leaking when I just, because people unbox it on the weekends. That's when they finally have time. And so that's when they get to it. And it's like, my filter's leaking, the system's spilling water. And it's because they didn't put the O-ring on. There's nothing wrong with the product. And just to have someone be able to know that and answer that so I don't have to stress myself out over the weekend would be amazing. Going back to it, I think if you could say email support from our founder, or email our founder, I think that it knows way more than any sort of phone call.

1:06:54So when you buy from Ridge, you'll get a customer service email. It's like, hey, how was your order? And then the next one is a Sean F. So from our CEO, hey, is everything going okay? I don't send that email. that is automated with AI, but it gives people a chance to like capture any issue up front and just set the system up. And like that inbox can be monitored by either AI or somebody from the Philippines or whoever, right? And just gives you like more of a, catch people before they're trying to call you. Like that's what I would love to do. The last question you have, and then we'll wrap this podcast up.

1:07:28How do you build enterprise value in a non-recurring product, right? Right. And I'm there with you. Mike's there with you. Jason's there with you. We have products that have no LTV or subscription tied to them. And we have to build enterprise value. And the way you do that is EBITDA. It's like, it's the only way, like you will be traded off a multiple of EBITDA. Right. So what you need to do is grow top line revenue. So you can grow bottom line revenue, and then you'll have a business worth millions and millions of dollars. Right. And it'd be sick. If you come from the software world, it'd be sick if we were getting multiples on revenue not happening anymore.

1:08:05So the only thing you can do is you can build a very profitable business and you can take dividends out and then somebody will give you probably 8x your EBITDA and that's how you can become a multimillionaire. Mike, any feedback on that? Yeah, it's hard. But I think enterprise value usually comes from, in hard goods, comes from brand and the intangible assets that you have. And so this would be if you're really seen as the authority in cold plunges or like one of the authorities, there's probably enterprise value that that drives in different ways because it opens up how you can monetize. The other example that we didn't talk about, but you're seeing some people start to experiment with that is, are there ways to pull in recurring revenue with your and the two main ones that you'll see people try is we have an app that you pay for.

1:08:56Eight Sleep does that or we're going to sell you a supplement. So we're going to sell you a supplement that if you take this and then you cold plunge, you know, whatever studies show that you get a 15 % better benefit. Those are probably the two paths that are the most practical for you. Yeah, the latter is something I'm exactly working on right now. There's two sort of products. Nonetheless, though, it would still require the core product, the home budget itself, to be sold. And so that's the constraint I'm constantly working with. But I love the idea. Just one thing that is fun about bringing a hardware product to life from scratch is that you kind of understand the full picture.

1:09:34And I'm starting to think about just crazy new products that can be sort of within the home plunge bucket, but that can live on its own, more consumer affordable to just expand across a large town. Well, and a really interesting idea here, I don't know if this is possible with your product, but if you can sell something consumable with the hard good, then you can really reduce the price of the hard good. If it becomes more of a razor blade and razor holder, I don't know, whatever model, razors and razor blades is what I'm trying to say, then you can actually do some interesting things with the cost of the core thing.

1:10:10so like i can if you did have some kind of like uh supplement that went with it if you're like hey you go ahead and you sign up for quarterly subscription on the supplement you can get four hundred dollars off your cold plunge it's like well wait a second this sounds like a really good deal or whatever so there might be something there i don't know uh but i would certainly be i would be experimenting chris you you got a plug too what are you doing besides cold plunges man what else you're working on okay this is more of a product development plug um in in all the the AI aspects I've implemented into my business with Homeplunge, I've actually started to package them into a web app.

1:10:49And so for anyone that doesn't matter if you're starting a business, running a business, I'd love to get your feedback to help develop this further. It's called AgencyAI, and the web address is agencyai.app. You can sign up for free, try it out, and it's going to give you access to SEO, meta ads, statics, and video. and a whole bunch of stuff. So I'd love if you could try it. Give me feedback. Help me make it better. AI has completely transformed my business. It saves me$15 ,000 to$20 ,000 a month on services I was paying for. My conversion rate's over 125 % this year because of it. And so I just can't say enough about it.

1:11:30I love doing it. And I'd love if anyone listening could help me continue to build it. I think the biggest takeaways to the audience are you control your price. you need to be testing that so you can unlock offers. Offers are the evergreen thing that will drive results. And when you find the best offer, you will just feel it in your whole business. Ads are great. I love ads, but ads are those quick hits. They will die fast. Offers can last forever. Don't get super sold on wholesale right now. When you're doing a million a year, it can totally kill you. If there's a place for it, I'm happy to make intros to small select retailers that I think could drive results here, the shields of the world.

1:12:11But don't go to Best Buy right now. I deal with them, I love them, but they will bust your balls way too hard. No, he's totally right. Focus on offer. Focus on one thing, get awesome at that first. I think Amazon has a place in this business. Mike said it. If you sell something on the internet, Amazon can sell it too, right? Half of all GMVs there. Very few things shouldn't be there. And right now we have a high-priced product that serves a great need. We just need the attention aspect of it. So plug in as an affiliate offer to the whoops of the world, the eight sleeps of the world, you know, the equinox of the world.

1:12:46We can get you on Huckberry or Govex, all drop ship. You give them a thousand bucks. It's just money in your pocket. I think that's great. And then make TikToks every Sunday, record seven hours of TikToks, post those. You'll be your own number one affiliate. That'll unlock affiliates for everybody else. Sell it at cost to affiliates. I think I just summed up the episode. If you're an operator and you are building, check out what Christopher's doing when it comes to AI stuff. It's gonna be linked in the description where we're gonna send an email about it. It's gonna be all over your face. But he went through this in the past 18 months.

1:13:18He built a business from scratch and he's scaling it up and he wants to share those learnings with you. So he came on here. We tried to help an operator out. Now maybe he can help you out. I love it to full circle. Guys, thank you for being here. Thank you for an amazing episode of the Operators Podcast. Talk to you guys later. Goodbye. What is it my north?