E121: Building a $100M Brand. AGAIN.

24:33But you walk down any grocery store aisle and it is nothing but opportunity. Like literally shelf by shelf, slot by slot. Just look at those products and there's probably an opportunity to go make a better, different version of those things. And you can do that in Target. You can do that in Walmart, Nordstrom's. Like all of these stores are just inspiration heaven. Yeah. And your advantage is if you're listening to this, you're probably digitally native, right? So like, you know, we, the last episode we talked about how wholesale is in a very difficult place in America and it's because Amazon ate all the sales.

25:07So I would walk down the aisle and I would find products and be like, how can I make this better, different and digitally friendly? Right. And, you know, we'll talk about, you know, Smuckers has Uncrustables. I think, I think Smuckers owns them. You know what Uncrustables are? Yeah. Okay. I didn't know that was Smuckers. Maybe I'm wrong, but it was a big private equity deal that Uncrustables got bought. There's now a wave of lookalike products that are done better for you, right? So someone was like, oh, I'm going to make Uncrustables, but better for you. Great. That is different, right? You could also take the reverse.

25:45I'm going to make Uncrustables, but adult. You know what I mean? I'm going to make them worse for you. I'm going to make them worse for you. I'm going to make them gourmet. I'm going to do it. You could do that a million different ways. as long as somebody's buying the thing, there's going to be people who want it, you know, in various flavors. And if it's in a grocery store, it is designed to be average, right? It has to be average. Like if you go to an Irwan, you're going to get, you know, a premium product. If you're going to go to, I don't know, any low end grocery stores that are nationally known.

26:14Grocery Outlet, I don't know if you guys know that. Or an Aldi. I think Aldi is a good example. If you go to an Aldi. Aldi, Walmart. Yeah, you'll get a less premium version. But if you go to like a normal grocery store, you'll just get the average version. something so you can go up or down to be better or different yep that's great so let's assume you have the product well we're going to skip the product development part because product development is not something you cover in depth in any way so like you can go out and get something made now you've got a product sean what do you do so like this is where it's like okay i've got something how do i figure out how to best sell it to somebody yeah and this part this is probably what's changed the most and it changes the most every couple of years um you know when i was 18 people still would make something and then try to sell into a wholesale account because they were they had the checkbook to buy things yeah they will not take a brand brand new brand off the street they're not interested in that right um then it was like okay facebook ads or amazon both both of those happened around the same time it's like okay i'll find customers via advertising advertising was cheap amazon was growing so you could just find customers there you could just start getting sales both of those have probably been priced out of a new entrant right and now we're in the now we're in the era of like you got to find your own first sales and it's probably going to be from native content and community so if i was making a new brand i would document the whole thing i would record every video i'd post them on social i would talk to the camera for probably two hours a day, right?

27:48Just like live logging, going live on Twitch, doing it because you will, the algorithm will reward you with probably a thousand sales. If you do that, if you put the work in, you make sure it's from video, you have some good product, it'll find somebody who's interested in it. Yep. So that's probably the only way to get the ball going right now. Okay, so what about like testing messaging offer? How, how because I agree I think it's like I'm I'm I agree with it because I'm assuming that you're in a category like I know a lot about this category I know a lot about this product at this point so I kind of have a pretty good idea of like this is how my thing is better or different and I also probably know like where are the people like me or like the person who already buys this stuff like where are they on the internet right so like that could be twitch it could be reddit could be like anywhere where like you could build could be tick tock if you're great at that, depending on what you're good at for sure.

28:45Um, but what about the actual message? Like, how do you figure out if what you're saying is going to convert? How would you test that? Yeah. Dude, it's hard, right? Like this is, this is chicken or the egg. Shouldn't you test messaging before you commit to making the product? Probably. Right. Probably. It's like, that's a good point. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, cause I'm like, I'm going back to, we're making the adult on Crustables. So it's premium ingredients, right? It's like the best jellies, it's almond butter, it's like artisan bread. You and me have made that company. And then we put it out there, we start making the TikToks about it.

29:20We start trying to sell this to people how good it is and how it's better for you and it's healthy and all that sort of stuff. And then people don't like it. You know what I mean? What do we do, right? It's probably, if you're smart about this, you would test all that messaging first. And you would actually probably build landing pages and run some amount of cold traffic to see what works better for lead gen like what are people some kind of paid traffic some kind of thing that like says yes somebody's going to buy this yeah waste 10 grand up front to make sure you're not wasting your time that's probably the correct thing to do waste waste five to ten just to make sure you don't waste a hundred or two hundred because like moqs and like minimum order quantities are probably going to bury a decent amount of cash initially you're probably going to screw up your first product as well like that's it's likely not to be the best thing you've ever made on the first run.

30:11Yeah. So we're making colostrum uncrustables, right? We figured out a way to combine those things. They're on subscription. It's a great product. It's a great category. We love it. We're super passionate about it. We do have to make sure that other people want this thing, right? And yeah, we have to test that messaging probably in ads before we place an MOQ. We have to have that data that shows that people will buy this and subscribe for it and like just get some positive signals on it. Yeah. You know, yeah, go ahead, Matt. I was going to say, so what about, so I like the like content community thing.

30:43I think that's great. One of the things I had written down was like a flood the zone creator strategy. So like what I like, so let's say you're not the customer. So like I'm 44 year old white male from Canada. I'm making something for like 35, 30 year old women. in the U S so like me documenting is probably not the best sort of content strategy. Like, no, they're not going to buy from me. I am not them. So what I came up with was like, you pick a narrow niche of content creators. So like, I don't know, let's say it's, it's like food creators, like cooking and food, but the niche in that is, uh, creators with young kids, like it's women with young kids.

31:29So like all the content is like very family cooking with kids oriented. The flood, the zone would be who are the top 50 and how many of those can I get? Like, how can I get deals done with as many of those? So you kind of create like a bit of an echo chamber, like the brand and the product is everywhere to people who are in that little like lane of, of social, of, of content. Right. Cause that's how, that's how the algorithms work. Like you can sort of make this perception that you are everywhere. Yeah. Yeah. And you can start incredibly small with those niches, right? You start as low as possible and move up.

32:08Going back to category, we've talked about consumable products, products you will not be profitable on on first purchase. And I think there's two different categories. Categories that are durable goods with a high enough AOV where you can be profitable on first purchase. That is a Ridge Wallet that's a Pila case that's hex clad pans. The other category is the Trevis of the world, they will lose money on first purchase just to get you to try it because there is some sort of repeat. And if you're starting a brand for the first time, it's really hard to be in that second camp, right? Because if you're starting a durables brand, you probably need like 300 grand.

32:48That's just like realistically what you should plan for. Do a first order, do some marketing, do some ads, pay for fulfillment, that whole thing. But you'll be getting dollars in the door while you're shipping that out. If you're doing a consumable brand, the adult Uncrustables, it's a million dollars plus because you're talking about seeding to these influencers. Okay, well, we're going to pay them, right? We're going to, maybe there's equity deals with a top influencer, that whole thing. You have to get some sort of distribution. The game is distribution. Why is Cluey crushing it right now on Twitter?

33:16They're throwing parties just for distribution. Intention's everything. You have to get that. So you're going to have to pay for it somewhere or the other. And then also, You're going to get less money on every purchase than you're putting out the door. That's the biggest challenge with consumables. At some point, you catch up where the repeat rate is equaling your growth rate. You can become cash flow neutral, but it's going to take you at least a million dollars. Yeah, I agree. I think consumables is very attractive. Anything you can put on a subscription is obviously attractive, but also terrifying in consumer goods.

33:51because your capital, like your working capital needs are just so high. And that's why, like you go back to the beginning of this. That's why consumer is, that's one of the reasons that consumer is difficult because working capital in consumer is a pain in the ass. You know, there's like, your working capital in SaaS is basically zero. Yeah. I mean, it's not much, right? Like it scales beautifully. Consumer does not, like no part of consumer scales nicely. Like it's pulling teeth the whole way up. So completely agree. And if we, okay, so like, oh, sorry, Matt, I just want to say if we could make a flow chart, it's like, I went to, so the flow chart's called, I want to have a hundred million dollar consumable brand.

34:32And then it's like, step one, do you have a million dollars? It's like, if the answer is no, it's like, okay, you have to do, you have to do a different category then you have to do a durable good, like a pan or whatever. Right. You know, you have to knock Jason off. Yeah. You have to be able to make your money back on every sale. Right. And if you do have a million dollars, then you can talk about this consumable stuff. This is coming from me and Matt. If we were starting it today, each of us would choose consumables. 100%. So NorthBeam just launched clicks and deterministic views, breakthrough attribution model that deterministically captures view-based performance of ad spend.

35:12This is huge. This means advertisers can attribute conversions and revenue to ad impressions and not just focus on one day click. This is a really hard problem to solve. I'm so totally stoked that NorthBeam is on. This new advanced multi-touch attribution model expands on their clicks only model by incorporating proprietary in-app events from participating ad platforms. And these third-party events are validated by NorthBeam's first party pixel data offering a more complete and accurate view of marketing performance. I just think this is so useful in today's environment. So many ad platforms have idiosyncrasies in user behavior that result in engagement metrics being more impactful on conversion than most conversion tracking software can measure.

35:58You know, platforms like Snapchat and TikTok, impressions are extremely, extremely important. Users are likely to click off of those platforms to make a conversion. But research from Snap and TikTok both prove that users have high brand recall off ads they've seen on those respective platforms. And rather than leaving the app instantly to make a purchase, the users are making purchases later, leaving conversions that are unattributed to ads without Northbeam's CDB model. And so Clicks and Deterministic View is going to help you track the real value of your ads on more impression-focused platforms.

36:32So check it out with Northbeam. let's go a little deeper on capital though so you said durables roughly three hundred thousand dollars this is probably going to cause some people to get with us but why'd you pick that number where is can it be lower can it be higher like obviously it can be category dependent so like do you have do you have like goal posts that we could sort of point people in between when it comes to like capital yeah well my number comes from that's how much money ridge wallet raised in our Kickstarter. So that's the only capital that's ever gone into the business was that Kickstarter we did, which was 300 grand.

37:11So it was pre-sale of the items, about$300 ,000. And that paid for the first order to ship to the customers, the second order to sell, and then some money to pay for ads to sell the second order. So that's where the$300 ,000 comes from. I mean... Yeah, it's funny. For a Pila case, I think I put the first 250 grand in. I think I put the second 250 grand in too. but that was about that was like first 250 went in then within nine months it was like okay we've got cash flow coming but again working capital right it's like i still i didn't have a factory at this time so we were buying inventory and it's like inventory and balance sheet just starts to balloon a bit as you grow these businesses and our growth rate was so fast that we weren't generating the cash required at the speed to like get inventory from factories and you know our work like our conversions like cash conversion cycle so it was you can definitely start with less you're gonna go slower yeah like you're gonna trade capital for time yeah time for capital yeah and like growth has a cost and like it has a real cost and there's a formula that you can break this out for right so it's like you were growing really fast but it hurt cash right so So revenue can be high, right?

38:29Your balance sheet can look good, but cash is used to buy the inventory on the balance sheet. So like it can actually hurt your day-to-day cashflow operations. So like 300 grand, I think 2025 is like the minimum if you're going to start a brand. And like - Yeah, you have to be going in knowing that like you're going to need some amount of work. Dude, how are like young founders doing this? Like how are people starting brands right now? It's been a while since I've started one. And so I kind of like this conversation, but like you're a 22 year old work. Where do you get a quarter million dollars, 300 grand from?

39:02Yeah. Look, I think a lot of them are drop shipping. So like they're, they're starting a brand, but it's different. Right. So like all of this is like, we're going to hold inventory and build an asset that could sell. You can always start like selling somebody else's thing right on affiliate or consignment. Right. Right. That's what drop shipping is. And also I just don't know if people make a lot of brands in a traditional way. Like this could be a boomer conversation because if I was 20, I would make money on WAP. I'd make money on TikTok shop affiliate. I would just try to make outlandish internet content to get people to view my stuff.

39:35And then I would monetize that with some sort of offer or whatever else. Dude, they're making info products. Like go on Twitter. Everybody's just being like, break the matrix mastermind. Like that's all they're doing. It's all info. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, making brands like you and me, we might be the boomers in the room. Yeah, still doing it the old way. I don't know. It's fine. I'm okay being a boomer. Boomer's life is great. Yeah, look, and we haven't seen private equity by WAP groups yet or private equity by info product groups. You know what I mean? No. So it's like, I think people do that to get the$300 ,000 and then try to make a real brand.

40:15I guess this is it too. like this conversation, this episode is I want to go build a hundred million dollar or nine figure plus consumer brand. So the capital, you, you kind of have to go into that saying like, I'm going to need to invest capital in that. Like I'm shooting for a fairly lofty target. I'm probably not going to do that with$5 ,000 out of the gate, or maybe I will, but it might take like 25 years, right? Cause you're going to have to like double that, you know, every year. And like, by the time you gets 10 years, like you start to get to bigger numbers. And then by the time he gets 20, you're at, you're at a hundred or something.

40:49I'm sure the math's going to work out like that. And if you're doubling your invested capital every single year, I mean, you are better than Warren Buffett. You know what I mean? Yes. That's insane. Like that's the thing. It's like people really want exponential outcomes, but like it, you have to start from a good base. I mean, it took Ridge like 10 years to get to a hundred million dollars in sales. So, you know, and that's when you can actually start paying yourself. Like I, I get so much flack on the internet for saying that people are like, that's dude, if you're an info, you can do$2 million a year in sales and make$2 million.

41:20And I'm like, yeah, man, it's just different. Like if you're, if you're dealing with taxes and inventory and balance sheet, like probably around$70 million a year, you can make, you can personally pay yourself like a million bucks after taxes. Right. Yeah. It's, um, I think the time thing is actually really interesting. Like if you look at our network, the people that we know that all run big brands, most of them are quite old. Like most of them are 10 to 20 years old that are over a hundred million dollars. Like it's very rare. I mean, there are outliers, right? Like I think Grunz is as an outlier right now.

41:54Um, but like, that's, that's not common to go from like zero to a hundred quite quickly. Yeah. Look, and the people that are doing that are multi-time founders or have been around the industry. So Groon's fantastic. Chad, Chad is a 20 year vet doing it in three years. Amazing. David's protein bars. He is a 30 year vet doing it in three years. It's like, yeah, yeah. It's like, I mean, would you, wouldn't, would you be surprised if LeBron James like started hitting, you know, threes for, it's like, yeah, okay. It makes sense. You know what I mean? yeah okay so let's go to we've talked category we've talked messaging offer distribution like getting attention uh i got capital sorry what else man so we can talk i've team i have a better analogy than lebron james one so sorry to go okay go it'd be like if tiger woods was really good at mini golf like yeah you'd expect it you know what i mean anyway not to derail you yeah we went through went through five really good steps.

42:56What's the sixth step? Anything you're thinking? I want to know how would you think about people and team initially? So like you're starting, it's you, you're a founder, you're going to do a ton of stuff, right? But like as it gets going and you get some momentum and again, you're shooting for like a hundred million dollar plus brand dude, in today's day and age, the, the, the people question is also changing quite quickly. Like it used to be the distribution methods, like attention would change a lot. now it seems like the people thing is also like we've talked about like revenue per head targets at like certain scale but if you were starting over right now who would you need how would you hire how would you build on the people side could be hires could be agencies could be anything so I wouldn't do it alone so I would I would I think co-founders are mandatory it doesn't have to be even co-founders but I think one of the best partnerships I've had in my life is by CMO Connor.

43:52I mean, you know, when we were at the meta event, uh, Connor Roland from hex cloud was like, yeah. So do you guys ever fight? Do you guys ever get into big fights? And it's like, it's like, uh, it's like that, man, like he's, he's, we've worked together on lots of projects for 10 years and it's, my life would be harder if I didn't have somebody, uh, completing what I'm bad at. I'm bad at a lot of right. So I think the first step is co-founder Matt, how do you feel about that? I 100 % agree. I've always had co-founders. I'm a fan of partners. I will say though, on this topic, picking a co-founder or picking business partners is just as important as picking your spouse.

44:34Like these are very important relationships. You spend just as much time with these people as you do your spouse. Sometimes in the early years, more time with your co-founders than you do with your spouse. So like, don't screw that part up like that. This is like a, you should do some diligence. Like you should get aligned on a lot of things before you get in a business with somebody. That's my one thing, huge fan, but like, it's the soft tissue part of business and it's the hard, it's actually the hardest part. Yeah. The other thing I'll say is like, people always ask me, how do I find a co-founder?

45:07And I'm like, okay, you should stop what you're doing. Understand life is really long and go get a job someplace where a co-founder might work. Yes. Like you don't need to rush into the collagen, uncrustable market right now. Right. We can wait a little bit. There's going to be a lot of good ideas. And it's way better to have the right co-founder off the rip. You should know them for at least a year and just go work like at a place, an agency. There's good people everywhere. Find someone you actually connect with. And then like, that's going to be your co-founder. Yeah. It's a dude. I met my current business partner.

45:41We were in an EO farm together for years. Like he had another business. I had another business. We wound up both exiting those companies and then came together to do this one. Right. And I think they're like, what you're actually hitting on is I believe that in the current sort of internet economy, like digitally native people, we sit behind screens too much. We don't get out in the real world and breathe the same air as people. And I think like, if I look at my, like my network is so valuable at this point, but it's because I invested in it. Like I spent years, like I would go to events. I would like, I would just be everywhere I could to just to meet more cool people doing cool things.

46:23And that to me is just like relationship surface area in life. You know, like I never know when one of these things is going to be really valuable. I just sort of go out and pour into them. uh and i it's so far it's like it's never failed yeah dude uh and the industry's small and life is long so like a lot of names are popping up that i talked to seven years ago you know what i mean and i'm like oh yeah how you been yeah yeah yeah um i you know a lot of people talk about networking but if you need a co-founder like they're like you have to go find them it's like yeah like you said like finding a spouse it's like yeah and unfortunately there's no dating apps So you got to go out there and you got to, you got to try hard.

47:03You know what? I actually, I don't think there is data on this, but I would bet you, I bet a lot of money that like the success rate of co-founders that have never met in real life. Like they just meet on the internet and some Reddit forum versus like we spend physical, like in real life time together. I bet you there's like a pretty big gap between those two numbers. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, sorry kids. It's like Tinder is not, not the model for finding a co-founder. Yeah. And there's a lot of debates about what's more important or what's harder, a marriage or a co-founder in a business. For a lot of reasons, I think it could be harder to have a co-founder and to find the right co-founder.

47:45There's no dating apps, right? Right. You know, there's, there's no, it's, it's, it's also financial in the same way marriages. Right. So that's incredibly difficult when it comes to finances, things I think can blow up more. It's like your personal finances. It's kind of hard to blow up, but businesses blow up all the time. And then there's no like shared asset, like a house, like you don't have to live with them or kids or whatever. So they're both hard, man. Yeah. So, okay. So you got good co-founders. talk to me then about like the business is going let's say you're doing a few million bucks in revenue it's working you've got product market fit uh how do you think about people now like how are you building that team is it all freelancers are you going to like leverage agencies what do you do man yeah if you're just if you're new starting out right so let's say you had a successful career in software and you have three hundred thousand dollars you're going to start a durable goods brand, you probably don't have the skills to hire someone who is technically very good.

48:46So you can get lucky. You make a full-time hire, right? But it's like, if I was asked to hire a cardiologist right now, I don't have the skills to hire a cardiologist. I'd be like, do you know about the heart? And they'd be like, yes. And I'd be like, okay, well, you just exceeded my knowledge. I don't even have the knowledge to ask you questions to prove if you know this or not, right? So I would find reputable agencies and freelancers and work with them for the start. Probably until I'm doing$5 million in revenue, I probably wouldn't have any US full-time hires, maybe an ops role, something very simplistic.

49:29But a lot of it, you're going to be doing it yourself. Customer service, you could explain how you want your customers to be treated. That's pretty easy. But I'm thinking like technical media buying roles, like, or, you know, creative, I would just kind of lean into best in class, overpay, learn because some of them are going to fail, learn what, like the terminology, how it works, whatever. And then, then you have the skills to hire in house. That's what I would probably do. Is it safe to say that like the, the types of things that you would want to go agency or freelancer would be highly specialized, highly skilled.

49:59And then any kind of like generalist type tasks early on in a business, like either you as founders can do that, or like those are probably pretty easy hires. Like you can hire like a generalist, whatever to like manage work, right? Like project management, marketing, and like basic marketing, like sending emails and SMS, but like creative strategy, way different, way different animal. Like that's a skill. Like that's somebody who's like, I'm here to master this craft. Yeah. Asset production. Like, you know, like I think back to the first hires we had, the first thing is like someone has to answer these tickets, right?

50:32Tickets are coming in from your customers. So that's like the first hire. that's going to be a full-time hire that's such a no-brainer right it's like hey answer all these tickets and then it's like and then the next one will probably be you know like inventory management it's like hey make sure we don't run out of this stuff like that's another thing like you start just offloading tasks that the co-founders are going to do naturally naturally they're going to answer tickets naturally they're going to buy inventory start offloading those things but yeah dude like anything that requires taste or experience it's like you just don't have those things yet.

51:04So you just find an agency you trust. And that's, that's where the internet comes. Hopefully you're making content and talking about your process and you'll talk like, oh my God, I need someone to help me with creative. You'll be on the internet and then you'll get a flood of people who are trying to sell you creative services. And then you just got to pick one and try it. Okay. So let's, let's do this then. So you're, you're describing like all of these functions in a business, right? Customer service district, like you've got actual like physical distribution of the goods, this like supply chain is import export.

51:32There's last mile. Do you, I'm going to assume that you're like pretty pro 3PL. Like you don't want to take on any of the bits and bobs around like moving the stuff around. It's like, you don't want to manufacture your own product. You don't want to fulfill your own product, all that stuff. You're going to kind of 3PL right out of the gate. Am I, am I right in assuming that, or do you have a different take? Well, I would love to do that but when you're just getting started if we're still talking the early days and maybe we'll talk about like you know the scaling phase but the early days dude 3pls won't even take your business right like they're like wait you have zero orders it's like yeah dude we're not going to take the gamble on you and like commands like so this is this is why china won so hard is that a bunch of trading companies came up and they were like yeah we'll take an order for 50 units right like no no american co-manufacturer is going to do that right so if you're in consumables it's going to be an american co-man usually but if you're in durables it's probably going to be a chinese you know trading company is what they're called so they just get the orders and then send them to factories who actually produce this um and the point i'm trying to make is i would like to have outsourced help for all those things but i remember when ridge was putting in boxes and taking to USPS until we were like 2015.

52:55So three years in the business, right? So it's just hard to get around that. We did our own Peely case fulfillment out of my original company, which was a fricking software development services business. So like I had a hundred engineers and designers sitting in office. And then I had like a 10 by 10 corner on like the sixth floor of a brick and beam building in downtown Toronto, where we had phone case inventory and like people sitting there printing off labels and sticking them on envelopes and then like having to like put them on a cart bring them downstairs get them to a canada post person who could pick them up like it was we did it ourselves it was painful yeah dude and like i mean every time you try to do that you try to give it to canada post to usps and then they don't want them they're like no i don't know they're like yeah yeah you have to schedule formal pickups it's like please just take these yeah i have more 30 packages please yes yeah it's funny.

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56:09We had 500 ,000 new subscribers. Revenue was$37 million, grew 100 % year over year just on SMS. The ROI, 108x. This is 151 % increase year over year. We had 106 % increase in revenue, 108x ROI, and close to 500 ,000 new subs. SMS is killing it for Ridge. We think PostScript is the way to go. We think PostScript is the best name in SMS. They have five reasons why. They're not going to waste money on send. They're not going to leave your customers out to dry. You're going to get more subscribers. They're going to instantly convert them with AI. They have auto-optimization for profit. They're going to keep you compliant.

56:48I think SMS is still the frontier of messaging to customers, and PostScript's the best name in it. Ridge did$40 million in SMS last year. This year, we'll probably double again,$100 million in SMS probably because of PostScript. Thank you for sponsoring this podcast. Thank you, guys. Talk to you later. So let's talk about then the levels of scale. Like when does that, so when does that change? Like at what order volume do you think like, okay, no, I can move this off to somebody. Yeah. When you have your first million dollar year, like you'll, a 3PL will take your business. You know what I mean?

57:25It could be, it might not be the best 3PL. It might not be a global player, but there's some guy with a warehouse somewhere who you can email who will do your, your orders as long as they're consistent, right? if you're getting 10 a day, 20 a day, 100 a day, and you're paying him five bucks an order, he will find a way to make that work. And there's some guy piecing that together. So all of this is pre-setting up the business. And then we talk about the$1 to$5 million sage, the$5 to$10 million sage. This is why people treat equity so preciously is because getting$2 million is so hard. You're doing all this stuff.

58:05You're sending customer service emails. You're like, I'm building this brand, right? And then at the end of it, you have a company that will sell on Flippa for like 200 grand. You know what I mean? It's like people don't value these assets until they're actually mature. So a lot of blood and sweat goes in the very beginning, but then it's not valuable until the very end. So, okay. So what else changes then? Does anything else change at a million dollars in sales a year when you're building it? Let's just assume like durable consumer brand. Yeah. So like you're probably turning a profit. You've probably paid yourself if you got to a million dollars.

58:42But it's still very ragtag. I mean, I remember the million dollar days. Like, you know, the point where it really starts to change, in my opinion, is when like you get to six million dollars. that is when like you know you might get interest from the bottom tier search funds right somebody will email you trying to buy uh you you'll you'll get software companies trying to take you to lunch or dinner like as soon as you get to that five or six million dollars you'll be like okay it's a real business there's some money i can extract out of here you probably have a couple employees at this point you might have four or five people working for you full time uh maybe maybe more you know But like it could be eight, it could be 10.

59:19But like this is where like I think you start getting more respect in general from the larger business community. Yeah. When do you, what's the, after 6 million, that's a specific number, I like it. After that, when's the next, what's the next sort of like jump in your experience so far? When does it start to change again? Yeah. So like six is... you know, I'm trying to think of a good analogy, but it's, it's, it's kind of like you, like you just got your driver's license. You know what I mean? Like, I think people treat 14 year olds, like literally not crashing the car anymore. Yeah. Like if you're 14 year old, literal child, it's like, it's like, Oh, okay, bud, whatever.

1:00:04Right. And then like, as soon as you, I mean, I've been there, so I've, I felt that disrespect. And then as soon as you hit like 6 million bucks, you're 16 years old, you got a driver's license. And then, you know, hitting 10 million, you're probably 18, right? It's like, hey, you're independent. You can do anything you want. It's your business. It's a real thing. You might have 20 employees at that point. You might own a building. You might have offices, right? You might have ideas, but we're going to take this thing, right? And you're very much, you're a free adult when you're hitting$10 million.

1:00:33And then I think that all falls apart somewhere between 20 and 30, maybe 20 and 50. Then it all falls apart. You have a midlife crisis. So that's my thought. What's your thought, Matt? I think it's around 25. 20 to 25 is like the, I can no longer just like muscle this thing up. I can't just put it on my back and outwork the, like the growing pain. You know, 20 to 25 is difficult, I think, because that's the beginning of the pain zone. I think you're right. It might, it might actually go all the way up to 50. you're big you're big enough that you can't do it all on your own but you're not big enough to be able to afford like proper management so like what you start doing is hiring like basically people that should not have anything more than a director title or like a manager title but you're giving them like vp titles and i see a lot of c it's like c-suite titles and like 28 year olds and i'm like bro that's not how that works like that that's that's a bad move um so And I think it's in that zone that we make that mistake.

1:01:34Because as first-time founders, we just don't have what we need to get the proper muscle. Dude, we also still don't know how to hire at this size. Yeah, dude. And you're describing a ridge to a fee. You know what I mean? We're like, being like, okay, do we need a CTO when we're doing 25 million? The answer is no. It's like, you don't need any. like people it's yeah that's that's where your ego is bigger than your wallet or your brains right and to equate it like you know somewhere between 20 and 50 it depends on the business the category everything i've seen businesses get up to 40 or 45 million before i'm ploding i've seen businesses do it at 14 million right but like what's happening there is what happens to every 28 year old when they drink too much one night and they're like oh my god i have to change my life right it's like i can't i can't handle hangovers anymore i have to get my together Your knees start to hurt.

1:02:29You're like, oh my God, right? That aging process happens to companies and it's around this revenue target. What size, what revenue range do you think a consumer brand should have a senior finance person? So maybe not a CFO, but somebody who is very good at managing cash, like 13 week cashflow. They can properly read a P &L on a balance sheet, like you the founder, maybe not, maybe some of you smart enough to do that. But like, when do you get that person? I wish we got it earlier. Uh, it depends on if you have a line of credit or an SBA alone or something like that. Right. If you're going to be going into wholesale, like finance is such an important part of that.

1:03:16So those things kind of, kind of factor it, but you should at least have a controller on your team. And that is a CPA level person, um, who is a little more senior than just a staff accountant and understands inner work and do business around$20 million in revenue. 20? Yeah. And you can do fractional before that, but you can't get a real loan. You can get a lot of predatory loans, but you can't get a real loan without probably a controller on your staff. Okay, let's do this. Let's do another one then. You don't have a co-founder who is like, let's just say one of you guys, one of your founding partners, or maybe many of you are like good marketers, but I get asked this question a lot.

1:04:00When should you hire a CMO? Yeah. I mean, almost never. Like you should like, yeah. I love this. This is great. We're building a hundred million dollar consumer brand here. Why should you never, why is it almost never dude? Unpack that. I think, the CMO title is the least defined title in an organization. So like, what does a CEO do? I'm in charge of the business not imploding. So I have to make decisions to protect the business every single day. That's my one job. I can do whatever I want to protect this business, right? What does a CTO do, right? They'll do technology, CFO, they do finance. We don't have to explain what finance is.

1:04:46You and I both know what finance is, right? Real easy. You know, what does a COO do? Well, that one's a little fuzzy, but an operation. So it could be supply chain. It could be people. It could just be whatever the CEO tells them, right? Like we've seen COOs do all that. The CMO, it implies that marketing is like a function and discipline like finance when it's not. Because marketing includes growth inside of paid. It includes branding. It includes all type of stuff. and really a company probably needs to be doing 500 million dollars plus to have a true cmo right somebody who thinks about brand and growth in equal measures and can like make sure you're showing up consistently in a walmart and a target and a gas station and on your website like that's like a 500 like you really need a head of growth and you should pay that person a ton of money right or chief revenue officer or something like that chief growth officer like that's the most important thing because if we were in a consumer brand like us the past 10 years what the number one determining factor of success is how much money can you spend on marketing right like nothing else matters just how much attention can you get um so yeah so are you demoting connor is that what i'm hearing like is he is he he's like sorry sorry dude like we we don't need you anymore yeah head of growth yeah so i think connor has a a higher title co-founder right so so connor the reason why him and i go so well together is he understands the mousetrap of marketing so perfectly right and i'm actually just really good at politics so i'm really going to be in likable so that's like what actually i bring to the table um but yeah yeah so like you know connor's a different breed right he's he really is he really is a head of growth and he can put on the marketing and do other type of stuff.

1:06:35But if you're not going to find yourself a conner, just hire a head of growth. Yeah, I think it's a great call because there's a big, like most CMOs. So people who have like the resume of a CMO, I find it's because it's such a poorly defined type of work. And actually it's really, you are right. It's a poorly defined role. I find hiring this role extremely difficult. Like my CMO, I mean, really, she's like a head of growth, right? Like that's like, she's just very good at running the team and understands all the tactical stuff. So like nobody on the team can outsmart her. She's like, she can smell crap everywhere.

1:07:13She can manage agencies. Like she can do all that stuff. And actually, honestly, I have a CMO in my company because I don't want to do any of that crap. Like the end of the day, I think a lot about growth and digital. That's like the area of the business to spend the most time in. And I think your advice is good because if you're going to get in a consumer, like the number one function of building a consumer brand is attention and distribution. It's like, you're going to have to be a good marketer. That that's, it's not like I've, I have met great consumer founders who are also there. They're not great marketers, but they might be world-class product people.

1:07:46Right. So like, that's another thing that you could maybe be in consumer goods. But I think most of us in consumer goods, like most founders are marketers at the end of the day. So like hiring a CMO is basically putting your hand up and saying like, I'm probably the best person at this in the company because I know everything and I'm like so close to the customer, but I just don't want to do it anymore. And then I think I agree with you as head of growth. Yeah. And like, if you have the understanding with your CMO that they truly are in charge of, you know, paid and growing revenue, then yeah, give them the CMO title.

1:08:16I don't care. But it's like, if you put out a job post for CMO, you're going to get very impressive people who have really cool jobs and cool backgrounds that you'll be impressed by, but they'll probably fail in the role. Right. Yeah, it's big M marketing, not like little M marketing. Like, you know, between zero and 100 million, 200 million, whatever, like you're doing little M marketing. It's very tactical. It's like scrappy. You know, you're looking at data every day. Like big M marketing, man, they're looking at like weekly, monthly P &L. Like they're not even in the day to day. They don't look at day to day numbers.

1:08:47Yeah, like you want your CMO to be like, okay, so I heard if we launch Facebook ads, but from a new Facebook account in Bolivia, we actually get a discount on CPMs. That's what you want your CMO to do. If you put out a CMO job title, you'll get somebody with really small glasses and a turtleneck who is really cool and knows DJs you've never heard of. That person won't do that. You know what I mean? You want the sweatiest person on earth. you might remember that Ridge switched to RichPanel about a year ago since then our orders are climbing yet support tickets aren't RichPanel's self-service portal now it's 47 % of our shoppers solve their own issues instantly we used to answer every single ticket with a person now that one change is on track to save us$500 ,000 in support salaries just this year Our customer satisfaction is at an all-time high.

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1:11:26Let's get back to Right.

1:11:29Okay. So let's do this then. We're talking marketing. We go back to your launching. You talked about like getting a distribution attention advantage. Right. We agree on that. There's different ways to do that. At what point do you have to get into ads and get good at advertising? Like, when do you think that is? Well, I'm biased. I don't think you should be in this business if you don't love ads. So like you should. I agree. Yeah. So I think the first, and like, like the reason why my actual advice to people is go work at an ad agency in person, hustle your ass off for three to nine months, learn Facebook ads, spend other people's money to learn why Facebook ads are good.

1:12:13The whole ecosystem, Snapchat, TikTok ads, try to do as many ad platforms as possible. Try to find success with those and then find a co-founder there and launch something. And that's because your biggest line item will be Facebook. I gave them over$50 million last year. Right. So like that's my payroll was 10. You know what I mean? Like, like my cogs might've been 30. So like they're, they're getting way more than everybody else. So it's the most important thing in your business. Yeah. So you're, you're sort of a fan of like, you should be, you should actually know how to do that before you even start.

1:12:47So even if you don't start by running ads, you should still have that skill set is what I'm hearing. I mean, that's one man's opinion. Even if you're selling adult Incrustables in Target, you should for sure do that. Yeah. Do you in today, in 2025, because we're starting over right now, and we've got lofty ambitions, would you actually start with ads out of the gate too? Would you just be testing that right away? Well, I would try. I'm assuming you have$300 ,000, like something. Yeah, I would try to get as many sales off of my organic content as possible. And like my contrarian view is that organic content should take you to$5 million in sales.

1:13:28And it's like, if you're, yeah, you should be really good at just creating content and storytelling and all of that. And just, there's still a free gift, which is free reach on reels and YouTube and Twitter and Tik TOK and all of these platforms where there's just free reach. And if you create good content and post across everything and make that's your whole thing you can get to five million dollars organically um and then from there we talk about ads and scaling it up i love that very cool okay uh what have we not covered man like so we're building a hundred million dollar brand like what what do so maybe when we try this what would you not do so like what is something that you're like this is conventional i think everybody and this is the wrong way to think about this well look and this is this is going to be easy advice.

1:14:16Like if you're listening to this, you know, you know who we're going to dunk on. I would not raise venture capital. I would not go to a branding agency. I would not go to a product dev agency. I would not do any of that stuff that other people did in like 2015. We should learn from those mistakes. You should get into products that you care about, that you, that you love in categories that are important to you that are also growing. And it's like, look, you're like, Oh, Sean, that's too hard. I'm like, well, sorry, you don't get a hundred million a year brand then. You know what I mean? Like, you know, this isn't, this isn't like the, you know, everyone's getting a cookie here.

1:14:51This is like a really hard thing to build. I would not try to grow very fast. I would think that a hundred million dollars should take you about a dozen years. Right. So I think Ridge did it in 10, maybe a little bit less, but I would try to, I would literally think like on a decade horizon, that's really fast, you know, to go from zero to a hundred million dollars a year in a decade. It's like, I have, dude, 10 years ago, I moved to LA and I lived in a flop house. You know what I mean? So it's like, it, it like, this is going to take a decade. So I would think about that. Um, I'd be totally okay.

1:15:24Making a ton of mistakes. Like I've made so many mistakes in my career. I've lost millions of dollars in mistakes. And yeah, I mean, no one, no one sets out to make mistakes, but just don't think it's going to end you. I wouldn't sweat the little stuff when you're doing a million dollars a year or$3 million a year. And you said an email that looks ugly. Nobody cares. Nobody's going to read it. I think the caring, like the over, over indexing on brand and brand importance early on is like a sign that you're probably not going to make it. Like you should just be focusing on selling as many things as you can early on.

1:15:59And then as it gets bigger, definitely start to think about brand. Definitely start to like, I mean, you should always think about the customer. I think that's like, you should obsess over your customer, like product and customer, product and customer all the time. Like that's super important. But I think I see often that people still get stuck in like the brand, right. And they use brand as an excuse to not try things and do things. Um, and I think that's really dangerous under$50 million a year. Yeah, dude. I mean, yeah, you don't, you don't have a brand, you know what I mean? Like it's, it's nothing.

1:16:31Um, the, the other, the other easy wins, it's like, just sell everywhere. It's like people are like, you know, there was a big debate. Should I go on Amazon? Amazon is over 50 % of e-commerce revenue. It's like, you should probably be there. Just be there. Right. Uh, if, and the other thing is don't get hung up on sexy partnerships. There was a guy, um, he was selling an athletic item. I'm not going to, I'm not going to dox him. He had the, he had an offer from a big sports organization. Right. And you hear that and you're like, okay, cool. How much money are they going to give you? And he's like, no, no, no.

1:17:05I have to give them money to be the official sponsor of the sports organization. And I'm like, hard pass. I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, that's a sexy thing. A lot of people try to dangle access or prestige or association. If money isn't coming in, it's not worthwhile until you get to a hundred million dollars. Then you can start doing brag marketing like we talk about on the show. But until then, you have no money to brag. Yeah. And I would take that a step further. Any large organization, whether that's a company, a nonprofit, a sports team, whatever, right? They are going to suck the life out of you in time.

1:17:44So even if it looks free, so you don't have to pay them, it's not. Their administrative burden on you is going to be insane. is probably a bad place to put your time. And it's definitely a bad place to put your dollars. I agree there. I just, I would avoid large, like what they call them strategic partnerships. Like that is a distraction. And it's not how you build a great brand. Not at the beginning, not from zero to a hundred. Completely agree. Can we talk, go back to that growth rate thing? So like you would look at taking a decade and you would grow, you would not try to grow like blazing fast.

1:18:21I think that's actually great advice. dude I was just at my YPO retreat for the last two days it's like an annual retreat the whole chapter does it there's a guy there that owns a bunch of pharmacies he and I were chatting we were racing cars yesterday that was actually super fun I actually got to track my car and I've never done that before super fun what type of car I own 911 it's just a fun car at the track so it's a summer car anyway we were sitting down afterwards we were chatting and we were just talking business and he owns a bunch of pharmacies and he, I mentioned him like, yeah, we're going to grow probably like 31 % this year.

1:18:58He's like, holy, that's so fast. He's like, how do you, how do you do that? Like 31 %? He's like, I couldn't do that if I tried. And it just reminded me, and I'm like, in almost every other category of business, that is an insane growth rate. And for some reason in consumer, I think like, well, probably for a lot of reasons, we seem to be holding ourselves up to like a SaaS or a tech sort of like analog or comp set. And I don't know that that makes sense. Like we're talking physical things like it's hard to move this stuff around. What do you think is like, so at what point do you start thinking about like a more normalized growth rate?

1:19:43So obviously it's not like from day zero, right? Because you're going to try to get to like a million or 5 million as fast as possible. Profitable and bootstrapped. But like at what point are you like, okay, from this point on, growth can kill us just as much as it can be great. So like how, what's your mental model there? Yeah, so I was just asking Chad CPT, the CAGR from$100 ,000 in your first year to$100 million in year 10, that's 100 % CAGR, right? Right. So that means you're doubling every year in that time period on average. Right. To hit that compounded annual growth rate. You shouldn't do that.

1:20:23It's like that's too hard. Right. So it's like it goes down if you do a million dollars in your first year or whatever else. But like we're starting from zero. Like it's so it's so hard to get these numbers. Yeah. It's much more likely that you're going to go from like zero to 20 million dollars. and then it's going to start to slow down. Like then it's going to go to like 20%, 30%, 40%, 50%. And that like, from what I've seen looking at a lot of companies, like that seems to be more common than like double, double, double, double, double, like that's really hard. You should not aim to do that.

1:20:55And then if the people who are doing that are losing a ton of money, right? Like that's the other thing is like people, I've talked to people and they're like, yeah, I went to 5 million this year, last year I'll do 15 this year. So I think I'll do a hundred next year. and I'm like, you're not going to do that. I'm like, and I hate to, because it sounds like I'm talking, but I'm like, nah, man, I've just, I've seen the story a million times. You should be okay with slower growth. It should take a really long time to build these things. And. Oh yeah, dude. Like we, when we launched Lomi, I've said this in the show before, but like we did a million bucks in the first hour of our crowdfunding campaign.

1:21:30And then like in the first 18 months, I sold a hundred million dollars in product. Rewind the clock. I would never do that again. Like almost killed myself, killed the company, like lost so much money because it's just so difficult to go at that speed. Uh, I just, I was an idiot. Like I shouldn't, I should have never done that. And there's a lot of reasons why we did it. Um, but looking back, like I still, I still think it would have been smarter to be far more calculated and just like take a much more steady, like get to 20, get to 30, whatever. and then just start compounding from there. Like that, that's still like my preferred approach.

1:22:09Yeah, dude. I mean, doing an average of$10 million a month for 18 months, it's like, that still almost kills Ridge. You know what I mean? We've been doing this for a long time. Yes, still today, yeah. Yeah, it's like you came out the rip doing that. So that's the biggest danger in these businesses is yourself, right? So like your own ego getting in the way, you wanting to do more, you getting into bad deals, you doing your own part, like bad partnerships you know manufacturing mistakes like wanting to grow forcing that like you're your biggest risk here right um so yeah i would just i would just be totally okay it's you're only in contest with yourself so it's like if you don't grow for a year or two years or you shrink for a year it's totally fine it's like yeah you're still you're still invited to the cookout we're gonna we're gonna have a great time the operators podcast with you okay so like that Let's finish on this.

1:23:01I think that's great advice for so many people because even this title of get to$100 million is probably the wrong objective to be shooting for in any business. That's an ego number. Just build a great business. That's the name of the game. I will say like I have just as many people in my network that are that I would consider like these are world class operator entrepreneurs that run like 10 to 20 to 30 million dollar companies as I do people who run 200, 300, 400, 500 million dollar companies. Like I hate to say it, but it's like the size doesn't actually matter. Like that does not mean you're less of an operator because you're not doing X clad numbers.

1:23:43Yeah, look, I've gotten worse the bigger we've gotten. like I'm less in the weeds I'm less tactical like it's just it's just the truth the job changes like I was a better operator when we were doing $50 million a year but yeah going back to it the whole point of the nine figure operator show is just like that's what I was I was looking for people who were doing more money than me to teach me and I met some great people I met David I met Jeremy I met all you guys so many good people yeah and they helped me get better now into this next phase and the only reason to get to$100 million is I mean really so I could start paying myself Because there was, I mean, there was a couple of years I was broke as hell, my guys.

1:24:19Yeah. Yeah. You know, the way I had a mentor of mine explain it to me once, he's like, the bigger you get, what you want to see is you want to stop feeling like you're pushing the business and you want to start feeling like the business is pulling you up. Right. So like after like 30, 40, 50 million dollars, like it should start to like the only reason you're going bigger is because it's actually pulling you up. Like the category, the product market fit, like your customer. it's actually just dragging you up now so like your choice is simply i want to rise to the occasion or not like sell it hire somebody whatever but if you're aiming for a large number and you start to like do bigger numbers you're doing multiple eight figures a year and it always feels like a grind and a push like you might be uh past the point of like optimal size for your category.

1:25:09Oh yeah. And it's still, I mean, it still feels like I'm tugging rich along, right? The business needs to feel bigger than you. And it just doesn't feel like that right now for rich. It still feels like I'm, I'm like, I'm just, I got Cerberus on a leash and I'm just dragging this thing along. That's awesome. Right on. Do you want to end it there? Dude, it's a great pod. An hour with Sean and Matt. Thank you for Phil, North beam, host script, Rich Panel, Sarah's Analytics, five softwares I use, five softwares I pay for, five softwares that sponsor the show and bring it to you. Also, join our EcomFuel group.

1:25:45Just if you run a business, you should apply. It's really awesome. It's very cheap. Oh, dude, 100%. Yeah. Great call out. We had a Slack and it sucked. Nobody ever posted. I would text these guys, please post in the Slack. They didn't know how to sign in. It's the one part of this that I'm like, I'm so bad at Slack. I hate it. I hate Slack. That's like, that's, that's the problem. I get it. You know? Uh, but yes, Econ fuel is like a great partnership for the show. Uh, and if you're listening to this on whatever you're listening to, you should just subscribe to like, just stroke our egos, please just subscribe.

1:26:19Hit the, hit whatever button makes us feel good on whatever YouTube, Spotify, I don't care. Just subscribe. And we got a newsletter. That's fantastic. We got, uh, spinoff shows that are fantastic. Um, Dude, and this is super good. We like doing this. It's been a very hard six months. We have a newsletter coming out where I talk about how hard my life's been for the past six months. Just tariffs and fires and dog. So we're back to the grind. We're killing it. We've got great content coming out. And we like being here. So thank you, Fulfill. You pay for this. Thank you, Northbeam. You pay for this.

1:26:51Thank you, Rich Panel. You pay for this. Thank you, Sarah's Analytics. You pay for this. Thank you, PostScript. They pay for this. Thank you, guys. Talk to you later. Goodbye.

1:27:02Flug teen