E134: Thrasio: The Truth, with co-founder John Hefter

25:44You've got someone with high level access in India working for Amazon for$21 ,000 a year. And a Chinese seller somehow gets that Indian person and says, I'll give you$100 ,000 to mess with this listing for two days. What's going to happen, right? Yeah, totally. So we had, like when COVID broke out, we had one product that was selling well in Europe and we got a safety violation filed one hour before one of the Amazon key European offices closed down, shut that listing down for 50 days. So there's that side of the business. It's sort of like wild west kind of thing that was happening in the third-party marketplace, which was really significant in 2018.

26:34It kind of like worked itself out a little bit. Amazon got much better at dealing with all that. So there was that piece of the business. All right. Operators, real talk. If your dashboards are a week old, they're not insights, they're history. You probably heard me talk about cleaning up our data. Well, we finally have it dialed and it's because of Sarah's pulse. We have a data foundation we can fully trust. Pulse connects us to over 200 sources. We've got it connected to so many sources, Shopify, Amazon, TikTok, Fulfill, NetSuite. Every dashboard is complete, accurate, and exhaustive. my team is in the dashboards all the time.

27:12No gaps, no mismatch numbers, no manually assembling spreadsheets. We must have killed 12 spreadsheets and combined them into one dashboard. And our daily growth dashboards are integral to the growth team, showing the true CAC by channel, by country. Our executive dashboard ties revenue to contribution margin down to the SKU level. And more importantly, like we get this fast and these are actuals, not estimates. And in today's environment, every percentage point in margin with tariffs and costs of marketing costs going up, every percentage point matters. Right. And for us, it's all automated. So the team could focus on doing what they do best, which is growing the business.

27:58And so we're also testing something brand new with Seris IQ. It's an AI chat layer that lets us just ask, which SKUs drove margin in Amazon, for example, Canada last week, and what promo impacted repeat purchase rate? And it gives the answers quickly backed by clean data, unified data. And so here's the part you want to hear. A few operators, podcast listeners can get early access to the beta. Saris will even co-design an IQ proof of concept tied to the top three KPIs that you want to move. It's not a canned demo. It's your data, your metrics, your insights. This is huge. Just to see it alive.

28:37It's extremely limited. Only a handful of brands will get in as a launch offer. If you want dashboards that you can trust and instantly answer your toughest questions, talk to Saris Analytics. And yes, this is just for our podcast listeners. Saris has just been a great advocate for the pod, great ally of the pod. And there are going to be a lot of AI tools coming out from Microsoft, Shopify, etc. But they can only be as good as your underlying data infrastructure. That's the thing. Having your data infrastructure set up properly is everything. That's why we started with Saris and then they keep building more on top of it.

29:10But no matter what, you know, in the AI world, you need to have a data infrastructure that works. And I don't think there's any better place to do it than Saris. So you can also take an assessment and understand your business's AI readiness with Saris at sarisanalytics.com. So get AI ready the right way. Get your data in the right place. Go check out Saris Analytics. The other piece is just like from an accounting nexus, from an organizational standpoint, it's really hard to be adding new brands every week to find a qualified brand manager who can organize everything to make sure supply chain's tied up, to make sure our accounting's put together and we can get numbers out to our investors and to our taxes properly.

29:57it becomes an exceptionally complex problem. Now, the other thing for me, it's just like products have a life cycle, right? So, you know, we're buying things a lot of times that are on their way up, but maybe they're about to hit their curve. And without ingenuity, which Amazon is built on people sort of, you know, taking something that works, making a little bit better and doing one thing at a time. Well, we had to do, you know, 80 things at a time to keep up. and we had to build that team up from scratch. It's actually the team, the leaders of that team are working on my new business now and stand that all up in like 120 days from nobody, right?

30:40So that's like, you know, making improvements. So I'll give you one final example of a fun one. So we bought this number one seller in fruit fly catchers. It's just like a fan with a UV light and like a sticky pad. The thing actually worked great, But the cousin of the owner of the factory decided he wanted to start selling it. So our factory started shipping us just broken units, delayed shipments to try to get the cousin up here. And what are we going to do? Go over to China and find them in the courts there. So then they had some of the patents in China. So we had to quickly work around those patents, make an improvement to the product, and then go and do some work to have a new variation on our listing to then save that product that was doing, I would say, six million a year at the time, was either going to be zero or we were going to save it and do nine million.

31:35And those are the type of games that became sort of what I would say just like regular everyday business for us. Yeah. Quick aside, Mike Beckham is one of the co-hosts of this podcast. His brother was the creator of the Beckham Hotel Collection. We know the pillow. Yeah, we are very familiar with the pillow. And I think it's still a crown jewel inside the portfolio. So let's talk about those attacks that happened on Amazon still happen today, right? It's almost a meme at this point, flagging something as a pesticide. It immediately goes down, it gets reviewed. You could take a listing down for two weeks if you just reclassify it in the back end of Amazon as a pesticide.

32:13And that's an attack that happens all the time. It just happened to our friend. Do you think Amazon has gotten better? Or do you think it's just, it's a never ending problem, but like, or do they just not care? Yeah. Well, yeah, I would love you. You're close to them. I'm sure they do care, but, but like, what's, what's happening internally? Well, I would say that I I've never been close to them. I've been a person or two away to being close. I actually think they, they do care. I do believe that they really want real high quality products that people like, because they want people to keep on buying off of Amazon, but just like everything in life, like if bribes are possible in India, then they'll always be possible.

32:52Right. And then just like everything else in life, like when people try to escape prisons, you make an improvement, then there's another way. There's always another way. So I think it's something you'll chase and you'll never quite fully solve. But my belief is that they do want to solve it the best they can. My sort of more controversial belief is that sometimes I think they want to see how things work and they'll let things go so they can really solve it later. Totally. It's like, I mean, same thing with like drug dealing. It's like, you know, cops don't arrest every person with a bag on the street.

33:26Like they're trying to figure out how it gets in the country and whatever else. And there's, you know, there's, there's big sting operations, you know, on Amazon caring, but before we get off this point, they also don't want too many large sellers, right? Like, cause like the, the more large sellers there are, the more leverage those people have, they love that there's 10 ,000 people knife fighting every day with zero profits, just trying to squeak out$1 not to go back to their job. That makes it the most competitive platform for Amazon. And that's always going to be their interest. At least that's the way I see it.

33:57They don't want you to have$10 billion in sales on Amazon because then you could pull those products and that's bad for Amazon. Amazon's done a great job making us a thousand little countries. I mean, they had that problem with Nike and Apple years ago, right? Totally. Those two brands pulled off Amazon. They were threatening. It was all about brand association. Yeah, totally. John, I don't know if you can actually answer this cleanly, but in hindsight, was the problem with Thrasio, do you think it was model-based or do you think it was execution-based? like where like our difficulty of execution so like is the model fundamentally flawed and did you just not see it at the beginning like hey this works at this scale but maybe it doesn't at this scale or maybe it's at this scale and speed like what what's your gut you might my and just you know like after my non-compete expired i i helped another swedish aggregator i really just wanted work in Sweden.

34:59So that was like, that was my job. But, but now like, I really started to see the, the model problem in the state of business conditions that existed during that time. Right. Like when, when assets that should be valued at, like, if we were able to go on through, through time and buy things roughly at a two X, I think you have a healthy model. if once we get into better business operational savings when it comes to technology and things and things of that nature i think the model could be successful again however when you had a position where we're trying to build our own tech to make this stuff work you're absorbing sometimes three businesses a week that creates a just incredibly complicated mess on every single level, you're doing everything manually while, again, trying to build your own tech to support things, it becomes an exceptionally complicated problem, even with the Amazon platform that makes things simple undergirding the entire thing.

36:05I think that's really it. And the other thing too, it's just like, you talked about a thousand people in a knife fight in any given category. That makes it really hard to grow your business, right? Like, again, you acquire these assets, or in some part of their product lifecycle, if you don't get the launching part right and the investment in new products and improvements to your current listings, it makes for a real challenge. And there's a reason why no one's at scale has really done it successfully yet because all the pieces aren't a place to do that. I think there might be a time where obviously well past the gold rush, multiples went through the roof.

36:44Now they're back on the toilet where technology makes sense. I also think from one of the core fundamental mistakes we went, it went for us with growing too fast, not because we couldn't handle the input, because we were making business choices as far as the brands we were acquiring, that I probably would have said no to those in a different time. I'm just kidding. We're selling the number one selling lemon squeezer. I don't know. right there's there's plenty of people in china who will be happily make 30 cents a unit selling that to undercut us and there'll be five engineers across the world designing a better lemon squeezer they'll be on they'll be on next year and you just start this like slow descent down when you don't have a set of brands that have brand equity sean maybe like you know like ridge has or i can make an argument for chas it's it's really hard to keep your your place at the top.

37:45Right. And nobody's spending ad dollars to try to sell more lemon squeezers. Like there's no demand is constant and stagnant, right? Like there's no events happening in the world being like, oh, I got to go refresh my lemon squeezers. Nobody's, nobody's thinking that, right? Yeah. So look, I agree that like at some point the model could work, right? Other people have bought businesses and aggregated them and, and, and you buy them for less and then you sell them for more. That's a great business model. That's private equity's entire existence. Yeah. And Amazon shouldn't be a special beast where it doesn't work.

38:20But we just saw such a rapid influx of capital to buy very much bubbly assets, right? E-commerce was so hot in 2021, and by 2022, it was dead. All right, operators, quick break. This episode is brought to you by Northbeam, the marketing attribution platform that we use every day. Now, we all know there's a ton of attribution solutions out there, but I want to talk about what makes North Green different and why everyone across the operators trust their data. The North Green difference, it just doesn't give just last click credit. It spreads credit across the entire customer journey. So top of funnel campaigns finally get the recognition they deserve.

39:00This is huge, especially for me, trying to grow our brand. Top of funnel is just really important, but knowing how much to spend there and giving it credit is just huge for us. So there's a ton of attribution models and accounting modes giving you maximum flexibility to track across huge look back windows or conversion lags for all you operators with long consideration periods. That's another big one for us. Years ago, if people would have looked at our Facebook ad account and told us to stop running ads, you know, like without having the right look back and attribution windows, you're just not making good decisions.

39:36North Beam tracks both clicks and views. And you hear a lot about that now, view through being really important. So you can finally prove TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat campaigns are driving revenue. So check out their clicks and views, clicks and deterministic views model, which is one of their newer models, which we found really, really useful. This model separates new and returning customer acquisition clearly. So you know which ads are driving incremental growth. North Beam Apex is crazy. This is an integration with ad platforms like Meta and AppleOven that allows those ad algorithms to actually drive your ad delivery based on first party performance data.

40:16Nobody else has this. The immediate efficiency returns at the push of the button here are pretty amazing. And then, you know, it never inflates revenue, just the real numbers that actually line up with Shopify. So it's a true source of truth. That's a NorthBeam difference, just the real numbers that actually line up with Shopify and an analytical rigor in the platform that I personally trust and have trusted since like 2020. Look, you know, I don't like paying for SaaS. The people on the pod don't like paying for SaaS solutions, especially Sean loves to talk about it unless they make us money.

40:54And clearly, Northbeam has paid for itself over and over. And we'd be flying blind without it. So, I mean, everyone uses Northbeam. Every big brand I know, every good brand I know, uses Northbeam. Manscaped, Dollar Shaped Club, AG1, Ridge, everyone in my chats. I trust Northbeam. They're one of the foundational platforms that we use here at HexCloud. And so if you're ready to cut through the noise, stop guessing and actually see which ads are driving your business. book a demo at northbeam.io forward slash demo and tell them the operators sent you. Join the club. I think we talked about why it could work.

41:36I would love to hear about the day it went wrong. I mean, when did you guys know it was like, oh, this is not working? Was there a moment in time? Tell us about that Tuesday. day. Yeah, no, I know the exact moment in time. So anyway, again, we're hiring a bunch of people. They're great. I'm doing the, you know, Sean, where you met me, I'm like in Dubai giving speeches and I'm bouncing around and kind of the other guys didn't want to be the industry outward face for the business. And I got a lot of really large business development deals from doing events like that, right? So I was like, I'll just stay on the road.

42:14I'm having a blast. Brandon and I, I'm working with now, my new project, we were in charge of like the PR slash like events people. So I had come back, I think I had maybe come back from either Europe or maybe it was even Dubai. And our team together said like, hey, we're throwing this big party in Cabo. It's a big business development thing. It's gonna be like Thrasio's mark that we throw the best events. And I was like, okay, well, what's happening at this event? It's like, oh, we're gonna do, there's going to be a yacht going through like the thing in Cabo there. We're going to do Baja truck racing.

42:50There's going to be fireworks. We have ice sculptures. And I was like, okay. I just started to get a little, you know, a little nervous there. And I was like, who's going? And they showed me the list. It was 40 people. And I was like, but 35 of these people have already done business with us. There's no new business here. And the other five people are my friends, frankly. you know who would tell me if they wanted to sell their stuff to me and then i was like all right well how much does this cost and uh she said it's it's 480 000 for the part uh and i said well uh maybe we should change this a little bit and she's too late deposits are already paid so i was like well that's a that's a half million dollar lesson on a party that won't bring us any new business at all uh but i guess you know life goes on so a few weeks later i had to travel somewhere else again, I go to Cabo, those five people who were my friends were kind of like a little bit of a wild child, you know, they were the wild ones.

43:48So I actually threw a private party for them to get everything out of their system before they had to interact with people. I actually work with them. That was my strategy, you know? So I did that strategy actually worked amazingly, which I was shocked at. And then like, we had these mansions on the top of the cliff overlooking the point in Cabo. And Brandon didn't travel as much as me. He calls me first. I miss his call. Danny, our president calls me and he's like, we have a big mistake. And I was like, okay. And he said, well, we had a problem with the inputs for our inventory management. We had like a sample exercise that our brand management team was doing and it accidentally got entered in and our supply chain pressed yes to the button.

44:35We made all these orders and we overordered hundreds of millions of dollars in products. And then, uh, and, and, and then he's like, I think, I think we might be. And I'm, I'm sitting there literally about to go to the Baja trucks racing, the big flats fireworks that night, you know, the whole thing's just like, like what, what a sham I started to feel. And I was already getting that sort of imposter syndrome. Like I don't belong here. This is ridiculous part of my journey. My life's falling apart. Like what's happening to me as a person. And then to have this news kind of come in at that, that moment, it was almost sort of like poetic and in a way.

45:08And I like to sort of deflect things with humor. So I told Danny, I was like, well, you know what? You got to be pretty good to make a$450 million mistake. You know, only thing I could think of at the time, but it had gotten to the point where I'll give you an example. Like, let's say we're, we were, we were at top umbrella seller, like number three or something like that. You know, you sell, you sell 90 % black and there's 2 % pink. Well, they were ordering 10 ,000 black units and 10 ,000 pink units, right? That's the sort of stuff that was happening because of this sort of like kind of almost innocent administrative error, right?

45:43And the speed at which we were growing, which is like, you can't, it becomes a monster onto itself. You can't put things in place properly in checks and balances when you're building the airplane as you're flying it. So, so for me, that was the moments where I knew like, uh, we were, we were in a, in a, in a bad way. Speed is a big problem when you've got to deal in the world of moving physical things around. I think it's actually one of the things that we get like all business, all business categories likes to take this idea of speed from Silicon Valley from tech, but it doesn't actually apply to every other category because when you're dealing in the land of software, you screw up, you just roll out a fix.

46:27It's instant, right? Or worst case, like you're massively skilled at infrastructure. It takes 24 hours. When you buy 20 ,000, too many umbrellas, like they show up, you know, there's no like rollback button. I just think that speed is the lesson here. Like too many people try to go extremely fast and consumer and it's hard to stand up systems that have all of the like guardrails in place and processes in place for that level of scale. There's a reason, I mean, we say it all the time on the show, there's a reason why all the multi-billion dollar brands or consumer companies are old. Yeah, dude.

47:02I mean, it's speed, it's debt, and inventory kills everybody, right? Yeah. So how long did that inventory bug take to surface, right? Was it like three months? Someone was just like, or was it one big order of someone just across the whole portfolio? You know, it was, I want to say now I'm not in supply chain, so I wasn't there for every detail. I was, I believe it was either a like free or post Chinese new year massive order for like, you know, cause we always had issues stocking out. so we wanted to reduce stock outs and that was the exercise but something happened in the mixed communication and it went across almost every brand right and then we had other other things that were happening where like you know basically you give these brand managers you give them their own portfolio and you're supposed to look out for the greater good of the of the company but at the end of the day your job's relying on your like vacuum brand so you want to keep sales up so you let's say you do a bunch of lightning deals just to keep that rank up and to keep the numbers kind of moving this way, not realizing that the lightning deals were causing other sellers to buy our vacuums and then relist them to take away the buy box.

48:20And then our brand manager, not aware of this, would then buy that vacuum back and then resell it, right? There's just things like that. Because again, you're talking about there was four of us sitting in an office that's about the size of the one I'm sitting here right now. And then two and a half years later, there's 1 ,600 people across 10 offices across the world. And there's 200 new companies that you didn't have before and now you have. Like things are going to go wrong, you know? Okay, so we explained why it was a good model. We explained kind of what went wrong. I would love to hear, I got maybe three points left, like the future of Amazon and FBA and what Thrasio is doing now.

49:02So maybe what does Thrasio look like in its current form? Is it still going around? I believe it has some portfolio brands. Are you involved at all or you just walked away completely? No, I knew that things were changing. This was actually before the inventory of this app. When I show up to the executive retreat and I'm the only person left in a T-shirt, I was like, oh boy, things are changing around here. PE's big hand started to reach in. And then we get one of those sort of like, you know, nightmare consultant groups to come in to try to fix things with zero e-commerce experience, you know.

49:39And so I'm out. So this is all speculative to me. I don't know, nor did I really spend a lot of time caring about it. It's sort of, you know, it's a distant memory that left me with a lot of great lessons and honestly changed my life too as well for the better. But I really think they don't know exactly what to do over there. And that's the reason why, that's partially the reason why they've gone through bankruptcy a few times. I think the issue is that they didn't know how to reduce the staff and still have things functionally run. They stepped away from the idea of this product lifestyle thing, product life cycle thing I keep going back to, where you need new and better stuff in order to continue to grow.

50:28Unless you have a Clorox bleach that everyone's just buying and that'll be steady and it'll do what it's going to do. Right. And I think they've really struggled with all those pieces. I think I'm sure there's been some amazingly talented people that have come in and out of there over the years to try to fix things. But I think it's a massively complicated problem. So, you know, what are they going to do in the future? I don't know. I would imagine that there's a set of assets, probably Anchor Orange being one of them, that they're going to find a way to try to keep those pieces and we'll see what happens to the rest of the portfolio.

51:02Yeah. Look, and that's, it'll be a very healthy exercise, right? They're going to bleed all of the fat off, sell it for pennies on the dollar, try to restructure the debt, go through bankruptcy a bunch of times and have, you know, instead of having 200 brands, going back to having 20 amazing brands, right? That actually get to 500 million in revenue, Right. And that's that's an awesome portfolio. Do you do you blame the debt at all as being part of the problem? Because, I mean, it was, you know, you raised three billion. I heard half of it was debt. I mean, yeah, that that's that's a big challenge to overcome.

51:31Yeah, no, certainly. I mean, the speed at which we had to execute everything and the pressure we were putting on ourselves based on what we raised became a real problem for us, without a doubt. And there's so many details in there. I don't have time to get into all of them on this podcast, but there are so many reasons why that became a real logistical challenge for us. I think it came down to, though, at the end of the day, just sort of like, we're trying to keep up speed. So we're acquiring assets. And even our diligence is great. Our decision-making process started to fail. And we purchased things we shouldn't have purchased that put further pressure on us.

52:14Then you have all these other mistakes and market conditions and crazy Amazon stuff that I've talked about. All of it's sort of happening at the one time and you get to where we ended up. operators, Black Friday, Cyber Monday is coming up. Is your SMS list ready? If not, get on PostScript. They're helping us drive 14 % more email signups through their better opt-ins. They're helping us get 6 % more SMS subs every single day because they have perfected the art of pop-ups. You need to build your list. You have to nurture your list. You have to take care of your list. PostScript is the best at that.

52:51They're the number one name in SMS. It's their number one revenue driver. We are excited and ready to take advantage of all of the lists we've built all year, okay? Postscript has the best opt-in of all time. It is single, sign in, password out of fill right on your phone, and we're gonna get probably another 100 ,000 people to sign up between now and the end of the year. We're gonna use those people. We're gonna use SMS to nurture them through the funnel. It's an amazing tool. I love it. Make sure you're ready for Black Friday Cyber Monday. Postscript is here to help guide you through everything that you need when it comes to SMS.

53:27More opt-ins, more list building. Make sure you don't look like an amateur, this BFCM. Use Postscript. Tell them Sean sent you. Tell them the operator sent you. Postscript will audit your SMS program for free and show you how to scale fast before Black Friday, Cyber Monday hits. When we talk about list growth, that's what you have to use before, during, and after Black Friday. You want serious gains. You want Postscript. Thank you for supporting the podcast. Thank you for being here. And you're back in the world of brand building, right? You have a new product, which we're going to talk about.

53:57But do you believe in the future of like FBA, right? Like the future of Amazon as a platform? Or do you think like if you're working on a brand right now, is it not part of your strategy? You know Amazon better than anybody else on earth. Are you leaning in or are you leaning out? So for this particular product, we don't feel that Amazon is going to be a core level for us. Will we eventually be on there properly? Do I think there's a future in FBA? Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you know, there, last time I checked, this was a couple years ago. Yeah. Depending on who you ask, there's 330 to 350 million people-ish, something like that in America.

54:37There was 118 million Prime subscribers. One in three Americans have a full Amazon. It's, you know, when you think about that. It's more if you take out the kids. Yes. Right. So, you just look at what the, Now, what a part of the zeitgeist of culture that we've had with this particular function. There will always be spots there. Now, will it be a lot like, you know, I don't know if you remember this, but like you're running ads on Facebook back in 2012. Man, your cacks are great. Everything's like, and then things just start to squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. So do I think it's getting tougher?

55:17Yes. Do I still think there'll be a world in which you can make money on FBA? Also, yes. Right. So I don't think it's nothing's going to be like the glamorous open road of early Amazon. You're like, hey, there's no duct tape on Amazon. I guess I'll start selling it. And you go to five million a year. Like those days obviously are way long gone. But is there an opportunity to be successful on there? Absolutely. We know one place too where I found out that I've helped out some agencies too, just doing some consultant. is there's a lot of retailers who should be good Amazon that are not, right? Like that's the thing that really surprises me is that they're mislevered because they're just used to selling it into GNC or wherever their main partner is.

56:01They don't realize they can move millions of units on there. So I think that's the best opportunity as far as quick, easy business. But if you're not one of those, you better have something that's an improvement upon something else. something that's coming at a different angle, something that maybe has a future for brand equity going forward. So, you know, I wouldn't like, I wouldn't go on Amazon and try to compete selling mealworms to chickens, right? Like, but I would go into a space where maybe I had a formula that made a cleaning product better or a deodorizer better or a laundry product or even food, I still think there's room in places like that where you can do really well.

56:49So if you have advice for, you know, most listeners of this show are doing seven to nine figures a year in revenue, they probably have some Amazon exposure. Out of, you've seen, you've done 200 deals. You've probably seen 2 ,000 businesses. You've deployed billions in capital across all of these. What's like the top tier advice? Biggest mistakes, things to avoid. one mind to save these people millions of dollars, what would you tell them? Is their goal to eventually have an exit? Because I have a very clear piece of advice. Well, dude, let's hear it. If you're trying to sell, what's the piece of advice?

57:25For me, it's like the thing that sellers would always get confused in their mind is their belief in what their asset is. And as a buyer, all I'm looking at is the stability of the asset I'm acquiring. And it's virtually known future growth potential. That's it, right? So I don't want to necessarily see that this person's on 19 different channels and 15 % of the revenue comes from eight of those channels. That creates complexity, confusion, stuff I don't want. I want to see a clear path of steady growth and I need to know what the moats are. You need to be able to tell me in a minute the story as to why this thing is going to be successful going forward and what my competitive advantage is on any level, whether that's manufacturing, whether that's formulation, whether that's branding.

58:18And I'm going to quickly and easily understand if like you had a couple of pop shots with like PR campaigns or successful ads that ran that no longer ran. Like I'm looking towards the future and the future only. And the past only matters for what I might pay you. So having the most simple story that's easy to understand and leaving something on the table for the next buyer to go out and grow. That's something that's always really important too, right? It's like, oh, I have the ability to start this channel or to launch this next product. I haven't done it yet, but I could, and that could be valuable to you.

58:54And maybe that launch would work or it wouldn't work, but that might be exciting enough for someone else to pay up for it. But it's just like having a confident and simple story that's backed up on paper. Those are the ones that go for twice the amount of ones that are just kind of a mess of stuff where there's no organized future for the brand. If that makes any cohesive sense to you guys. Yeah. You want steady, you want simplicity, and you want some meat on the bone. You want something for the next guy to come to the table. All right. Before we get to the plug section, Matt, any final questions?

59:28No, dude. I mean, it's a fascinating story. I appreciate you just sharing everything. It's great. Dude. Okay. Okay, so I would love to buy the book, pre-order the book, register the book. Hopefully you get like a gumroad page for pre-orders done. Tell us more about what you're working on right now, man. Yeah, so I got, you know, one of the great things about Thrasio is it exposed me to some exceptionally bright people, both in and outside of my business. And so when I was done, like honestly, it was a lot. And one of the things all of our executives had was this crazy hangover. That's really hard to define.

1:00:05We're almost like hunched drunk. Some of us still are. Two years afterwards, we're like, there's nothing gives you the dopamine hit of what we were doing before. Nothing stimulates like your desire to improve. And you're just left in this sort of like malaise of like kind of like jello is the way I would describe it. You know, and even if I was at my new business now and someone's like, oh, we made$5 million last week. Like, okay, it's weird. It's a really hard thing to define that nothing changes your levels anymore because you were in this sort of explosive plate that exploded so big that now it's almost like a post-traumatic stress disorder.

1:00:44But one thing I want to do is like, all right, well, if that's not going to give me stimulation, then what is? And working with the people I love who I know are smarter than me is going to do the trick for me. So I gathered some of the smartest people in product development. They were out of the Utah office. I flew out there for about, I think, about 10 days over a two-week period. And we just sat like I did in the Thrasio days and said, like, what can we do? What do we want to do? And then what we figured out was like that we want to do something with hardware and we want to do something in the Christian space.

1:01:18So what we've developed as a product is, in essence, a very relatively complex hardware device that feeds into an application that then has all these agents that do all these amazing things to help bring people closer to Christianity and also enhance their experience if they are someone who's really close to faith. We think we're going to revolutionize that entire space by adding a level of intimacy, by adding an ease of use. Things that were really manual before will now become automatic. And we really think also potentially curing loneliness for elderly people. So we've started this company.

1:01:59We're almost done with the app. The hardware is designed. We closed our first round of funding. Really exciting. We got an NFL Hall of Famer to be the first person in our next round. we're still starting that if anyone's vaguely interested they could reach out to me directly at john heftermarketing at gmail.com and we can have a conversation but we're really excited potentially for what this sort of like hardware to app technology with ai can do because it's it's actually applicable to a lot of other things we just felt that the christian space was the right place to start and and maybe a good place for me to uh you know make up for some past errors just in case, you know?

1:02:38So yeah, that's, that's what I'm working on now. And it really is great when you, when you have people that you're working with that you love as people, you trust, and you just know they're brilliant. It really does like change things. And, and, and this project, which I have a real belief in, and by the way, if it ever really takes off, like I'm out, I'm not going to go and deal with all that again. I'll be this first phase and let it fly away without me. I don't want to do that again. I want to do things that are good for other people in the world, and I want to work with people that I love.

1:03:12That's one thing this Thrasio experience has taught me is just to reshift the framework of what I define as being successful. Beautiful, brother. Okay. We have Christian AI hardware coming from John, his book, Unicorn on Fire, which is about the Thrasio story. You're in e-commerce. You know when you want to read it. I'm going to read it. I'm going to pre-order the book. It'd be really sick if our audience pre-ordered a thousand books. Thousands of people listening right now. I would love for you guys to pre-order this. John, we appreciate you coming here. Anything else you want to say? No, this was what a great chat, guys.

1:03:45I really appreciate you having me on. And it was fun telling that story again around the campfire after one. Yeah, look, and you have more stories to tell. So as soon as the AI Christian hardware thing launches, you'll come back on to plug it. Matt, anything else you want to say? No, I can't wait to see it. That was great, John. Appreciate it, man. Keep rocking in the free world. Doot, doot, doot, doot. All right, thanks for making it all the way to the end of this episode. Wherever you are in the world, it is awesome to have you here. If you do not already subscribe to this show, that is my one ask, is please go to whatever platform you are watching or listening to this on.

1:04:17It could be YouTube, it could be Spotify, Apple. I don't care. Just go hit the subscribe button. Please pump our egos up. It helps. And before we go, one more thank you to the sponsors, Fulfill, PostScript, Northbeam, Saris and Rich Panel. Awesome guys running these companies. We all use them. These are our vendors. That's the only reason they're sponsors of the show. So thanks again to those people.