Honeylove’s Betsie Larkin & Igor Lebovic: Building a $200M Company Together

22:26And if you can do it fast, then that's amazing. But if it takes a minute, then that's fine as well. Yeah, I don't really think of us as a fashion company. Well, what do you think? What are you guys? It's more of like a technology type of thing. So Igor used the Apple analogy. I think it's in shoes a lot too. So they'll spend a long time figuring out the shoes. And then you take that idea and you do expansions on that shoe. So I think like on running is a good example. Oh, yeah. That's sort of how we think. We go very deep on the products that we make. And then when we like have a hit, then we'll expand on that and create different versions of it.

23:01So it's not like fashion. And that's not to say that our stuff isn't beautiful and it isn't like very aesthetic. It's just that it's not the first thing. It's the function and the way that it works and is it effective that comes first and then the beauty and the aesthetics come second.

23:17Matt Bertulli:Yeah. I mean, this is Hexclad, right? It's like great product. It's been iterated on over a long time. You can expand the product into a lot of different like adjacent things. Versions, yeah. I would say like this is another one of those common things in great consumer companies is like a weird obsession with the product. Yeah. Some of my favorite actual apparel companies are the ones who go the other way of fast fashion where they say like, I'm just going to iterate forever on like these 10 things. They're just going to get better over time. And they show you every little iteration. And I'm a nerd that way.

23:49Matt Bertulli:I like to see people who just kind of obsess over like the smallest what would seem pedantic things. But they turn out to be really important in the experience. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. I've actually told Jason this. I had somebody steal one of my hex glad pants. Like one of my friends just took the damn thing out of my house. Nice. Didn't tell me. He just really liked it? Yeah, he's just like, this is awesome. I had a few of them, so. You don't need this one anymore. Yeah, he just like took it home. And I'm like, dude, I'll get you one. I know a guy. How did you guys, so right back to the beginning of like launching then, so you come off break.

24:25Matt Bertulli:You launched with a crowdfund? Yeah. Kickstarter or Indiegogo? Kickstarter. Yeah. We did an Indiegogo too, but it was just like kind of what you do. Like you do the Indiegogo. This is what we share. We launched Loni with Indiegogo though. Oh, just Indiegogo. Yeah. Okay. Kickstarter wouldn't talk to us. Yeah. They're kind of snobby. Well, I don't think they really like helped us out very much either until it was already going and it was doing well. Then they start talking. Yeah. But yeah. So what made you want to do that? Like why the crowdfunding? It seemed like a great way to start. I think you actually do raise money there.

25:02You find out if the consumer really wants the product. I do think a lot of other brands use Kickstarter differently than we did. For me, Kickstarter was very public. So I had a successful music career at the time. And the idea of just using Kickstarter for testing wouldn't really be true for me. I think it was like, if I'm going to have a Kickstarter, it has to be successful because I'm exposing myself. like all of all of these pans that I have are going to see me trying to do something totally different from what I've been doing and that would be like a public failure so to me it was like I only want to go on Kickstarter if I already strongly believe that I have product market fit so I had that two years basically where I was on tour with Armin Van Buren but when I was at home I was like every new woman that I met I'm like hey I'm doing this thing will you try it out so I was getting lots of feedback oh very cool back to the iteration thing.

25:54It was like lots and lots of iterations trying to get the product exactly right. Because if I was going to launch on Kickstarter and have all of these people see it, it like had to be successful. So, um, yeah.

26:06Matt Bertulli:Did you, were you like, we went really deep on what makes for a successful crowdfund. Same. Yeah. Like literally pulled apart. Like we sat down with like all the best campaigns and pulled every video apart, like frame by frame, word by word. That's weird. I did the same thing. I actually transcribed the successful Kickstarter campaigns. And this was before you had 2018. You didn't have an AI. Yeah, I was handwriting these things. Yeah, totally. But the good thing was, as you kind of went through that, you also were ingesting all of the patterns and learning. So it was like the campaign pages, the order of everything, where are the call to actions, what are the different chapters in the video.

26:42And there are serious commonalities between all of the campaigns that break a million dollars. I mean, mine did 300 ,000, which I was delighted with. The goal was 30 ,000. We ended up hitting that on the first day, which was super exciting. And it was like most of what I needed to actually get the production order.

26:59Matt Bertulli:I was going to ask, how close was it to what you actually needed to launch the company? I needed like$60 ,000. So I knew I was going to get there because on the first day I hit 30. So yeah, no, Kickstarter is really fun. I feel like it's this microcosm for business. You have to figure so many things out if you have a successful kickstarter campaign you and you actually do it all right you ship to the customers like you do it on time you really learn how to do a lot of what you need to know for the first couple of years of having a consumer business it's how to make the product how to get it manufactured how to ship it how to do customer support how to do marketing like you have to do all of those things right in order to have a successful yeah The actual, it turns out the structure of a great Kickstarter video is almost universally applicable in consumer brands.

27:48Matt Bertulli:Totally. They will work all the time. You could even just use that structure and that script structure and just apply it to anything. We still do. Yeah. We still do. We've actually started it back up again where I was like, okay, we're going to create Kickstarter videos for all of our new launches. And then we've started doing pre-orders. So it's really kind of like a Kickstarter campaign. So we'll have these landing pages that have like something kind of like a Kickstarter video with some of the same chapters. This is why we did this. This is how it all came together. You know. Yeah. Yeah. You it even for the team, I think it helps really solidify.

28:21Matt Bertulli:Like, why did we make this product? Yeah. Who is it for? Totally. You know, like and like, yeah, it's just structure. It's great. The so at what point did you figure out this thing was going to be real? Like, when did Honeylove become like, oh, we have a real company? This is going to work. Yeah. There were a few places. I think hitting the goal on the first day of Kickstarter was actually one of them, where it was like, that was surprising. I wasn't expecting to have that happen. I'm constantly flabbergasted by the achievement. I think that there's a chance that we're going to be successful, but the extent to which things take off sometimes is really surprising.

28:59So that was a moment. Getting into Y Combinator was a moment. With Honeylove? Yeah, with Honeylove.

29:05Matt Bertulli:Really? Yeah. That's very not Y Combinator. This is a very common response that you have. How'd you pull that off? Well, it was 2018. Okay. We had traction. Yeah. They like that. Y Combinator companies don't have a lot of revenue. We had$300 ,000 in revenue. Fairly good size market. And I think the potential to go into Intimates, which is a much, much larger market. Clear indications of some level of product market fit. There's also like innovation, right? You have an innovation story. Totally. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, the whole like we're a technology, like that totally fits. Yeah, they just seem to have an allergic reaction to like physical goods at Y Combin.

29:48They do, but they let a couple.

29:50Matt Bertulli:They're kind of adjusting now. They let a couple in each year. Okay. And Honeylift's been in the top 50 YC companies a couple of years in a row. So it was a good decision on that part. Yeah, good for them. We had a woman in my interview, or it was just me, Carolyn Levy, who's the lawyer for Y Combinator. interviewed me. She asked the right questions. I think she was able to see that this was a viable business. Was it, I mean, having like already had some success was, I'm just thinking of like these early years. Was there anything like personally, was this like a difficult journey for you guys?

30:23Matt Bertulli:Like did it change your lifestyle having to start this company or was it sort of on the personal like relationship side, pretty smooth. Just given both of you having like established careers and like having had some wins i mean honestly i feel like on the whole it's been it's been pretty fun um just like broadly it's been surprisingly more successful than we would have thought but you have to remember that we also launched in 2018 in 2020 you had the pandemic yep every single year there has been something that feels like a i know just i'm so tired of being told there's like a hundred year event.

30:59Matt Bertulli:I'm like, five years in a row, guys? That's right. Really? Yeah. So there's definitely been a ton of headwinds. And Igor and I have definitely had to navigate things as a couple, of course, working together. But it's really been an incredible opportunity, I think, to learn how to work together and to have just that exposure to some of these things. I feel like before we were working on Honeylove together, life was pretty easy. We would see each other at the end of each of our work days and it was like pretty chill. Now suddenly we have to make decisions together and it wasn't always easy. But I think as a result of us like both trying and having our hearts in the right place, we've actually learned how to navigate these things, which has probably brought us closer in a weird way and given us a higher level of respect for each other than we would have just separately.

31:49Yeah. Somebody was bringing this up yesterday. You know, there's this idea like I could never do this with my wife. And I just remember having this conversation with this same person just two minutes earlier about how they were, you know, like, you know, loving their kids and everything. And I was just like, well, you are raising children with your wife. And I think it's an analogy that's probably worth just kind of like, you know, wrapping your head around, you know, mom and dad, like mom's going to have a certain style and dad's going to have a certain style. And sometimes they're going to be identical, but sometimes they're going to be a little different.

32:19And I think navigating those different styles and being consistent in raising your kid is kind of like an interesting proxy for how it works when you're like, you know, husband and wife, you know, trying to get a company to take off. And one other aspect here that I think is really interesting is, so Betsy's career consisted at that time of traveling and working while traveling, but then coming home and not working while at home. I mean, like, you know, writing songs, but like not having a very fixed schedule. That's work. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But not having a fixed schedule, you know, like basically being able to like, you know, go and, you know, travel for two days and get in a car and drive somewhere.

32:59Yeah. My schedule couldn't have been opposite. Like, you know, at that time, we ran a company with 100 people. I mean, I very much had to be here at that time doing those things. And oftentimes it also meant, I mean, just imagine, I'm sure everybody can empathize here. we're going to go and see a movie or drive a dinner together. And it's at a certain time. And of course, something blows up right before. And I want to give Betsy full credit because she's so entrepreneurial and she gets it. But at the same time, there's still a little bit of this like, oh man, I'm not living up to what I really should be doing right now.

33:33I'm either tied to my phone or I'm thinking about something. When you're doing this thing together, there's no such a thing as a missed dinner or showing up late for something or being absent minded or whatever like you're in it together you're navigating it together so surely you are you increase the surface area of risk because you're now talking about hiring decisions or performance or what have you but you're also reducing the surface area of risk because you're no longer sort of like kind of like gosh this is going to sound horrible but almost selfish for your own career where you have to do trade-offs for the you know the good of the family sometimes yeah and so for us i would say we are closer than ever and obviously we navigated new lessons but it's like an extension of life like work is an extension of life and almost every spouse is somewhat intertwined with their others work in some way it's actually in some respects i think maybe even just easier because you just know what each other is going through all the time.

34:42You're just like in it. So it's just like your work is everyone's work is their life in a lot of ways, right? Like your work really is your life because you've run it together. And I think it's a lot of blend.

34:54Matt Bertulli:Has that, uh, has that sort of like the relationship dynamic, has that lent itself to how the company has expanded from like initial shapewear to other product categories. Like, does that stuff just come naturally to you? Cause you spend so much time together. Do you just agree on things like that? Like, how did you decide to go from where you started to where you are today? It's all about, you know, honestly, like I, I can't take any credit there. Well, the playbook started, I think before I joined, um, and he was always there on the sidelines. So I don't want to say that all of these decisions were made a hundred percent by me without your involvement.

35:28Um, I might run things by him, but yeah, I mean, I think it was just natural to do adjacent expansions so we started out in shapewear and then we made a decision to do a top with a built-in wireless bra but it still had a little bit of shaping in it so it was like that logical adjacent jump that did really well that actually got us through the pandemic because people stopped wearing shapewear oh yeah but they loved the top with the built-in bra and it did that did really well thankfully um and then it was just natural like okay the built-in wireless bra on this top is really good. We should just make the wireless bras.

36:03So I think I was just kind of logically expanding and really like looking for the next, the next big thing. Like it's in my nature to always be looking for the next big thing. I think going from music into having my own business, it was like, okay, this is starting to feel kind of stagnant for me. I need something else. It's like Igor's doing all of these startups. It looks really fun. I'm really interested in it. I'm constantly probably meddling. So I should have my own company. And I think in the way that we run, we run Honeylove product wise, we don't like sit back on our laurels and like, just like wait for the, the, the party to end.

36:44It's like constantly thinking about, okay, how else can we, you know, serve the customer? What's something that we can do better than anyone else?

36:51Matt Bertulli:And so product for you guys has been like customer pull first, as opposed to saying what markets and what categories do we think we should go into? It's a little bit of customer pull and it's a little bit of like design team, I would say, where like, you know, I'm kind of leading the design team. I'm thinking about where we should go based on my own intuition. And then we're running that by customers and asking them, hey, what do you think of this? It's not always a request from a customer. Sometimes it's a hypothesis that we have, but we do run everything by the customers. We have like regular surveys of lots and lots of customers.

37:27We started figuring out ways to survey people just outside of our immediate pool where we think we can expand into. So we don't do anything based purely on kind of gut and intuition, but a lot of things start there.

37:40Matt Bertulli:How many products have you had to, how many products never made it past the, we have an idea, here's design. How many don't get to, we're selling it? I don't even know. A lot. A lot? Yeah. What's the weirdest one?

37:56Matt Bertulli:Or like somebody's like, we're going to make this. I'm like, okay, let's try. I'll let you think about it. But the one thing that while you're thinking, the one thing that I think is interesting is when we onboard people from other companies that are, you know, in adjacent spaces. The hardest thing is always this idea of how much gets worked on and doesn't get released. And again, this goes back to the idea of newness. I think people are so trained in this career to be productive. And productivity is measured in terms of how many, almost like as a programmer, the lines of code. I think that's an interesting proxy.

38:30It's like this useless metric that really doesn't, in any shape or form, reflect the quality of the product. Well, for a designer in our space, oftentimes they come and they get nervous if the thing that they designed in the first couple of weeks is not just quickly going through the approval process. and I don't know I mean I think I pride ourselves on I think we pride ourselves on knowing that we released roughly 30 styles in the last 7 years and we've killed 3 that launched that's an incredible hit rate so roughly a 90 % hit rate in terms of these styles constantly being replant is a result of having killed hundreds that never made past the approval stage

39:15Matt Bertulli:What typically makes a product not make it past? Is there some patterns just for people listening that want to get it, that are crazy enough to get into anything remotely close to apparel? Yeah. I mean, one thing that'll happen is we'll survey it. So we'll show things to customers and they don't like them as much as we thought they would have. So that could make us kill something. So like actual style, like this is just not hitting the mark. Sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. at other times it's like oh we thought that this that I one example I could give kind of the weirdest one that we didn't go forward with and by the way this is still something that I think we could do but we were sort of like beating our heads against the wall with it and it just wasn't working and that was a posture support bra and it just felt that's actually really smart totally and they do exist and we wear tested a lot of things that were on the market it's like but they don't they don't work and for us it's like I don't want to sell something that we're saying is going to help you with your posture that isn't.

40:12So it was getting a little contraptiony. There were some really contraptiony things happening in order to get it to work. And it just felt like this isn't a good trade-off. You don't maybe need to have posture support in your bra. You can wear some kind of brace that isn't built into the bra. Again, I'm not going to say it's impossible and I'm not going to say we're never going to do it, but it felt like we were just beating our heads against the wall.

40:37Matt Bertulli:Have you seen the product, the posture things, where they just like, they buzz you when you're slutching. Some that are trying to fix your posture, they're just reminding you that your posture is shitty. I mean, honestly, that's probably more effective. It's like Zap. Like a dog collar for posture. No, but that works so much better than an actual posture support bra. So on the product thing, a little more. Yeah. Shapewear to bras? It went from shapewear to tops to bras. To bras. Yeah. What are your best-selling categories today, if you don't mind sharing? Uh, bras by landslide. Really? Yeah. Yeah.

41:12Matt Bertulli:Well, and why? Like, so people come back to work, like a shape were just not as big of a category as you thought initially, or is bras just that much bigger? Bras is a much bigger category. And then we were early in wire free. So right now everyone is racing towards wire free. We got into wire free bras early. And honestly we got into shapewear early too. So, um, yeah, we came out about a year before skims. So kind of my like happy accident of hating shapewear on stage worked out really well for our shapewear timing timing yeah and then um the bras it was i think similar we got into the tops as an adjacency to shapewear and then the tops had the bra built in so we're like oh we should do these wireless bras also and they they were great they were made differently they still stand out in the market today and yes it's a huge market so can you uh i got a question this is random uh skims came into shapewear.

42:05Matt Bertulli:Do you, either of you have a strong opinion on a competition being a good thing in consumers? So like, you know, big categories, do you like having lots of competitors? Do you like someone like Kim coming in and saying like, let me show you what shapewear is? Is that net positive? I'll be honest. I was really scared when Skims first came in. It's Kim freaking Kardashian. Yeah. It was like, she's got some reach. What the hell? I mean, on one side I was like, this is kind of cool. I chose a category that like the most famous woman in the world then chose like she had her pick of the litter and she picked something that I picked a year earlier so I felt kind of good about that um but I was scared I was like yeah they're gonna sweep in and just take over the whole business um turns out it was totally positive for us I think uh you know the Kardashians have the ability to bring awareness to any category in a way they kind of made it cool um because people perceive her as cool and I think it all just bled over.

42:59But then our products are so different. The way that they make shapewear and the way that we make shapewear is different enough that some people prefer ours and some people prefer theirs. Honestly, I think it's been that positive. This episode is brought to you by Sorol. You're practically renting attention on meta ads and rent only goes one direction, up. Influencer marketing done as one-off campaigns is just another form of rent. The Fix is a system seed products at scale, convert the winners into affiliates, put your best performers on long-term retainers. That's what Serol is built for, finding perfect fit creators with their AI, managing personalized outreach at scale, built-in product shipping, one-click payouts, and tracking posts and ROI of all your campaigns so that your team can run influencer marketing like a machine.

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44:02Matt Bertulli:you know it's uh we we have talked about this in many episodes ago on the pod i don't understand the the people in consumer who are like i gotta stay in stealth mode i can't let anybody know what i'm doing like they're worried about somebody competing with them and i'm like okay listen kid you realize that in consumer you know all consumer goods all categories there is never ever ever been a single company who has a dominant market share in any consumer category right and the closest is coca-cola coca-cola and they invented freaking santa claus did they also put cocaine in the first version yes man and that's the closest to like a a like silicon valley ish i'm gonna own 70 share doesn't happen in consumer And I'm just making this point because I am so tired of this, like, oh, but they're going to copy me and they're going to come at.

44:59Matt Bertulli:I'm like, dude, you're not thinking big enough. If that's true, then you're not really doing a real, you're not building a real brand. Well, it's always going to happen anyway. It's going to happen. These are the laws of business. Even if you have a first mover advantage, that competitive advantage will get eroded. All competitive advantages get. The only real competitive advantage is a monopoly. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But in tech, and I asked it, I'm bringing this up because like the whole Y Combinator thing, right? Like it is rare to be in consumer to get into YC, but then in YC as some, like I come out of tech, they teach a lot of that doesn't apply to consumer.

45:39No.

45:39Matt Bertulli:You know? So like, what are, I guess, what are some of the things that out of YC that really did, like this was really valuable. Like this is stuff that we wanted to pull out of this program. Make something people want. Yep. Exactly. Talk to your customers. Yeah, and a shocker. That's not a bad idea. I know, but a lot of people don't do it. In consumer, we don't do it. Yeah, in consumer, they don't do it. It's hard, but it absolutely works. Do things that don't scale. What else? The number one thing that I just want to portray here is, you know, I went to an average school, and I literally met the smartest guy out of like 5 ,000 students.

46:17And then I hung out with him for the next 25 years. And that was like, that was my influence. That was like my benchmark. And that's who I measured myself against. And that's how we got better. But it took another, so I was in YC in 2014 and I graduated in 2002. So it took me 12 years to be surrounded by, I think YC at the time at about 140 people in a batch.

46:40Matt Bertulli:Yeah. And that was a great generation of body collaborators. Flagsport, Ryan Peterson. Everybody knows Ryan. Yeah, we know Ryan. We love Ryan. He's on the show. He was on the batch team. The mastermind yesterday when we had 30 people there, it's like a very, very tiny, like one day, almost one day version, I think is super valuable. I can't imagine you guys doing that with an incredible group of people for an extended period of time. And there's a leaderboard and you know what the standard looks like. It's very competitive. And like, you know, all the investors are going to invest in, you know, like the top maybe 10%.

47:15Like all the best deals are going to be the top 10%. And then, you know, other people get funded. But increasingly, stocks look like, you know, second pick.

47:22Matt Bertulli:Can we go further into the customer thing? So you said like talk to your customer. Yeah. And I do think this is a thing. And somebody brought it up yesterday too. But like this is a thing in consumer where I think we don't do this enough because the volume of consumers is really high. Yeah. You know, like you guys have millions of customers. We all have millions of actual customers, right? Yeah. In quantity. And I think it's easy to hear it in tech. Ryan probably had 12 customers that he had to talk to. Real easy to talk to 12 enterprise SaaS customers. Very hard to talk to a million people who buy bras from you.

47:56Matt Bertulli:How do you guys do this now? Can you give us like a, this is what we're, like the current state of the company, here's how we listen to the customer. There is a hack, I think. Please. And I actually learned it in Y Combinator. Okay. Right. Brian Armstrong, Coinbase founder, he'll get one of the dinners. And he's like, a lot of people don't do user testing because it's too hard. There's, you know, it's too much work. He's like, but if you just talk to three to five customers, chances are you're going to get 80 to 90 % of what you have learned by talking to a much bigger group of customers. So I think people should do that.

48:30If you talk to three to five people and they're all saying the same thing, it's true. Everyone else is going to say it too. If they're all saying different things, that's a different story.

48:38Matt Bertulli:You need to go - You don't need a thousand of them. Yeah. If they're all saying the same thing, because the main thing that's either wrong with that product, the customer is going to see it right out of the gate. It's like, there is some universal truths that I think you can get by talking to just a couple of people. So I think people shouldn't shy away from talking to small numbers of people as well. I love this a lot. One of the things we did at PILA, this is six, seven, probably six years ago, and this was in the pandemic, right? We started, we had this thing where we're like, can we send a personal thank you video to every customer that buys from us?

49:11Matt Bertulli:At the time, it was like four or 500 a day. It sounded like a lot, but there's 30 people in the company. I'm like, okay, we did the math. Like how many videos would each of us have to record to send out all the videos? And after a week, my software guy, my developer was like, listen, I did the math. And if we just did like these 200 names, first names, we get 80 % to 90 % of our customer list. So then we all sat down and I recorded like five, hey Jen, thanks for your order, like five versions of that video. And he built this little tool that like customers would roll in and it would just like pick their first video name.

49:50Matt Bertulli:And I mean, listen, the lesson in all of this and the reason I bring it up is like the law of averages is true in consumer, right? Like we are, most of us are actually not that different. You know, like there's a reason why you get a million people buy from the same brand. It's like, well, it's not like you made a million ads. Although maybe today we probably have to, but it is true. Like you can talk to five, talk to 10, be directionally correct and then move. Yeah. I think that's really great advice. Yeah. We do still talk to bigger groups. Yeah, sure. Our customers too. We send out a ton of surveys.

50:20And sometimes you do need like more for statistical significance for maybe choosing between designs or something like that. if it's close, it's like you have to keep going. Um, like if they're tied, but yeah, most of the time you can get what you need with like a small group. They'll call it out. They'll call it the main thing that really matters.

50:40Matt Bertulli:So as we go from like YC building and scaling the company, can you guys walk us through like how marketing has changed in the company in that time, maybe channel mix, how you think about where to go now to find these customers that you're wanting to sell to. i'll let you take this one i'll tell you i remember a car ride with betsy early early on and i'm embarrassed to have said this because it just reminds me of how incorrect i was um you know we started with a very simple company it was one channel it was all very interconnected you know the shopify side was basically like templates and you know like it was very very simple and i remember betsy asking me like what would happen if meta just wasn't working anymore and i remember We're telling her, like, game's over.

51:27You know, like, you know, we all go into something else. I mean, like, I remember, we don't think much about it. That was just like, don't even go there. Like, there are questions that we're not going to ask ourselves. And, you know, it still will be pretty painful. But I think that for a company, and let's look at some companies that we admire, like Nike or, you know, what would happen to Nike if Meta wasn't there? So, like, you clearly can build a business without Meta. And, you know, this is not to say that you really should because Meta is just absolutely phenomenal. I really think it's underappreciated as a company for how many businesses have basically like, you know, become a thing that wouldn't have otherwise.

52:04But look, I mean, you know, it's possible. And we try very hard every day not to have neither a key man risk nor a key channel risk nor a key product risk. What does our mix look like today? 40, 45 % meta. You're going to look at Google and YouTube together, contributing to about 20. TV, linear and CTV, about 15. Okay. And those are kind of like, you know, the main channels. I mean, like we've had those channels for a long time. And then the rest, you're going to be looking at AppLovin and you're going to be looking at podcasting, Pinterest, you know, all those end up, you know, having two and a half to 5 % or so.

52:43Matt Bertulli:Yeah, which is meaningful at scale, right? Like if you could put 5 % of spend into something at your scale, that's still a lot of dollars. Like, so I think finding those channels ends up being pretty important. So what would happen if Meta wasn't there anymore? I mean, you know, I think you would just have to fill a 40 % hole, 45 % hole down to like, you know, it'd be hard, it'd be hard. And I think the company would be much smaller. The company would be much, much, much smaller. But I think that's where this idea for brand marketing is really important. And how has marketing changed from early days to today?

53:12Well, early days, it was all just conversion optimized campaigns and maybe like one or two of them. and that's it. I mean, our meta account alone is such a mess of full funnel from, you know, conversion optimized to, you know, new contents to everything and everything else, of course, as well. TV driving, so much interest that then has to be scooped up on Amazon. Okay, now you have two shops. Not to me. Don't get me started on TikTok shops. So like, you know, that's right. That's right. That's right.

53:41Matt Bertulli:Yeah. You ever hear the saying like you either die or here, you live long enough to become the villain. The marketing equivalent to that is everybody starts off and either dies in purchase conversion optimization or eventually figures out that everything is just quality impressions that we're going to get a lot of them. That's right. And that's ultimately where big brands come from. So like you just got to, at some point, you got to get there. That's right. If you were to say like over the last, okay, five, six years, right? Let's just focus on like 2020 forward. Okay. Is there a year that you would go back to marketing again and give yourself a piece of advice in that year to either do something or don't do something?

54:21Matt Bertulli:And what is that piece of advice? Should I take it? Yeah, you can take it. We were so late to TikTok shops. We were so late to TikTok shops. We're all late to TikTok shops. And Amazon, actually. I mean, we know some people who were early and I just, my hat's off. Look, the thesis, and you can't be yourself too much about it. I mean, there was a thesis, but like there's a lesson learned though too. The thesis was that this is going to be a channel optimized for lower AOB and we're going to go after the channels that are optimized for higher AOB. I think what a channel turned out to be surprisingly important is first of all, the thesis, the original thesis was not correct.

54:59Like so that out of the way, plenty of companies with an AOB well over hundreds doing exceptionally well. So like that thesis straight out of the door should have been tested and not putting in the effort to test an important channel. That was a lesson learned right there. But the strategic importance of the channel for every other channel was also completely not understood. And so for the first couple of years, I mean, listen, this is our first podcast. And the reason why it's happening today is because of this realization. These lessons, you can't just source them from internal four walls. As hard as you think and as much as you want to be thoughtful and working hard and testing and learning and testing and learning.

55:41it takes a village and uh i think betsy and i just really had this a little bit of this like yc mentality yc yc is phenomenal and helped us like 99 out of 100 times the one time where perhaps it didn't help us as much is this idea that they tell you don't go to conferences and don't like you know do it just like nose little grindstone it worked phenomenally well up until we missed tiktok shop and i think that would have been obvious sooner from talking to more people like we talked to our customers but we didn't talk to enough founders and that was a lesson learned and uh we we love to share and we discovered more recently as we started like you know talking to them and sharing that it's a really fine exercise i don't remember when i learned this but it turns out that other people's mistakes are free for you uh well this is actually you know go find them this is actually where this podcast comes from right yeah the big dog chat was this incredible resource in 2021, 2022, 2023, amongst 12 big brands sharing everything.

56:40And it's still to this day, there is a few of these chats that we are in. They're wildly valuable. They're incredibly valuable. And people have questions about things like, is this really working? What are we doing here? And there's been just like, you know, a year and a half worth of talk about TikTok shop and just trying to like, people are still trying to figure it out. and you know is it an AOV issue or is it just a type of product issue like what really is the issue you know um I would have thought you guys are perfect for TikTok shop and it's not because not because people spend a hundred bucks but because it's like this is something that I've got to buy and buy quickly right it's it's it's what is the consideration period for your average customer I think that's like the question that's great yeah for TikTok shops and I think it's a question, you know, in general.

57:27I have the data for that if you want me to take that one. You can back it up with data. So as with every business, it's a curve. Yeah, sure. 30 days is where the maximum is. But what's the percentage that convert in 30 days from first touch? I mean, that percentage I would have to think through now.

57:43Matt Bertulli:Yeah. But be optimized for a 30-day conversion. Yeah, we do too. But it's like in, I'll give you like in Pila, my average order value is 65 bucks. So it's not very expensive. but it's still the average time from first touch to purchase, the average is 68 days. Interesting. And that is at$65. Now, the majority of my customers from a first touch will buy, the majority being like 55, 60 % will buy in the first 30 days. But that curve turns out there's a lot of them that take like two, three months. Yeah. The one thing that we definitely noticed is, And a wonderful tool to test this is if you're using Nordbeam, you can play with the lookback windows.

58:28Yep. And you can see how your RAWs changes if you look at it. That's how we know that, is Nordbeam. Yeah, yeah. A lot of people also ask the question in their post-purchase surveys. So not only how did you hear about us, but how long ago did you hear about us first? But Nordbeam is a phenomenal tool. If you look back, how's your RAWs looking like if you expand them to 30 days, 60 days, 180 days, whatever. And we definitely found that there are different consideration windows for shapewear versus bras. Shapewear has a much longer consideration window. And so if you're spending on one day click, clicks only, your effective ROAS for shapewear can be lower to achieve the same profitability as a higher ROAS threshold for bras because it actually backs into it over a period of time.

59:12Matt Bertulli:Yeah, listen, I'm happy you brought up the TikTok shops thing too, because I actually think I'm like on record, like totally trashing the channel at some point in the last two years. Like you should just think it was like discount central, like this is the cesspool of commerce. I actually may have called it that. Just thinking like the only people on TikTok shops are like quality customers because TikTok was basically giving them 80 % off. The Chinese government was funding it. and I'm like, I don't want to be there as a brand. Dude, we talked about this like two years ago. Like, why would any of us go here?

59:47Matt Bertulli:And then it turns out everybody who figured it out was way smarter than us. You know, what was interesting about that analogy too is the savviest and heaviest user of TikTok in our company is our C-suite general counsel. No way. I think she has the story about like, you know, using it to get rid of kids and whatever. But like, you know, the idea is that she comes to us and she's like, oh, I saw that new ad. I'm like, we just launched it last night. She's like, oh, I know. I love seeing it all day. You're also learning a lot about her. That's great. Has there been a stage of growth that was more difficult than the rest?

1:00:22Matt Bertulli:That's an interesting question. You know, I'll tell you, I'll give you this. Difficult as in like complex versus difficult as in like results. So right now it's very complex. We have definitely come to a point where doing what we used to do in the first couple of years is no longer there. we are by far already in older channels and full funnel marketing and really having to measure it in every single way from MMM to Geolift tests to everything else. So I would say that that actually has really been a learning curve. And it's one where we originally started with fewer better channels, really just focused on a few and took us a little bit of time to really start being the adopters of Geolift and incrementality testing because we just didn't have an Amazon store until a year ago and we didn't have so many other things until recently.

1:01:15So in terms of like the explosion of complexity, that was the steepest learning curve that we have navigated over the last 18 months. Amazon definitely complicated it because it grew very fast. It's about 20 % of our revenue. Oh, wow. And it's run by a small team and we didn't really think about investing in it heavily And we've been consistently out of stock on the day that we started. And obviously, you know what happens in that case. Yeah, which is never great for Amazon.

1:01:40Matt Bertulli:Yeah. And so like all the lessons learned from running out of stock on Amazon, we used to think of it as like, that's the last channel that gets attention because we have wholesale. We're in Dillard's and Walmart and, you know, in like all the big guys, Nordstrom and so forth. So you don't want to piss off Nordstrom. You really want to make sure that they get their, you know, slice of the inventory. But we're learning that you really don't want to mess with the Amazon now, though. You work so hard. you three months of straight growth this happened to you this year because i think it's been like especially punishing in this year it happened to us in q4 we launched in july uh way exceeded our expectations and then by october we were out yeah and we were then like quickly rushing to be back in stock yeah out of inventory yeah and we were quickly rushing to be back in stock for for november and you could not find us on amazon to save your life i mean like he took an act of god There's like so many people with PTSD listening to this right now.

1:02:36Matt Bertulli:Look at him. He's like, please. His arm hair is standing up. I just want to feel myself right now. So suddenly, you know, we have like, you know, our, you know, person who is running our wholesale asking for a mentor. We're like, oh, that's important. Listen to that. And in the past, the person from Amazon asking for it. Oh, and now like when they ask, they get what they want. And so those are some of the lessons. Difficult to go. So, I mean, really 2020 was just like this, like, you know, staring into a biz and asking yourself, we were making 20, 30 something thousand dollars a day prior to March 17th and then 2020.

1:03:15And then from one day to another, you know, like one or two or three hero shapewear products went from like making good amount of money to, I think we would make like a hundred dollars a day. You know, like, just like, it really felt like something that disconnected. It's crazy how Kobe did that. I was like, some things were just like this and everything else was. And just for context, it's shapewear. It's the garments you buy to grow up and be active in some sort of social activities. And that was definitely like, gee, like, how's this going to look? You know, and, you know, like the thing is like, oh, well, it's two weeks, you know, like where it's two months or whatever.

1:03:50Thank God for bed saving started working on the tank a year earlier. I mean, this is just one of those things that you just can't. So how long was it scary for? When did you launch the tank? oh my god i don't know if i remember exactly from memory like october from memory oh man you were i think it was july and then the bra came out in like october all right i'm really bad with still um that's scary but we were trying to decide if we should launch it because we were you know sitting at our board our board is very small and just saying do we want to launch this amazing product into this messed up time yeah and then it actually ended up being the perfect time to launch it because it was a top that you didn't have to wear a bra with yeah and everyone was just trying to be comfortable on their zoom calls so like loungewear took off during that time people who had a loungewear collection were just like sitting pretty yeah um

1:04:41Matt Bertulli:and yeah that top saved us we talked to uh the guys from shyness earlier and their their moment was covid too because they could finally market to people you just work from home your underwear uh and then we had about i think a two-week period with pila when covet hit where our sales dropped i think i've said this before like 40 to 60 or something like in a day because in phone case it's very tied to movement of humans around the world so it's like going to work going to travel going out with your friends like doing something and all of a sudden nobody was doing that things fell off and then we figured out the uh the wear one wash one thing was like people who worked in healthcare or you were going to work and you wanted a different case for sanitary reasons, that then ripped us.

1:05:24Matt Bertulli:So COVID was like this strange moment in time with how it shifted consumer preference. Then ultimately, if you actually look at things, I'm sure you've looked at data. It was like, we saw this weird spike up in e-com and it's basically normalized back down to exactly where it would have been over those five years anyway. It's like, we all thought it was like, this is the time. Retail's dead. E-commerce is going to be a thing. Nah, we've just re-normalized back to baseline it really did transform our space but we had a very similar problem inflection point in that our largest channel at the time was costco and costco basically shut down yeah the road show and um i was not a full-time employee yet um but i i was of the advisor to the founder one of the founders and it was a very it was a it was a very scary moment and the decision that you had to make whether to hold it or let it rip yeah was it was such a key decision they had the same decision to make and they made the right decision as well but just can you just think about it if you would make the wrong decision like oh yeah there's no company it's like dude if you guys hadn't actually launched dc like.com yeah like costco roadshow shut down i guess i should sell some pans on the internet yeah well We were there already, but the spend wasn't there.

1:06:45No, yeah, you weren't. It wasn't a big channel. We guessed the spend because there was a lot of inventory and no channel. At Hexclad, Apploven has been our highest spending new channel since the start of last year, mid seven figures and growing. It almost wasn't. My team was skeptical. So I stepped in to push them. First, I had them pull data on the overlap between Meta and Apploven customers to find out if the platform was really just retargeting. Then we ran multiple holdout tests. The results, 90 % new customers, 53 % higher ROAS, 36 % higher new customer ROAS, 27 % lower new customer CAC. The numbers were just bang on.

1:07:26If you create an Apple 11 account and launch on day one, you're gonna get$1 ,000 in free ad credit plus another 5 ,000 when you spend 5 ,000. Audio on vertical videos, unskippable ad units new reach for new customers check it out today go to nine operators.com slash applovin you're going to get our guide to new channels recordings of our live expansion events with us and 25 of our friends nine operators.com slash applovin back to the show guest is spanned and it really worked and the problem at the time was that you just didn't know how long it was going to take so i think the decision that betsy was grappling with was you know it would be so much nicer if you launched it when the optimism and just like the overall sentiment was a little better and we just didn't realize that people were just making yeah so much money at that time let me add one more thing to this so this is an adage this is one of the my mantras you just never wait that's don't wait that's right everyone wants to wait for the perfect time to do something you know there's just like uh very rarely is waiting the best decision You just go.

1:09:05Matt Bertulli:So on the YC thing, did that also shape how you lead the company and how you hire and think about? So like what's top of mind for me is like YC is like founder led, founder mode. It's the Brian Chesky's like, you know, like you got to keep in the weeds. Do you operate that way? Do you? Let's just go there. Yeah. I mean, I'll do it and then you can kind of give your version. I think it's all about stage of business. So it depends on where you're at and you have to know when you can kind of get out of the weeds and when you need to stay in the weeds or, you know, be there alongside your your leaders kind of contributing for me.

1:09:45I think I'm at this like middle point where in the beginning I was in everything, doing everything, working alongside everyone and all of the different functions. Now we have different people. We have more people. I think it's more of like working alongside them. And sometimes sometimes I'm still doing quite I see looking work. Sure. But a lot less. And there's a lot more of just like working alongside them and trying to get the most out of the people that we have. It's the only thing that you really can do at a certain point because we just can't stretch ourselves that then. Like and I have to say no to a lot of things now.

1:10:22Sure. In the spirit of helping the greater good. But curious how you would say. I think it's just worth contextualizing, though. I think not being founder-led would mean that you're not in the design room when the designs are happening. And so you're definitely in the design room. And within the founder-led versus not founder-led, I would definitely classify it as founder-led. The only thing is that you're not the only person doing it now. And in fact, as you look at the group of people doing it, you're trying to let other people do more. But it's you're in the world. And we have more capable people now who I feel like I can step back more.

1:10:57There's more there's more knowledge there. But I do think a time will come when I'm not quite as in the weeds as I am now. It's really just a matter of sequencing and what your business needs and having an instinct for what your business needs. If it's fine to actually drift off into the bushes a little bit more, we're just not there yet. Like we're still so actively like launching these new initiatives. And like, I want to be there. Like I not only want to be there cause it's fun, but I think I'm actually needed.

1:11:25Matt Bertulli:Can I just feel like a followup on this product and in the design room? Um, how far out are you looking with product? Like, do you kind of look out like a decade and just say like, this is the trend line? No. Um, I think I look more out like three to five years. Okay. I would say, um, our product life cycles are quite long, um, for like a band and cut bra where we're starting a new pattern that can be two years. And that's really just like how long it takes. Like even with the best people, the best factories, that's how long it takes. It's complex. But yeah, with like the grander vision of like where I want to see us get to.

1:12:00That's really like in the like three to five years, I would say. We can do a lot. I asked because I had, I spent a day with Chip Wilson once.

1:12:08Matt Bertulli:He's the founder of Lulu. And it was like one of the things, it's the weirdest thing he was telling us about. Like his long-term prediction of, I think at the time, like technical apparel. he's like i think at some point we're all just gonna wear the exact same thing every day like star trek style and i remember thinking i'm like that's very bold like also like just shows you like he's just way way out in the future i'm like where does he think things are going and his world was like technical apparel yeah um but i like to ask every founder that i'm like how far out can you see like where your your category is going yeah you know based on current product trends or like are they just changing too damn much you have to think about pendulum swinging too.

1:12:45Because like in the case of him talking about uniforms, I think there are times when like the pendulum swings towards simple wardrobe, but then people get bored and they actually want to express themselves and they want to like go vintage. So this pendulum is swinging. So it's kind of hard to look too far out in the future. But yeah, you can have your own instinct about what the world needs. For me, I often think about what would we be great at and where does that overlap with what the world needs. Okay.

1:13:14Matt Bertulli:So we like to finish these things with this segment called the Titan 10. Usually it takes 10 minutes, but we're going to, sometimes it's like we just ripped through it. I'm going to ask you the questions. I want you to answer them as like gut feel as possible. Okay. Okay. All right. First one, I drop you both on a desert island. I'm going to give you a piece of paper on the piece of papers, three numbers. That's the only thing you know to run your business is just those three numbers. What are the numbers? I'll go first. Repurchase rate. What was the second one? Return rate and review sentiment.

1:13:52Matt Bertulli:Oh, how do you measure? Oh, like satisfaction scores? Yeah. It's like the reviews that people leave us. I can describe that one first. That really is a proxy, I think, for word of mouth, that level of satisfaction where they write something down and that's where we get free marketing. Repurchase rate is the scorecard for how much they really liked the product. And did we create a product that can be repurchased, which is actually part of the objective of all of this is choosing subcategories that can be repurchased. That's something I think about now more that I've been doing this. And then return rate, that's super actionable for us.

1:14:26If the return rate is high in a certain size range, we can easily fix that. We have very granular feedback loops and they tell us exactly why so we can go back in and fix it so these are like the most actionable ones for me very like very product focused you have different three numbers yeah yeah we we definitely focus on different parts of the business so for me i'll be north beam all day every day so you know you guys know my answer one day click roa clicks only attribution sorry i'm boring everybody the two that i really uh think where everybody else might be like you know going in different directions contribution uh on an order level is really important to us really making sure that between all these different countries and all these different stores that we have a really good grasp of that.

1:15:10And that the last one, it has to be, I mean, it's always inventory, right? At the end of the day, if you have too much of something, you want to shift more of your traffic and attention to those garments. You don't have enough of something. You want to preserve it for like, you know, the key moments. So, you know, weeks of inventory cash, you know, looking at 30 roughly as a benchmark is probably a pretty good idea and making sure that that's always healthy.

1:15:30Matt Bertulli:Very cool. I love it. Inventory heavy businesses with long lead times. That's a good answer. You also get to take a book, resource something entertainment. It just can't be about business. What is it? I would take autobiography of a yogi. Cool. Yeah. Back when I was in my 20s, I started doing yoga and I was reading the yogic texts from India. And I just really love the way that it makes you think about the big picture. And I think a lot of this stuff can be reread. And every time that you read it, you get something different. So if I only get to take one thing, I'm probably going to be rereading it.

1:16:08I want something that's got some depth to it. Cool. What would you bring? So I had a chance to meet Naval, Naval Ravikant. Yeah. And he didn't write a book, but somebody else. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. And what's interesting about it is it's two parts. One part is business. So we said we're not going to read those pages.

1:16:27Matt Bertulli:No. But there's a philosophical part. I'm going to cut them out. That's right. So imagine I get to only carry the second half of the book. It's literally first part is second part is philosophy. It's more a philosophy book. Like it really is. Yeah. And it's just, I mean, it's just like, you know, really gets under your skin. It talks about health and family and happiness. And obviously if he left it at that level, everyone's like, oh, okay, whatever. Like same things. Right. But the way he breaks it down, I deeply recommend everybody reads that. And for me, it's been my north star for for me you wouldn't bring her music to listen to that would be the close second you know uh yeah i didn't know you were gonna get shot on here today i definitely i definitely love listening to it when she was traveling a lot it was like you know i know i come back and i see it was like the last thing listened to on spotify i'm like oh um okay give me a contrarian belief about business?

1:17:23Do you want me to run first? Yeah, you can go first. One really strange thing that we do is we believe that screening calls are very important. Oftentimes, the way it works is, you know, there is this, like, I need a hire, and then I'm going to brief a recruiter. They're going to come back with, like, 10 or 15, maybe, like, you know, sample profiles. We're going to calibrate. Then off you go and come back with people I need to pay attention to. and I'm sure there are amazing recruiters out there. But the one thing that they teach at YC is that, you know, do things that don't scale. And when it comes to recruiting, that's one of them.

1:17:59If you're going to go and stretch, if you're going to go and get the person that you only have a 5 % chance of getting into your company, then that screening call is going to be the last time you see them most of the time. And so if they, you know, if you're so lucky to get them on a call, anything other than like your 100 % best day of your life is just not going to be enough. And so we're just fanatical about people and an absolutely unhealthy amount of my time is spent in recruiting and spending time in the weeds of recruiting. And I actually think it's a really good investment of our time.

1:18:36Love it.

1:18:36Matt Bertulli:Very cool. Do you have a different answer? Do you want to go with his? We already talked about the user testing thing. That was actually what I was thinking. one. Yeah. Yeah. You don't have to talk to a lot of people just to get a, to get directionally correct. Exactly. Talk to a few people. If they all say the same thing, you know, you can probably trust that. Yeah. Yeah. I like that a lot. Uh, okay. So then on the leadership and people thing, what's the most important word in leadership? Let's go with you starting on these. Um, I think, I think with leadership, um, I'm gonna have to think about this.

1:19:08Actually, I can go. So I think it's commitment, like leadership, business, all of it is very difficult. There's lots of highs and lows. I think part of what has made us successful is that we've been committed and we've stuck with it. We've been okay with being very uncomfortable at certain times. So really just kind of doing the thing that you set out to do for us. It's the way that we serve our customers and just being committed to that and being willing to endure a certain amount of pain. in order to get there in the end. Cool. Yeah. Honestly, it's inspiration now that I think about it. Yeah.

1:19:45You know, at the end of the day, and I think that's really like why founder-led companies have just like a little bit of an advantage. You are basically going to have to see just a step further than a lot of other people see. And, you know, it's easy to lead when it's easy, right? Like, you know, everybody can lead in the easiest days. That's not where the measurement comes from. The measurement is like, on the darkest day, what's the truth and why are we going to be successful? And why is it still important to pay attention to this company? Not only pay attention, but for this company to be like your one company that, you know, a hundred other people are still going to find to be the most important thing in their lives.

1:20:25And I think it's really hard to get it from anyone else other than the founder who actually really saw the vision for the very first time and has the ability to continue. I love that. So then what's the most important word, business?

1:20:39Should I go?

1:20:40Matt Bertulli:Yeah, sure. I think this is where the discipline comes in. Yeah. You as a founder, yeah, I think. And by the way, we should mention this. So Betsy was very generous and she basically gave me the title of a co-CEO and a co-founder. I take that very seriously. She always breaks the tie and it's her child and she sees further than I do. She's still the tiebreaker. I love that. Definitely. Definitely. For the reasons that we mentioned before. Yeah, yeah. No, it makes sense. I honestly think she feels it in her gut and I only see it in numbers. But this is where the inspiration from Betsy is really important when it really comes down to it.

1:21:16But I think as a founder, you have to do both things. You have to, on one hand, be inspirational and really give people the extra motivation. On the other hand, you really have to be disciplined. And so what we have found is sticking to our values and principles is exceptionally, exceptionally important and to never deviate from them. So our five values are, I better remember them now, but best in class products, fanatical about people, rapid iteration, truth in data, and lift each other up. And so each one of them give you a sense of like how we operate and what's important to us. And for example, fanatical about people will never not pay attention to recruiting as more important than whatever we else could be doing at our time.

1:22:00or like, you know, first best in class products. If you could do 20 products, there are 90 % or two, there are 100%. It's not even a conversation. Right. And in business, you'll get a lot of people disagree with you every single day. And I think it's really important to be able to point to something that you shook hands on as a contract. This is before anyone joins the company to see our values. We walk them through them. And every value has a counter value. and why you should consider realizing that by sticking with this, you're going to miss out on all the other parts of the universe. So the best-in-class counter value is that you're not going to be as productive with moving things through the funnel, and that might feel really frustrating.

1:22:44So if you're going to easily get frustrated by just not getting a high hit rate, you shouldn't join Hangulov. And so I think it's very important that everybody who joins, we shake hands, we agree with each other, this is what we're doing, and then it just the amount of disagreement that you can avoid by always sticking to those principles is phenomenally do you have a different word then most important word in business i was thinking about it um i think it's product just like yeah that's what feels true for me it's like we nail the product everything else is so much easier it makes everything else easier yeah yeah okay let's have some fun best meal of the day and why uh for me it's breakfast because i have the most energy in the morning.

1:23:25Psychologically, I'm more optimistic in the morning. Usually like excited about the day. Anything is possible. Also, like I don't have as much time and energy to cook anymore. So dinner is often takeout and we're often tired at dinnertime. In the morning, I actually make like barista, like these really like creative, like macho drinks. I make mushroom coffees and it's like kind of a fun bonding time just with like igor me the dog cool sitting out on the balcony it's like a few minutes a piece do you agree 100 yeah it's like the the day that uh she asked what do you think of this was a day that life just got so much exponentially better she just came up with this new thing and started experimenting and just like for years and years now we're like trying always this lovely changed little recipe and cool i'm like the first tester And for me, it's just like an amazing moment every day.

1:24:20Matt Bertulli:Back to business. What do you think the most overrated growth tactic is right now in consumer? I might regret saying this. It might be like, you know, when people talk trash about TikTok a few years ago. I'm trying to go for max regrets here. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't think this is true for everyone, but I've seen a lot of intimate companies fail with brick and mortar retail. Oh, like owned retail? Yeah. So I think people get really excited about it, especially consumer companies where it's fun to like put your product out in the world, get to express yourself through this like physical medium.

1:24:57But it feels like it fails a lot. And to me, I still want to do it at some point, but I think it's about sequencing and having a really clear plan. Maybe even focus grouping and testing out, you know, kind of mini versions just to get it right. Because the failure just feels like a bummer, like to open stores and have them closed. Yeah.

1:25:17Matt Bertulli:Do you have a different answer? Overrated growth tactic? Yeah, yeah. I would say that we are very much doubling down on AI. And like an exponential amount of our time these days is spent on like both investing and benefiting from AI. One thing that we're not doing with AI is trying to focus on the SEO aspect of AI. Oh, yeah. Why? Well, I mean, it's hard for me to tell you how many times it comes up in conversations, which is you should be using that vendor because you're going to surface better. and higher in these types of prompts and whatnot. And look, again, I might come to regret it. And it's ironic because I started my career by getting a company to rank really well in Google.

1:25:57And so you should imagine that I would love to rank high for prompts on, you know, ChatGPT and whatever. And apparently people are putting a tremendous amount of effort into it these days. I just come from the school that you do have limited cycles to focus on, and we just made a decision to not focus on that right now.

1:26:14Matt Bertulli:Cool. I also think you're working against the entire point of the machines. That's right. They're getting better at sorting this crap out. So it is an SEO. It's not a perfect algorithm. It's deterministic. It's the complete opposite of it. So yeah, totally with you. Love it. Okay, then underrated tactic. What is the most underrated thing in consumer right now? Just talking to your customers. They're going to tell you exactly what they want. I think people don't do it enough. Yeah. Agreed. Yeah. I think there's always more money to be made in retention. there's always always always no matter what your retention rate is no matter what you're making there um a tactic that we recently discovered by pure coincidence we asked uh a retention agency to just tell us about themselves and they said no we'll just do an audit for you and we're like oh and so we asked three more and they'll do an audit and we hired one that was best but uh there is like i would imagine that any agency that's really like interested in your business, they'll give you a free audit.

1:27:13And if there's one thing you want to do today, go on Klaviyo, find the list of highest rated Klaviyo partners, go with whoever seems really reasonable or smart or what have you. They'll give you an audit in a week and you'll probably learn a lot and it will be a tremendous use of your time.

1:27:31Matt Bertulli:It's usually free money. And to be clear, only do that if you're really genuinely thinking about working with one and they did so clearly. But you can have a full-time retention team that's working really hard and working really well, and you'll still find ways for an agency to plug in and to deliver on extra cycles that you just didn't have the cycles for. Very cool. That's Igor. Thank you for coming. That's the pod. Thank you so much for having us. Such a pleasure. Yeah, that was great.