How Matt Orlić Lost It All, Built a Skincare Empire & Found Meaning

31:27that was the brand name that was domain i had like atletico madrid i was a sponsor of i had barcelona players i'd real madrid players and there's just no product market fit i lost like 1.5 million dollars trying to start that brand after 18 months i closed it because cure was taking off football stops was like declining and then i jumped on the cure skincare bandwagon but yeah at that time i thought that was going to be like my 100 million dollar brand but it wasn't and skincare one was doing better so then i started helping my sister it was a thesis like so you it was like the whole influencer thing so you the supplement company had all the soccer players you got secure skincare doctors like that was the same that was the thesis yeah yeah yeah and i like whitelisting with the big clubs and they've never done that stuff i thought oh my god no one knows this i do it's like five years ago i can whitelist of arsenal and athletic and madrid has to work turns out it doesn't i'm actually surprised that didn't work me too i was still surprised yeah yeah

32:21Sean Frank:So I'm not, I have seen a lot of people waste a lot of money, like in, in sports niches because they just assumed like, Oh, my fans are going to love this or whatever. I know, I know a brand that like, they gave like, you know, messy, like a million dollars for ad rights and photo shoots. And they're like, and they had like a collab with them. They're like, yeah, we sold 300. And it's like, he posts on his social, he has like 50 million followers or whatever. And they sold 300. It's just, it's the dis, the disconnect there. but yeah so Matt my question was like yeah 2019 the three years you took off what were you doing because you were you were doing everything on earth you got burned out you took three years off what was that time what was that monk mode like what was that time period like yeah that was a moment for like self-discovery that was a lot of traveling I got my skydiving license I put all the businesses like under leadership and actually made more money without me funny enough but um and I just literally just traveled the world did like spiritual stuff psychedelics tried to understand like what do i actually want to do for the rest of my life like because i at that point like i still made good money it wasn't like a few money but i made good money i thought i should have been a lot happier than i was but it wasn't for whatever reason so i just went on like an internal spiritual journey during that time and i said i wasn't going to do anything again unless there was a certain meaning attached to it and the football stops like i used to be an aspiring football player i thought that the reason i didn't make is because i didn't understand like the nutritional side of things and that was one of the major reasons so i wanted to like help that for other football players that was kind of the play there um that didn't work out but but yeah that's why i didn't want to start anything else unless it meant something to me so i was trying to i wanted to like make money authentically and i think the way the difference between authentic money and inauthentic money is that has some kind of inherent meaning to it where you actually do the act without needing any money or gratification in the process so that's what i was trying to find and what would be f you money like what how much money were you looking for that whole time that's a great question like 100 mil yeah that's a very big number you can you can you can do it you can say those words long before you get to 100 million i know also you're living in croatia man i'm pretty sure i'm pretty sure you could do it for like 15 yeah i know but you know well croatia is actually more expensive than australia to middle in people really would be shocked to hear that yeah people would be shocked so i was i think i was telling matt the other day like um you can't get loans past 500 000 personally personally so anything i buy i have to buy in cash yeah so your cost of living in croatia could be lower but the but like in dollar terms because like you don't have access to the financial instruments that like other countries yeah but yeah but not even like my penthouse was like 4 million us it's not cheap yeah it's not cheap in a population of eight wow how big is croatia what eight million people there you go oh yeah that's expensive yeah i thought canada was bad geez yeah it's gone nuts here yeah yeah brother that's that's new york prices yeah but here i think i have some bad news everyone i know that has over 100 million they say the f2 number is even bigger so i think i think it just keeps going up dude never enough man it's never enough that was back then i mean like my burn rate personally is like 35 000 euros a month so i think my my because my concept of like how much i need has drastically changed yeah yeah i think that comes with age too yeah i think so maturity so i think i think we're starting to get pieces of your whole story together right you're a young hustler you're doing you're doing like a million different things you you figure out this niche i'm gonna make uh oem goods basically i'm gonna buy them in china i'm gonna get some sort of brand on it and make it beautiful.

35:55Sean Frank:I'm going to sell it to these retailers. And for a while, life's good. You're doing as many of those as possible. And then you get punched in the face one time and it takes down 80 % of your net worth. Then you're like this, I'm going all in on digital brands. I got Facebook ads working. I got hoverboards. I'm going to spin up four or five of these. I'm going to a digital agency. And that works for a couple of years. And then you have a big aha moment. You see that somebody could sell stuff outside of Australia and you're like, I got to do that. So then you scale it up, you take a couple of years off, you come back and you're like, look, I want to do something that actually I would do for free.

36:29Sean Frank:Like I want to actually go out there and help the world. And you're like, I'm going to do supplements because I wanted to be a professional football player. And I just needed to do this one little thing and it doesn't work. But life, life's funny, man. You know, it'll, it'll, it'll rob you with one hand. It'll give you gifts with the other. You end up because your sister wanted, you know, LED lights, You end up having this amazing brand doing$80 million a year right now. So I think things worked out because I think the skincare brand is beautiful and it's totally crushing. Matt, you have something to say?

36:59I want to, like, did you, on all of these things, were all of them bootstrapped? Was everything out of your own pocket? Like, have you ever taken any investors, anything like that? Yeah, no, definitely not. And there's like no chance in Australia that it's going to give you a loan for anything. Like, I remember even throughout the period when we were selling to retailers, I had to factor invoices to get paid like for three months yeah it was like excruciating because like no one in australia is going to help you knowing the financial institution there is not helpful for small businesses yeah i don't think americans realize how amazing their system is compared to every other freaking country yeah yeah yeah and i go i kept hearing that word purchase order finance i'm like bro what like this does not exist in australia like it's crazy like i remember about having to so at one point like i went to my parents i'm like man i've got this order from dick smith i paid 30 i need 70 like just let me extend your mortgage i'm not risking my house on you whatever so then and then and the contract we had it was 30 per annum as a return that's how desperate we were so the first person i shopped it to is like i'll mortgage my house 30 yeah and that's what we had to pay for like years as an interest rate wow that's worse than loan

38:12Sean Frank:sharks and like yeah yeah i think 30 percent the legal in america um you know it has gotten a little bit better i think there is more like private equity capital coming into australia but the multiples are still worse so like if you could become a global brand try to become a global brand i think like the tools we all use it's like look if you're in australia you're running ads on facebook which is an american company right we're using the same social media listening to the same music try to get as global as possible and like it's just not that hard right if you're going to pick a market to sell into, obviously America's the best market.

38:44Sean Frank:And then like, if you're doing that, you might as well go everywhere. Right. Um, we have a great Australian business, but it couldn't support the company. Right. And when I meet Australian auctioneers that get stuck inside their one little market, it helps to Canada, happens to Europe too. Um, you gotta just, you gotta just go abroad, dude. Um, so let's talk about that with, with, uh, cure. How are your sales breaking out? You've grown super, super fast. You said you just launched on TikTok in October. So how did you get from zero to$80 million faster than most people? I think it all comes down to our creative strategy.

39:14I think we have a very consistent creative strategy machine. We have this thing called a spherical scaling system that we built internally. So it's like the first stage is angle architecture, where we take the use case of the problem and we combine it with an avatar, but super, super hyper-personalized. Like someone's got acne, it's like a teenager has hormonal acne, and that's like one angle. And then we look at the awareness levels of the ad so is it unaware is it problem aware solution aware product aware most aware and we actually modify our spending based on where it sits at that awareness level so we create an unaware ad we're happy to spend more into that unawareness ad and then as you go off the funnel we'll spend less and less so it's that sophistication and then scaling with formats i think allowed us to to get to this because i like you know i'm the coaching company now where i coach equine brands and that's the only thing i keep preaching it's like angles and offers angles and offers and i don't think you have to really think about anything else until maybe you get to you know multiple eight fingers hearing you say that it's no surprise you're

40:13Sean Frank:running a great brand because for a long time like this is like during covid brand founders were just people who really like their product or whatever like and the people who are surviving now are are amazing marketers and to be a great marketer it is all about creative right now right you know there's a debate about if it's if you could have too much creative right but it's like, no, if you're trying to scale up, the more angles, the better. The more individual pieces of content that are unique, people hear that they just end up shooting the same video 10 times. And it's like, that doesn't help anybody.

40:42Sean Frank:It's like, you need to have 50 different ways to sell to 50 different people. And if you want to scale, each one of those gets a thousand bucks a day, right? But when you add up 50, you're at$50 ,000 a day in scale and you do that over and over again. So no, it does not surprise me you're crushing it. So let's talk about getting over to TikTok. Like, you know, you're not a TikTok shop brand or you're not a TikTok shop brand first. Obviously, you're going to crush over there. So what was the delay? I mean, we got on there. When was it? I think we had some issues in terms of getting... I think, yeah, it was October.

41:16We started actually scaling. We probably got on there in May, but we didn't get approved at the start because we were like invasive with the needles and stuff like that. So eventually in New Southampton, we got approved and we scaled pretty aggressively. I think we'll number the... We're in the top 10 in terms of TikTok shops in like October, November. but once we started actually looking into deeper we weren't making any money from it and the more you dig deeper into it like some weird thing happened where we used to get say about 30 % 40 % of our revenue was organic and that made it profitable for us all of a sudden like a switch in October zero organic revenue once we tripled as spent so all of a sudden we're in the negative and ever since then we haven't been able to really bounce back and we're still trying to work it out we're asking the tiffel shop reps they kind of help us and that's like the game we're trying to play now let's try to see if we can actually make it profitable we're doing hold out tests with work magic at the moment to see if that actually incrementally helps other channels but at the moment hasn't really been profitable for us to invest more in and everyone talks about this whole incremental effect on other channels we haven't we haven't seen it yet i definitely

42:17Sean Frank:agree with you that there's no more organic revenue it's like we were we were talking to you know best in class brands and they're like yeah 90 of the revenue is going to come from gmv max campaigns it's like okay so you're going to be it's it's just it's just a new way to get ad spend out of us and commission and whatever else right um but bummer you don't hear about the halo everyone promises the halo that is what like this mythical thing everyone has been talking about but hopefully you find it hopefully you can find that holdout and if not you're crushing on better yeah exactly we'll see we'll stay in 10 days time i want to talk about uh how so you built this company with your sister right what is the division like how do you guys split up who does what and how do you actually run the company like who who is running the company like and how does how's the whole organization work it's like all of this sounds awesome that's a lot of growth very quickly to be bootstrapped so like operationally you got to be buttoned up yeah i mean she's offense no sorry i'm offense she's defense so she's everything product related i'm everything marketing related and the only time we butt heads is because obviously she's trying to build a brand and no one really knows what a brand means and you know if we advertise in a certain way it might not be on brand and i think that's no time we kind of butt heads and that's hard um but apart from that i think it works great because if you actually get a hand on our products i think our products are literally world class uh i think she spent a lot of time and did an amazing job on it but yeah that's where that's where the troubles lie in terms of what brand is and how do we still scale while protecting a certain brand image which we don't really know how to quantify dude well taylor's oldest time right man you're like no i want to run the you know black friday offer ads in october and she's like no it's bad for the brand that i've been there going back to the product being best in class what you guys have done is something originally talked about is putting soul in something right like you know we have any commodity could we get into like our luggage business right like we have to make it really appealing to people and like you know you can't really win on features all that often because it's like a luggage is a piece of luggage it's like where it's going to be just as light as everybody else and just as durable but you have to like make it look like it has soul and then like people actually end up purchasing it you guys have done a great job with that because so much of the led mass market looks like american psycho it looks just like horribly designed like scaring kids or whatever but you guys actually like make it look elegant and i think that's a huge part of your guys's success is like the aesthetic angle so you just did a great job on that man yeah she did yeah she crushed it yeah the distinct products that we make is definitely a big big marketing play for us without them our job would be hard to sell and you could see this business being five times bigger just because you have those different product lines right you could have serums on subscription you have the micro-needling on subscription and then you have these big AOV products to really you know get people in the door and you talked about that early on as you said you had a high AOV product that like you were trying to scale and it was hard but then you found this second product line that got people into the brand what was that second product line was it the mask no the second product was the micro infusion it was that home micro-needling yeah yeah that was that's our main acquisition product and that's what really helped us I think when you're trying to decide products always have have a purpose you know i mean once by acquisition once aov maybe once by ltv the filters were clearly an ltv play for us we're actually potentially looking to go and suit we are we're going to test telehealth as well for skincare as a ltv play so we're just trying to really angle our marketing towards yeah different pillars to make sure we can scale the business profitably but i think just on that in terms of product development for everyone listening it's not as hard as people think like honestly you can go and get a product design agency to design like the cosmetic look and feel of your product fairly cheap like you look at some water filters i think the one there's some of the most beautiful ones especially the faucet one probably costs like five grand in design and then you take the design you go to the factory and use the factory's engineers to actually bring it to life but i think a lot of people get stuck with product development thinking it's this really complicated part but if you're just looking to redesign it in a certain way it's not that expensive we should unpack all that um because you hear about asian cheese for everything right for email for paid social for media buying for whatever.

46:28Sean Frank:But yeah, you're totally right. There are design agencies, but they will help you make new products. And yeah, you can spend, just like any other, you could spend$500 ,000 to make something or you spend five grand. And when it comes, I think you nailed it, that you should design something independently and then you bring it to a factory who's actually going to make it and you have them engineer it. Because where a lot of times people make mistakes is they have the designers and engineers working together and they're going to engineer a product that is too hard to make. That happens all the time.

46:57Sean Frank:And then you bring it to a factory and they're like, this is not how we make it. So I think, or we can make it and it's going to be 3X the cost or whatever, right? You can get 95 % of the aesthetic with no increase in cost if you bring your designs over to the engineers. But if you say this is the final thing that has to be engineered, it'll be five times as expensive. We see this happen all the time. Yeah. 1 ,000%. 1 ,000%. Unpack that a little further. So if you're saying to somebody who wants to develop a product, don't start at the factory because they're going to be looking at it from an assembly and an engineering perspective.

47:28You want to start from industrial design.

47:30Sean Frank:If you go to a factory, we've all been to China. We've all seen, we've all been to the Canton Fair. Maybe this is changing over time, but typically Chinese factory partners are very bad at design, right? It's almost like a joke that typically the way a Chinese designer makes something better is to just add more features. And how often do you see somebody that just does million things. You're like, dude, nobody wants this. It's just, they're just like, it's the platypus approach. They're just, they're going to keep putting more stuff on it. Right. So you, that's why buying off the shelf products, they all look the same, right.

47:59Sean Frank:And they're, they're floating out of the office. So you want something unique. So you design something. Okay. And design is just the aesthetic look of it. Right. Uh, and you have a function or idea of how you want it to work. Um, but then you go to a factory who actually makes that product. Right. And you say, Hey, whatever you're doing, it needs to kind of look like this at the end. and then you work together with them to engineer a product that actually works with their supply chain. They have the inherent knowledge of how to make the thing anyway. You don't really know that. And then together you build something that looks beautiful.

48:28Sean Frank:And like, you know, our language is a good example of this where, you know, we could have just done an away clone. We could have just done a, like Monos. Monos and Away are the exact same bag, right? We wanted to make a different one. We'd add metal to it. So we have a design and then we go to a factory and say it has to kind of look like this, but we don't engineer that product. You know, we work with them to engineer it. So that's - that's the tip for everybody you've also you've spent quite a bit of money on product though like i think to what sean's saying like you guys you and christine are not afraid of investing in product development no i mean for the mask it probably cost us 200 grand 250 to start with because we also built an app so we have a customizable feature in terms of where you want the treatment you can have different anti-aging under the eyes or acryl of the chin whatever we've probably spent a couple hundred grand developing that mask at the start yeah also mold fees right yeah the molds let's not yeah dude tooling is tooling kills the molds the molds do kill you yeah yeah i mean she's a lot of stunts and new packaging recently which is beautiful but the molds for the packaging cost us like 80 grand which i was shocked about yeah yeah put it in a box bro uh but you know at least at least there's no sizes right um it's only less than 20 skis in the whole business yeah because the the killer is like you know shoes, molds are so expensive because it's like you have to do, you want to do half sizes.

49:46Sean Frank:Okay. It's like, you know, 250 grand. Are there any categories you've avoided? You've done so much stuff. Is there anything where you're like, oh, that's too hard. I shouldn't do that. Or like in retrospect, would you have any tips to like products you should definitely not do? It's a great question. Ours, Sean. The answer is ours. That's always the answer. Yeah, Luca. I don't know. I think the only thing you shouldn't do is something you don't actually like. I think the older I get, especially I think with AI coming into play where we're going to have abundance of resources everywhere. I think it's more important than ever to actually do something you love and sell something that you actually like.

50:20And no matter what that is, I think you can make anything work if you like it and you want to do it for a long enough period of time.

50:24Sean Frank:Dude, except for football supplements, apparently you couldn't get that forward. Yeah, just not that. I was going to say, I have a further question on how you guys are running the company because you said your offense, she's defense, your marketing, she's product. where does like uh operations supply chain like finance where does all that roll up to me you okay yeah yeah i still run that part of the business i just have a lot more experience in that so it wouldn't make any sense and i think her sort of genius and what she loves the most is making products and i don't think it makes sense for her to do anything else about that i 100 agree they're typically i say they should be through the business a product person a marketer and then an everything else guy kind of seems like you're the everything else guy and the marketer so maybe at some point you hire and everything else got a coo or somebody else um yeah yeah yeah yeah and also the reason why the coo is the easiest one to hire is just like it is it is the most transferable across brands right like you don't want to hire a bad marketer because they'll kill your whole company and you can't hire a product person but you know shipping stuff from warehouses is more or less a commodity you know skill set love my coo though so matt on the like the brand and where it operates now, but I would like to know more.

51:36You've talked about sort of like meta advertising. You talked TikTok. What other channels are you selling in? How many markets are you guys selling it? So to get to this number that you're at now, like, talk to us a little bit about like the, I guess like the supply chain of this company, like channels, where you're shipping product to, all of it. And how the hell do you do that? I think the biggest challenge is my sister to sell everything to everyone at whatever cost because she just loves like she's so passionate about it so we're pretty much selling globally uh 80 percent of our market properties in the u.s uh and you know the big english-speaking countries probably another 10 another five percent europe and then we have warehouses in the u.s uk and also china that we ship from china to the rest of the world um and and all that stuff like it was such a headache tonight before but we recently uh we maybe about a year and a half two years ago we jumped on the fulfill bandwagon and that made everything so much easier because first we reduced a couple of head accounts and our business sometimes when we sell out of certain bundles we weren't able to actually mix those bundles and fill up certain gaps in our product line but with the fill in the back end we could so we never were out of stock where before we'd have to always go out of stock but because fulfill and they're like back end engine we're able to create different bundles on the back end where the customers wouldn't see the website would stay the same and allow us to keep selling so that kind of helped us you know sell more products to more people in all these different markets and if someone was out of stock in a certain warehouse we could route it to another warehouse they should directly from china so that allowed us to keep up with the growth that we're having because we're scaling that quickly as you guys know you started pretty quickly sometime and you don't really forecast too well uh and that system actually allowed us to be a bit more

53:20Sean Frank:yeah lean in with that forecasting and if you have five product lines and five warehouses it's like you do the complexity gets insane right that you when you add in bundling are you doing any wholesale as well or any amazon we just started probably amazon properly in october as well we were just so under resourced i didn't realize what it took to actually win on amazon we had one like you know we had one guy doing ppc a bit and this and that but in our category now we have like a team of like seven or something that we have like a mini fractional team. And that's what's changing again for us, just investing a lot more resources into making that channel work.

53:54Sean Frank:I mean, you're hitting on all the good points about a fulfill, right? Order management system, order routing, eventually you do demand, you know, planning, demand capture in there. Like, how do you make sure your stuff from China shows up at Amazon on time? Because Amazon's not your warehouse. You can't control it. You can't overstock it. Like you have like, especially if you start doing, and I recommend you do this, Amazon in the UK, Amazon in Canada, Amazon in Europe, like they're going to give you 50 square feet. And it's like, how do you make sure it always is full all the time? What's up operators?

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55:04Sean Frank:If you want to save 30 % guaranteed on help desk and now returns, book a demo. Also, like with the Fulfill at the moment, we'll try and build our own AI inventory forecasting system. And we probably spent a bit of money on it. And then Fulfill launched their cord version, which is actually probably better than what we were trying to build for the last four months anyway. So that's also kind of helped us manage everything recently. You should let the technologists do technology. You're a great ads guy. Your sister's a great product builder. It's like, that's our Zara genius. We should just focus on that stuff, man.

55:37Sean Frank:mine is podcasting that's what i want it's before we're retiring from operating and we're just gonna we're gonna podcast now so matt can you uh you then you've been building brands you've done a lot of things uh i think sean you wanted to go there but like now you're sort of like training coaching you're helping other other operators like what why why start that why get into this new business? You've been so focused on Cure, scale the one big thing, and now you've got this other thing that you're running alongside it. Does that have purpose? What's the reasoning? And then tell me more about it.

56:15Yeah, it's more for impact over profit. I think at this stage of my life, any extra million that I make won't actually impact my life at all. I think my basic needs are met. My lifestyle is met. And I just almost build at the moment so I can coach, literally that's how much i enjoy the coaching thing i think just at some point you need to add a layer of contribution into your life when you get certain psychological development and that for me is the coaching and that's been so rewarding i think we've coached like about 150 different brands the last six months alone and yeah just like man i can't believe this christmas i was getting like presents to my house from clients so that whole reframe of like they're painting me and then they're sending me presents was like mind-blowing that alone uh and i think that that's what drives me today to actually grow cure so i can be a better coach well dude you're

57:03Sean Frank:definitely a never enough guy right like even though you've you took the years off like you found you found purpose in your life you did the mushrooms it seems like it's still like it's never enough you got to be doing lots of stuff what what's the difference between coaching and like your agency business you had an agency business is it is it really just you're not doing the work it's all just like helping people get in the right frame of mind or you explain what the coaching offer is and then the coaching is all about like actually not just from a mindset perspective but helping the whole e-commerce business from every department i think from the agency side was all done for you this is done with you and the agency side will just focus on media buying at facebook in the coaching business we have everything from playbooks and how to product development branding we have mentors each single discipline like cro people we have facebook people google creative strategists that come every week and show the latest credits and help you with the system like everything you possibly need in terms of mentorship and guidance e-commerce brand we kind of cover so i think the service is very different because as you know like when i was trying to build the brand um that's why i even reached out to matt for help early on i don't know what i was doing as the brand was growing i was just trying to find people who did what i've done before and especially in e-commerce there's so much to do but more importantly it's about someone telling you what to do when the sequencing of it because i think a lot of brands just don't know what levers to pull when and that's the main reason why they're not successful they're just focusing doing the wrong track.

58:22So the coaching is really important, I think, to realign brand founders as to what they're doing at what point and providing them with the right resources and the playbooks to actually upskill them.

58:31Sean Frank:That's cool, man. And you've done 150 brands so far. And what's the name of it? You can do a hard plug right here. How do people sign up? What's the coupon code? Eagle MarketX mentioned the word operators to get$100 discount. There you go, bro. That's awesome. Yeah, EagleMarketX.com. no please you're gonna say a couple more things but i'm curious i want to know more you want to know more i mean it is what it is like it's a monthly subscription there's no contracts there's nothing else essentially you know if you don't like what you're learning you can leave and something like 599 a month literally it's just there for impact over profit people come in they're like why is it so cheap i think that's the reason why some people don't even join so they don't understand why it's like 599 and have like 14 mentors there but it's as simple as that.

59:14Sean Frank:Look, it's kind of the reason why we do the podcast, right? Like I, you know, people joke about how many sponsors we have. And look, this podcast makes a ton of money now, millions and millions of dollars. I was trying to do it for free. There's one guy on the podcast, not going to name him, Jason. He wouldn't let us do it for free. He's like, we got to, we got to get sponsors, but it's just because I love, I love brands, bro. It seems like you love brands too, right? Like being a young guy, you know, 20 or whatever, I would love to buy and think you're the same way. It's cool, man. I love stores.

59:42Sean Frank:I love brands. And I love everything we're building. And in the age of AI, great time to be building a brand. Everybody on Earth is building tools for us, right? Like Fulfill has 100 great engineers. They're going to make Claude work great for e-commerce. Saracen Analytics is going to build my data warehouse. I can just show up and be like, I have an idea for a new color. That's my job, basically. So Matt, you want to add to that? Yeah, I agree. I think that part of the reason we do, a big part of the reason we do the pod is it's nice to be helpful. like it feels good like we get a lot of feedback i mean to say that though the flip side of this is the reason i was excited to have you on matt is probably like one of the more acute pieces of feedback we get is we don't make enough content for like people who are kind of starting out and early on so things have actually been really helpful to have you on so like here's the journey and here's how i do things and like here's some frameworks to actually help you and then it's cool that you're actually doing that like uh the e-comm architect thing to like actually help people because we have had this criticism for sure on this show is that we stay a little too up level, up market.

1:00:44But yeah, I think Sean hit it, man. Like we do this to be helpful. I think the like, we have too many sponsors, the business makes a lot of money. I don't know. My view is I just don't believe that people value free, right? Like I really don't. I think you said that. Like your program is pretty low priced. People almost get turned off by like, if something is free or too cheap, it must be bad. um so i i think like our this is some sort of my rant on like operators i think by us building a good business around it is just going to make the content even better and that that's net benefit to the actual audience so like suffer through the sponsors they are funding the the increasing of the collective knowledge of e-commerce and brand building and i think that's a good thing even though I find it annoying too sometimes.

1:01:34Sean Frank:Dude, hell yeah. I mean, for Phil brought this amazing story to us today. Thank you, Matt. Thank you for Phil. So Matt, you are on record saying that you think any company not using AI every day is being irresponsible. How are you using it right now? How are you getting the most effective AI tools? I think at the moment, we have this philosophy, we want to build the people to build a business. So self-leadership is a big component of our philosophy at our company. I do leadership trainings every week. We have like this internal university. so at the moment we're literally just upscaling everyone to use ai themselves we're also hiring a head of ai that starts in a couple weeks time but we really want to empower everyone to find solutions on their own because what i started to see when i went to every single department is that you're going to use ai as a use case in so many different ways like for an example like account one yesterday where we have all these influencer content coming in and we have one person doing pre-reads and trying to make sure that the content is filmed correctly so now we're creating an app that the influencer has to upload to get approved before he gets to our team.

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1:03:33Sean Frank:Dude, I'm a million percent agree with that. It's like saying people aren't using the internet in the 90s or whatever. It's like, dude, it's going to be the next technology. Just get your hands on keyboard. You have a rule that says one business at a time. You currently have two businesses. So how hard of a rule is this? i mean i call the coaching business more of a hobby than i do a business at the moment but i think focus for me was was a game changer you know when i had 13 businesses at once i was probably struggling to generate significant profit but the moment i focused on one we grew up pretty quickly to 80 million four years so yeah for me focus is a big thing i mean it makes a ton of sense you you're probably doing 30 million or across 13 brands that i can do 80 million off of one focus is a beautiful tool last question you're 25 years old you just lost 80 of your money okay you just lost five million dollars a huge push in the face you can go back in time what do you tell your 25 year old self you can't control what you look at being always control what you see life's just a game of perspective so you can't connect the dots looking forward early back so no matter all that matters is what story you're telling yourself at the time as to why that happened literally stories are like operating system of the mind do you think your 25 year old self would have understood that or would he tell you to go off it's like i just love it's still five million dollars this life you know what i i think i think he would have because you know what i actually did at that time i went and reverse engineered all the people that actually made heaps of money i'm like surely heaps people made a lot of lost a lot of money and went bankrupt and stuff like that and when you actually do the research there's a ton and then i convinced myself at the time, because I lost this money, I'm going to be successful because all these other people lost a bunch of money.

1:05:18So it's like my rite of passage in order to be ultra well.

1:05:21Sean Frank:Yeah. Well, again, I think it all worked out for you, Matt. So thank you for coming on. Thank you for sharing your story. Thank you for Phil for making the intro. So for Phil, the ERP I use, I'm doing my order management. And if you want to talk to Matt, he has a coaching program. Link is in the show notes. You can click there. He's on LinkedIn. You can hit him up and it's incredibly cheap, only 600 bucks a month. And you get to talk to him and he's going to help you make 10 times more money, that's a Sean Frank guarantee. So Matt, thanks for being here. Matt, thanks for hosting. I'll talk to you guys later.

1:05:49See you boys. Thanks guys.