The Next $100B “Switch”: Inside COMFRT’s Affiliate Playbook

23:50Which I'm assuming is at least five, 10 % at his volumes. It's probably maybe five. Yeah, somewhere there. Then you have to have ad spend. So like some percentage of that sale is going to ad spend. I'm just like, I guess you, you need like pretty solid gross margin to make that work. Cause I'm looking at like my own, if I look at Pila and I look at like, what am I spending of every dollar that goes to ads? Like you've talked about this, right? Like your business and mine are probably very similar. We probably run between a two and a two and a half MDR most of the year. And then there's moments where I can like get a lot more.

24:29So to add like another 10 % in an affiliate commission. On top of that, you got to have the margin stack to make that work. And I'm also like, I'd love your take on this, but what are the other mechanics of the category or the product that allow him to do this? To go so aggressive in the recruiting, the paying, and the engaging of these affiliates? Because this is not cheap. I don't think it would work for every category. It doesn't work for every category because the brand needs to have something people can latch onto. It has to be special to some degree. There needs to be a mission. So that's like one.

25:08There needs to be a mission. There needs to be margin. It's funny. We always say this here. There's no margin. There's no mission. So I like this. What's the other thing then? Is it the leader that Hudson himself is just so charismatic? Because the other thing, when I look at comfort, I see a female dominant brand. like all of his top i go on like look at his top tiktok creators they're all all women yeah it's very very female first i i didn't actually ask him what his breakdown for you know gender is um okay but let's let's tackle point by point so there needs to be enough margin to pay for this increased cost and i guess the flip side is we are very comfortable giving half of our money to meta but wouldn't it be better if we gave 33 of our money to meta and then like we give the rest of money to these people who are theory i love that yeah i love that but like what if it's half your money to meta plus another whatever to the affiliates yeah and that's why i like there is it's a great parable because there's things to learn but things don't apply to everybody right like you know i very we're gonna try to make ridge more gen z focused more tiktok shop focused, more affiliate focused, but like, it's going to be pushing water appeal.

26:27Like we're a male centric product. We don't have a mission tied to it. We're very much gifting oriented. Like the wallet doesn't save your life. Right. And like the comfort hoodies and the whole mission of like, like less anxiety, mental health awareness, all that type of stuff. People can be like, comfort is helping me in my day to day and is making my life better and saving my life or something in a way that like the wallet will never do. So yeah, that is a critical piece. But on the margin, yeah, if you have that built in, the affiliate commission only is paid on first-time orders. So, like, if you're looking or repeating this out, you should look at things that have some sort of natural repeat to them, right?

27:04Right. And fashion accessories, like, people buy a lot of them, right? Like, once you get them, there's some amount of LTV. Yeah, probably 25 % of people are going to buy five times a year or whatever, right? Yeah. So, like, you'll do anything to get those people in the front door. And this is just a great way. Also helps being so viral. So being everywhere, a lot of people don't check out on TikTok shop. TikTok shop is a great top of funnel awareness driver, but it's a horrible checkout engine. So if you measure things on return on the platform, there's just going to be spillover. He sells a ton on Amazon.

27:35He sells a ton on his website. His website's most of his revenue, but you think about him as the number three TikTok shop seller. That is just top of funnel awareness that spills over to his website everywhere. Yeah. It's again, this comes back to like your was it the old bezos thing like your margin is my opportunity like my takeaway from tiktok shop so far correct me if i'm wrong here is the ones that win on tiktok shop are the ones who can go on there and say like i actually don't need to make any money here i can i can use it as like a lever for everywhere else that i am i've never seen anyone turn a profit on tiktok shop as a pnl so like like on it as a standalone channel like it you would not be building your business there yeah and uh i think there's a gen z focused hair care brand for men called based yeah um and they're doing really well on there and us even talking about tiktok shop pnl is like a boomer strategy to them right it's like it is just about getting impressions and then capturing sales everywhere possible and that's really where we start getting to like agnostic commerce it's like, I don't care where I'm sold.

28:44I just need to be sold everywhere. Because if there's a checkup box on the internet, if I'm famous enough, people will try to buy Ridge wallet there. And that's the Hudson approach, I think, the comfort approach. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of reasons I like for it. Can you back up a few minutes ago, you said something about Gen Z and TikTok, like that that was one of the things that makes, like you want to get Ridge to be more Gen Z folk oriented as a brand. Is that because that's the, your thesis is like that is largely who is consuming on TikTok shops or is that a broader like long, like longevity of Ridge?

29:17Like we want to be more Gen Z oriented. Yeah. And sorry, I, I'm not talking about the actual people that are 18 to 25 right now. That is Gen Z. I'm talking about like in internet speak, like TikTok shop and getting good at that form of marketing is very Gen Z coded. It's like, I got you. All right. The marketing I do right now is very millennial coded, which is like Facebook ads, YouTube influencer. Like I'm going to get, I'm going to get really good at app loving. It's like, this is, this is, this is boober. And they're just like, Oh, I'm going to make, you know, I'm not going to say Hudson doesn't do this, but like the brands that are crushing it on TikTok shop make claims that are illegal and they kind of hand wash it because it's through affiliates and the affiliates are making the claims and they're not making the claims.

30:05Hudson doesn't do this because it's a hoodie. It's like there's no claims to be made. But look at the best-selling supplements. It's like, see what the affiliates are saying. Yeah, it's super scary, man. Actually, I got so many questions on the TikTok shop side. That's actually one of the things I wonder with American ownership. Does this stuff start to change, right? Because an American company might not want a whole whack of people making claims. Is the U.S., is it called the FTC? What's the FDA? No, not the FDA, that's the drugs. But isn't there like a commission that's very consumer protective or protectionist in the States?

30:42Like there's a governing body that really cares about the consumer. Yeah, so the FTC sees people for false claims all the time. Yeah, like if you're an American owner of TikTok, would that not concern you? If you're scaling an e-commerce brand today, ads alone aren't enough. After Sell focuses on the one moment that every brand already owns. after checkout and turns the post-purchase moment into more profit. Monetize every order with post-purchase offers and thank you page experiences without disrupting checkout or hurting conversion. Enterprise-grade tech used by Gap, Ticketmaster, Macy's, and Target now driving results for brands like True Classic, Hexclad, Ridge, and Jones Road.

31:22I would know. This is the reason I ended up buying three pans from Hexclad instead of two. Aftersell has already generated over$1 billion in additional revenue for e-commerce brands, revenue that doesn't require more traffic or higher cap. So check out After Sell and tell them that the operator sent you. One takeaway from this is that people are too myopically focused on TikTok shop in and of itself, right? Well, I'm telling you right now, Comfort is incredibly successful. TikTok shop is an avenue of their success, but they are not a TikTok shop brand. Like they're making 80 % revenue everywhere else, right?

31:57But the problem with recreating this is that a black swan is, yeah, TikTok shop is changing ownership. The Ellisons are buying it. The Ellisons are very interested in owning the media. They bought Paramount. They're trying to buy HBO. They bought TikTok. I think it's so that they can control the narrative for an entire generation or the entire country. That's what they're trying to do. And I just don't know if shopping will play a part of that. Maybe they get rid of shopping because they're like, no, you actually have the feed and we want people to watch more conservative of TikToks. Like that's right.

32:28Yeah. They might have other motives, right. That are not purely profit driven. So in that case, like, so you're, you're as Ridge, then you're looking at like, okay, how do we make TikTok shops work? And you've been posting messages about TikTok shop. So like, as you look to the platform, is the, is your thesis similar to what comfort is doing? Like, we're going to use it for top of funnel awareness. Like we're just going to make as much noise as possible using this thing for as long as we can. And whatever happens happens. Is that the idea? Like just litter it into the existing stack of stuff you do?

33:00Yeah. So my thesis is TikTok shop will not work for Ridge because we are two out of a price point. We are two men's focused and we don't have the network effects that a goalie or somebody else might have. Right. If you buy a Ridge wallet, thank you for your purchase. You will not come back and not buy another wallet where a goalie or, you know, a Mary Ruth organics has some sort of, uh, you know, LTV type of that product. so my thesis is it's not going to work for me okay but with that being said if there's a five percent chance that this is the next facebook i have to give an honest effort so i'm doing i'm doing 10 grand a day right now on tiktok shop i'm i'm spending 10 grand a day on tiktok shop ads gmb plus or whatever right um and i'm paying agencies to find me a bunch of creators and post because what i don't have in the hustle that huts have me starting it what i don't have in like going in there and like hyping up these groups i haven't capital and i'm just going to pay agencies to get me a bunch of people so i'm working with a men's focused tiktok shop agency to try to make it work and you know they're posting 100 videos a day or whatever right um and then that content the best of it i promote more of it and then i get the whole i try to jump start that whole flight wheel so that's what you're bypassing the creator recruitment part yeah and the agency's doing it for you and there's a bunch of agencies who have access to tons tons of creators in Oh, yeah.

34:25But doing that will only get you so far because Hudson has built one-to-one relationships with 500 of the greatest affiliates of all time, and they text him all day. And he's their boss. And they believe in the mission, and they believe in what he's doing, and they get paid very well at the same time. Hmm. Okay. So, I guess then, did he talk much about what they do? I'm also interested in the idea of paying the creators across platforms. Right? So he takes the content, he recycles that to other places where he spends ad dollars against it. He's got to have some reasonable way to track all of that then.

35:06Yeah, so I think he's just using Amazon. Right. So this is just for his website. Okay. So let's talk about some of the advantages of his business. Okay. One, you know, yes, TikTok shop affiliate, and TikTok shop fees eat up margin. Well, that's 20 % of his business or whatever, right? So there's a lot of spillover that those affiliates on TikTok shop drive that he's not paying for. So he's not paying them on Amazon. He's not paying them when they just Google, when people just Google the brand, right? So he's getting a lot of, it sounds like a lot, like a 10 or 20 % commission, but it's only applicable to 20 % orders.

35:45Then he's taken the best content and he's running it on ads. So he's running that on Facebook. He's running that on Snapchat. And that's to his website. But the only way to track that is going to be NorthBeam. Last click UTM or NorthBeam UTM. Which my NorthBeam ROAS might be 0.4 or 0.6, even though my business is at a 2x. So we know Facebook has a halo effect, just like TikTok Shop has a halo effect. And he's only paying on a third of that right now. So effectively, he might pay commission in aggregate on 25 % of orders, first-time orders. and then they show it's actually just not as painful as it might sound like a big a big commission but like you can never capture what people are googling so you don't know who to pay that commission to does any of this remind you of the facebook organic days like you remember all the the like the buzz feeds of the world who all built these like crazy businesses because you could just post organic content to facebook and get weird amounts of reach right before facebook figured out its ad machine and turned like basically flipped the whole thing on its head is any of this remind you that like is this working on tiktok because you can have a an individual affiliate or creator post 10 to 20 times a day and it's volume because like one of them might go viral for god knows whatever reason right um does that organic reach just go away at some point like for sure this does tiktok just turn this into an ad machine you know it's gonna to have to flip at some point, right?

37:10It can't all be free forever. Yeah. And what I would say is it's just like that. And if you go on TikTok, the ad load's already incredibly high. Between shop posts and between actual ads, it's probably at 50 % of the poster ads are monetized to some degree, right? So I think it's already happening. That's why the window is, if not closed, it's closing fast. But I just think there's good learnings that can apply to so many different businesses. The other thing is, the reason why their scale is so big and so impressive is he's the most sophisticated person doing it. I've talked to a lot of Magnfigure TikTok brands, but they're always, like, they don't have the system as built out as he went and actually built it out.

37:51He doesn't have this idea of, like, you know, taking the content, running on ads, building a meta machine, building a standalone DTC business. Because, like, the reality is Comfort's going to continue to grow and be successful even if TikTok shop gets banned because of all the effort he's put into it. that started right you go to tiktok yeah i mean it's sort of the uh anybody who got big it's like anybody who gets big with a tactic today even if that tactic goes away they still like a certain amount of momentum and inertia that you just get now right so like you just you bought so much reach in this case like he's not he's buying it but not directly like with ads right he's playing this arbitrage attention game on tiktok while it's still available and it's worth an effort for everybody just to just to figure out how these flywheels actually work like how to make them work for your business like dude it's i'm going in with like a 95 chance it fails for ridge but i'm going to light a couple hundred thousand dollars on fire because like if it's the next hundred billion dollar switch which was facebook ads were zero dollars now they're a hundred billion dollars a year tv was a hundred billion dollars a year now it's a hundred billion dollars a year it's like it hasn't grown if this is the next switch like this whole organic affiliate flywheel.

39:02We got to, I got to give it my best chance at making it work. The other black swan event is if AI content just really does take over the internet. And then it's like, you don't need, you don't need the affiliates making a thousand videos a month or whatever, because AI is just going to do it for you. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've seen a whole bunch of chatter on like how legal is all that AI UGC, right? Like you can't have fake people doing testimonial style content. whereas a lot of these creators can absolutely do it. Like, they're using the product. They can speak from firsthand experience. It's going to be illegal to get AI to do that.

39:35Like, it has to be. Yeah, but... I'm pretty sure it's already illegal to do that. Yeah, but if you want the speed of the American court system to solve something for you, it's like, good luck, dude. That's what you're counting on. Was there anything else that Hudson told you guys that was just sort of like nobody had really quite thought of things this way before? I mean, the most striking comments I think I've already said, but I specifically asked him, how many followers are you looking for when you reach out to affiliates or potential affiliates? And his answer was as little as possible. He's like, you do not want people who currently are valuing their reach.

40:14You want the smallest amount possible because the algorithm just wants good content. and follower count is not a direct correlation with the ability to create good content. So he takes people who have, and he takes a lot of people, thousands of people through this funnel who have no followers, have never made content. He tries to make them make good content. And the ones who rise to the top after the thousand videos in a month make amazing content. Right. And now, now they can go and make a career doing this, but it's like, it's like anything. There's, there's a lot of attrition. That hurts my brain, man.

40:48So like, he's basically a it's like a talent scout for a sports team right he's out there looking at these people before they're actually pros and he's got some criteria that he's built or his team has built to like identify the ones that have potential and then put them through the system or or not or he's just saying like hey you've got a pulse you want to make videos take a swing yeah and the ask is is big it's like it's like you have to make a thousand videos but if you do it i guarantee you'll get$10 ,000, right? And you want somebody who's like, holy, yeah, I want to try that. And then you, because like the fiasco is big, it's probably two or three hours a day.

41:28But like, it's only two or three hours a day. Yeah, and I guess there's a lot of people who have two or three hours there, like especially young people. They've probably got the time. Yeah, and then it's just like, do you have somebody who will get better every single time, who will actually commit to it and who will prove it? And at the end of it, you have someone who makes killer content. And that person, you you've worked with them every day for 30 days they're like this guy's my mentor right i'm bought into the whole system um you're it's not too dissimilar to um i heard you on our show at other places talk about like the ad machine the math on the ad machine like how many ads you have to make to find winners is probably similar to this right like if you go recruit 50 000 creators just to get down to 500 great affiliates.

42:13You probably make 50 ,000 ads just to find 500 great ones. Yeah, you know, it's a good analogy. I think the ads thing is you get better at it over time, where you never get better at pulling in random people. Because it's just random. It's just random. And so then it's just a volume game. You have to actually go find tens of thousands of people who are willing to try this. What's up, operators? Welcome to the RichPanel ad read. RichPanel has been a sponsor for over 12 months. I've been a paying customer for over 12 months. And guess what? I just renewed to pay again for another year. We have cut our SaaS bill in half and automation dropped our cost per ticket by 70%.

42:54Our CSAT has also improved from 88%, which is still really good, to 96%, best in class, all powered by RichPanel. I told them last year, hey, you guys need to do the same thing with returns. And now RichPanel has a returns portal. It's built to cut down your tickets and convert more refunds into exchanges. They do the heavy lifting, data imports, self-service, retention flows, team training, all of it. And they'll be live in two weeks. If you want to save 30 % guaranteed on help desk and now returns, book a demo. You're right. Like it actually, it doesn't make sense in, in like my very myopic view of how brands are built and like how distribution works and paying for it.

43:34yeah and you know it really harkens back to the era of toms like you know will be parker buy one give one like these brands are trying to have a mission behind them but like it just was kind of feel good kind of too corporatey but this is like look if you're really going to be a brand warrior and you're going to like my brand is for these people like we are changing the world for these reasons um it could really work for you right like i said like i rich i'm not i'm not the guy jumping into discords trying to get these people to hyped up to sell wallets you know what i mean no if people ever want me to make a a passionate plea to have you buy wallets i would just be like yeah they're pretty good man you need one right everybody needs a wallet um no actually like that i i appreciate you coming out and talking about this because tiktok tiktok shop is like probably our biggest swing of 2026 for what we're trying to do as a brand.

44:31And the thesis has been that we are mission-oriented, so that we should be able to recruit people to the mission. In the same way that our customer, we have a, I think I commented this, but we have a really, like a weirdly high repeat rate for a case company. Like most case companies have terrible repeat customer rates. Like we've seen some numbers and we're like, wow, that's awful. Ours is like three or 400 % higher than the average one. And I think it's because we acquire a lot of customers on messages that are very personal. It's not just a functional benefit kind of product purchase. People either buy us for climate reasons or they buy us for personal health reasons.

45:12They just believe in a better product for a very small number of reasons. But it turns out that it makes for very loyal customers. And I've been looking at TikTok shops thinking, the same mechanics have to apply. with recruiting creators. And this example of comfort is, you know, making me feel better about it. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, the other thing is everyone goes after the top affiliates. They're trying to get the top affiliates on the platform to talk about them. And what Hudson has been able to do is create his own top affiliates. Because he's like, and I misspoke earlier, the top affiliates are mercenaries and you want missionaries.

45:51And to build the missionaries, to spread the brand voice, you have to do their bottoms up. But of course, when you're a big brand, the top affiliates will jump on there too. Because if they can sell well, like they want to make money, they will sell the brand that's selling the best. So it's like a lot of people help them. They're like, oh, I'm going to go out there and try to recruit the top affiliates. But it's like trying to get in the inbox of a Kim Kardashian. It's like, you better bring a big check. And then it's doomed from the start. So if I was you, I'd start with it more of a groundswell.

46:17You have a product that has a purpose behind it. You have a female first audience. And yeah, man, I would just start grinding it out. Yeah. I mean, the, we have a huge amount of, like we have a decent sized seating program and most of those people actually do post to TikTok shops. And then we were going through the setup of our TikTok shop, like all the infrastructure. We're like, wow, it turns out we have a lot of people who make videos for us. Uh, we just don't really pay attention to TikTok as a brand, which just is so embarrassing to say out loud now, but it's true. Like if I'm being honest, you know, like I ignored that app on my phone for a long time.

46:54long time. And really, so it's like once once you see it and once you see somebody post, it's really nurturing that person to get 50 more, 100 more posts and like bringing them in and be like, hey, you're basically going to work at the company. It's like I'm going to like I'm going to teach you how to make more money than this thing. And and then so that's one piece, the actual getting the post. And the second piece, I think is next level, is then giving them more money when you spend on that content and showing them that like, Hey, look, this isn't just about your reach on TikTok shop because TikTok shop might go away.

47:26I'm going to take your content. I'm going to spend on Snapchat. I'm going to give you a percentage of that because you're going to drive sales over there too. And like, just try to treat everyone so fair. It's a very fair approach to it. So now that this is like, uh, what's going through my head, Sean, is the all marketers, like markers ruin everything. So Hudson's talking about this stuff, right? He did an event with hundreds of people. Those people are going to go tell other people. What do you think is going to keep this from being ruined by marketers? Yeah. Yeah. The question is, why is Hudson feel comfortable telling everybody now?

48:00Yeah. Right. Like that's another way to say it. Yeah. It's like the guy in three years made basically a billion dollars in retail sales at margins, healthy margins, hundreds of millions of dollars in EBITDA. Right. Why is he telling me? And like, Why am I telling you guys? And I think it comes down to two potential paths. One is this window is closed because of a dark swan event, right? So Ellison's buying TikTok. They, without a doubt, want to control the media. Why did they buy Paramount? Why did Paramount just buy the free press? Why are they trying to buy HBO so aggressively? And why are they buying TikTok?

48:35They want to be the de facto media family. They saw Secession and they're like, I love that. I want to do that. I don't want to be that guy. So that's a dark swan event. Or the content just becomes AI in the future. And this whole creator thing is actually just a blip moment in time that existed between Facebook ads getting worse and AI taking over the entire world. So there's one path. It's like it's a dark swan. The other path is Hudson's just so much better at it than everybody. He could tell you exactly what he's doing and he wouldn't do it. Actually, that's true with most things, right? If you actually look at most things, a lot of people are, they know what to do.

49:16They still won't do it. You can tell somebody exactly what to do. Like tell a hundred people exactly what to do. And two will actually go, go try, try not succeed. And I think that is actually just probably, that's what's, that's what I'm actually thinking is, is the real truth, right? Is like put the black swan stuff aside. It's probably just because nobody's going to do it to that level. You know, it's like Kobe Bryant or whatever. He's like, yeah, okay. How do you get good at basketball? He's like, well, you wake up at six in the morning every single day and you train for three hours. Then you wait three hours and you do it again and you do it again and you do it again.

49:49And they're like, well, what about nights I go to the club? What about the, nope, nope. Every single day at six in the morning, you're in there, you're playing basketball. That's how you get good at it. And that's Hudson in front of everybody. He's like, here's what you need to do. Reach out to thousands of people personally. You have to invite them into the brand. You have to explain your mission. You have to explain your values. You have to get on calls with them. You have to coach them through every post. You have to watch them get better. You have to pay them a bunch of money. You have to make it work.

50:15And eventually you'll have a big business. And people hear that, they're like, that's for me. Explained that way, I don't want to do it. So that's great.

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51:06As a CEO, that's like music to my ears. Sign up now and you can lock in 50 % off unlimited tests for the year. I think the comfort mission thing, what I like about it is it is, I like there is one. What we found with Pila, and again, this is paid acquisition. This is not what he's talking about, I guess, in this like sort of affiliate driven way. But our eco messaging takes a long time to convert people. Those people typically wind up being our best customers. right um and i found that like our toxin-free microplastic free messaging converts faster it hasn't been around long enough for me to speak to like the lifetime value of those customers um but i do wonder if like this whole thing is just an arbitrage and attention like are we just is comfort just so good at r being the system i i don't know what his lifetime value looks like but can you maybe unpack that for me like why like why does that part work so well for them like what does he got i think his mission is unique in the fact that it is very selfish and what i mean by that is it's about getting rid of your anxiety like like the hoodie is heavy and he has a travel hoodie and people hate airplanes they hate traveling so he made a hoodie that is 15 % better for traveling than anything else on the market.

52:34And that extra 15%, one, you get the benefit of talking about your mission to end this anxiety. And if you buy it, it directly solves a problem. And let's counter that with the two things you have. So the eco thing, it's a mission people want to buy into, but it doesn't actually help me today. It's like, look, they're still going to burn tires in China and India. So if I buy it, it's not going to help me with a microplastic toxic thing. Like that actually could affect my life right now. It's like, look, I don't want people to be poisoned, but I really don't want me to be poisoned. So I'm going to buy your thing.

53:07Yeah. Yeah. And so one is faster moving on the front without proof yet that it's better long-term. And then the other one is longer term, better, but slower moving on the front. And what he's got is possibly both, right? Is because it's selfish, people move really quickly they act the creators also want to join in because they identify with it so i love that part but then i think the customers are also it's to say it's it's like creator and customer are super aligned is what i'm seeing like that's that's probably my takeaway here um yeah imagine if you had a pill that every time you like or like every time you bought ozempic they also gave food to kids that are starving it's like it's like you'd buy into this mission of like, yeah, I don't want kids to starve, but I also, I don't want to be fat.

53:51So it's kind of like a double win, right? And that's what the anxiety messaging, I think, of comfort has, where the ego messaging is lacking. But maybe with the microplastics, you could hit on both because like, hey, we're helping save the world and we're helping save you. I think that's critical. Yeah. We're really like, a lot of our success right now is better for you and better for Planet. And that works well for us. Yeah. Okay. In the last five minutes, I do have to bring up, how does he grow so fast while bootstrapping? Yeah, dude. I think cash flow management's key, but I think it's a couple of things, right?

54:28You're paying affiliate commissions after the sale happens, unlike Facebook ads where you pay it to get the sale. I know that sounds stupid, but that is in and of itself buying you a couple of days of accounts receivable, accounts payable. You're arbing AR a little bit there, right? you're getting the money first and then you're paying the affiliate commission and even the fastest you could do that it's still going to take four or five days right the sales are coming in you're tracking them you're validating them and then you're paying the commission and what if you wait 30 days to make sure there's no returns right so like you could be saving yourself a ton of money on the affiliate side versus paying facebook today that also i'm sure he has great terms at his factory i mean he's buying more than anyone else in america he probably has really great terms at factory.

55:14But the second thing is going to his website, he incentivizes pre-orders. And it's a small incentive. It's you save five bucks, but you wait 60 days to save that five bucks. Some people are going to do that because they don't need it right now. They're traveling in three months or whatever. And that obviously hella helps with cashflow. So I just want to talk about bring up those last couple of points. Dude, the pre-order thing, when I saw that three months ago, whenever Hudson got added to one of our chat groups, I remember going to the site, I'm like, oh, this is either really stupid or it's genius.

55:45And then more I thought about it, I'm like, oh no, it's genius. This is like straight up, it's got to be cashflow. Yeah. You don't get to triple your business without outside capital or without really awesome cashflow. So just think about those two pieces, the pre-orders, right? Because he's a travel focused brand a little bit, people know that they're going to be traveling whenever, or if it's your eighth hoodie, you don't need another one right now. I'll wait, I'll save the extra five bucks and I'll get it in three months or whatever. Right. Yeah. And then paying affiliates after the sale, huge cashflow benefit that I don't think people talk about enough.

56:19It's yeah, that's genius. I mean, my head's off to the guy. Like, it's just an incredible story. It's a very cool business. And it's awesome that he was willing to go to LA because he doesn't live in LA, right? Like he went, he flew out to speak to a lot of people to basically share all the goods and he's generous for doing that. So Hudson, if you listen to this, that's just awesome. the other shocking thing is how down to earth and chili is it's like it's like you know you i've met a lot of people in e-commerce and even people with small amounts of success are total assholes right like people doing 40 million dollars a year will try to be a big dog to you and this guy doing 600 million is just down to chat wanting to give money to charity willing to talk to anybody at this thing so awesome fantastic i'm glad he did it i'm glad he lets me tell the story a little bit.

57:07So we're chipping off a little piece of his shine, but don't worry. He'll be, he'll be on as a guest soon enough. Cool, Matt. Hey, Sean, this was great. This was awesome. I learned a shitload. I'm going to actually try to get this recording before we release it and send it to my team. Yeah, yeah, dude. You can act early on it. There's one other piece I want to, I want to circle back to. You know, it's funny. He sent me a message on Telegram. I'm in a chat group with him and some other people. And he sends me a message because he finds out I'm Canadian and he's like hey my name's Hudson uh I'm the owner of uh Comfort would you be willing to talk to me about Canada and I'm like dude yeah no problem like happy to it was like the nicest way to ask for help ever I'm like this guy's great yeah always down to ask for help always down to share so um you know David Guillaume dropped one piece of knowledge is that like there's givers and there's takers especially like in small communities like ours right and his goal david david game's goal is to always be a net giver because if you take too much he's like you get exiled from the group he's like they'll just cut you out of the conversations if all you do is take so it's like he talks about him meeting hudson for the first time and then like fighting over who can help each other the most right it's like no i'm going to tell you things to help your business and it's just because you want to immediately deliver deliver value um which is nice, dude.

58:30And look, I want everybody to keep winning. I guess the thing I wanted to circle back to and say was when you hear about the four minute mile, you either get stoked that somebody did it or you get dismissive that it can't be done. And there must be some some failure there. And I've been both sides of that. Right. It's like when you hear about someone doing six hundred million dollars, you're like, that's a lie. It must be a scam. How do you do that? Or you can be like, holy heck, can that guy teach me how to do it? Yeah. One of those people is more successful. If you go in with optimism all the time, sometimes you will get scammed, sometimes you'll get burned, whatever.

59:02But it's just a way, way easier way to live. Yeah, pessimists sound smart and optimists get wealthy. That's how I like to look at things. We have a newsletter. We throw events. I do this as a hobby. I make not very much money doing this. I choose to do this because I love e-commerce and I love doing this. I love talking to everybody. We're going to bring higher quality episodes. I'm going to be more guests on more shows. We're going to have cool going on all the time. Thank you for being here. It's a fun hobby. Talk to you later. Goodbye.