Build a 7-Figure Business by Providing Your Most Priceless Product for Free

0:00We were in a Japanese fashion magazine. We did an ad campaign with Apple last year. Bigger things like that where it's like, wait a minute, maybe we're actually on to something.

0:12Can you scale an online business and build it to seven figures while growing a physical store all while staying profitable? For these co-founders, the answer is a resounding yes. We are very in touch with our community and kind of what they're into and what they're reading. If we take that and apply it then to our e-com, we've seen a lot of great results. People come from all over the world to visit Revenge of. They sell curated comics, collectibles, and even have the city's biggest and best collection of pinball machines. Our initiative has always been how do we keep people in the store? If you create something with a lot of passion and you think outside the box and you try to be a bit of a disruptor, then people are going to notice.

0:52Jeff Eiser and Joe Myers are here today, and I couldn't be more excited to get right into it. I'm Adam Leventer and you're watching Shopify Masters. Guys, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thanks for having us. So before this, you're both in Hollywood. As far as I understand, you're working on a TV show together. How did you guys first meet? Yeah, I mean, we've both been working in the television industry for about 20 years now. So we met on set of a beloved show known as Bad Girls Club, which I did 15 seasons of. But yeah, we've worked together ever since then in various forms of production and production design and stuff like that.

1:26Is there a third co-founder? There is. Yeah. So Joe, there's two Joes and a Jeff. Joe runs a lot of the business side of everything. He does the numbers, but he also manages the pinball stuff. That's kind of his. Joe Koontz. Yeah, Joe Koontz. That's his expertise is pinball. I mean, we see a lot of this in the entrepreneurial community where there's a solo founder. Often is the case there's co-founders. It's more rare to have three co-founders, I would say, in a startup. Is that a benefit? Is it more challenging having a third voice in the room? Benefit for sure, because we each have our own expertise to bring to the business.

2:02You know, Joe manages, he works in television also, but he works in post-production as an executive. So he does a lot of budgets and stuff like that. So that's kind of his world. Joe's comes from the comic background of like all the fandom and stuff like that. And then I'm the creative with the production design and all that sort of stuff. So the three of us together, I think, have really divided the workload and allowed us to like grow as quickly as we have. Especially considering we all have our other careers also. So it's been really good to like spread that responsibility around. Okay, so how does this idea for creating the sort of modern version of nerd culture or whatever, how does this come to fruition?

2:41Well, it started because during COVID, Jeff and Joe had started collecting a bunch of pinball machines. and as they kind of fell into our FTB shop and kind of started to proliferate, they started taking up too much space. We were trying to come up with an idea of where we could take them and how we could better home those units and so it kind of spiraled from there. We wanted a place that we could share that with everyone and also offset some of the costs of maintaining the machines. So it started as a small idea of having like a little tiny pinball arcade that people could come visit It grew into what is Revenge of Now, where we have comic books, we have shared passion projects with artists that we do all the time, as well as just recently a coffee shop just down the block from us.

3:26So it's something that started very small and then has grown into something we're very extremely proud of. And the online version of this, the website itself, was it retail first, then online? Was it online and then retail? Yeah, I think for me initially, like the idea of an online store wasn't even in my mind. I know Joe is much more dialed into the to the online commerce of it. But in the get go, it was let's create a cool space where we can hang out with some friends and hopefully sell some stuff. And then, you know, when we kind of realized that we could do that online as well, you know, we started going down that road and trying to grow that side of the business.

4:05What is it from your past in production or entertainment that you could take forward into this type of business? I mean, we're still in that chapter. Like, we're kind of coexisting in the television world today as it exists now, which is totally different than it did 20 years ago. But, you know, doing TV shows back then is like creating a new brand every show and running a small business every shoot. So there are a lot of lessons we learned throughout those decades of television that definitely bled over into being entrepreneurs and opening our own store. Whether we knew that at the time or not, we've certainly used that knowledge to our benefit now.

4:46Joe, for you, same sort of thing. And you're sort of behind the scenes now working on the online side of the business. And when we were talking earlier, you said online is sort of a new thing for you. Absolutely, yeah. Part of what you take from the television industry, especially in the kind of corner of reality television that we started in, was adaptability and growth and learning. You can't ever assume that you know everything. So everything is kind of its own learning experience. So when it came to my time in television, what I did was a lot of budget management, a lot of tracking, a lot of labor costs and hiring and whatnot.

5:21And so as you grow those skills for each different client that you worked with, you learned a new way to present all that information, all that data, all that kind of processing to fit those different clients. And so taking that and then applying that idea to the online retail, I came in very much with kind of an idea of what it was, but it's been a learning process along the way. And it's been exciting. We took a huge step forward, actually, when we jumped into Shopify. And it's been a super exciting process, actually, seeing that growth online. Yeah, and I think it's important to note that Joe, you know, he handles the online business, but he also brings the fandom.

5:56So he is dialed in to like what he wants out of an e-commerce site. And that's how he kind of approaches how he develops our e-commerce. Yeah, a large part of that, I would say, since we work in such kind of a niche, passion-based, like the fandom-based world, is that we're able to tap in with customers on that aspect, whether it's an upcoming movie or a character that someone likes that's coming back from comic book death. It's a really exciting way to be able to take a thing that you already know there's an audience that's passionate about and be able to engage them in that way online and through e-com.

6:33When you say that Joe taps into the fandom side of things, are you scouring the web and looking at, say, certain communities of fans that are talking about comics or pinball or otherwise on, say, Reddit or somewhere else? Like, how are you tapping into this? Right now, what we do is we actually started our own kind of online space on Discord. We have our own digital lounge where we have people who are involved in our book clubs, people who are just avid comic book readers, pinball fans. Kind of each segment of our community is represented in a digital format in there as well. I mean, we've got a super robust social media presence.

7:14You know, we are able to engage with the customer outside of the store and we can see what they react with and what they, you know, are responding to in terms of different fandoms and things like that. So we get a lot of feedback online. We're not necessarily like scouring Reddit or anything like that. But, you know, it's just about being in tune with like the zeitgeist, honestly. We do enough events in the store that we are very in touch with our community and kind of what they're into and what they're reading. It's a very direct conversation, even on that point. And if we take that and apply it then to our e-com, we've seen a lot of great results that people are very tapped in.

7:53And our reader demo at the store isn't that necessarily of a collector who's looking for a comic that came out in the 60s. What we have intentionally grown is a community of people who want to read or be excited or engage in characters on a monthly basis as opposed to like a long-term collector basis. Jeff, before you were saying that you wanted to create this retail space that people could hang out at. And I'm curious, this sort of marriage between the online business and in-person retail. And this idea of creating a space where people want to hang out, this idea of building community. How do you think about doing this, say, analog versus digital?

8:33I mean, it's something that we talked about, just creating that synergy of our brand through digital and in-person. So, I mean, obviously, like the space came first and we developed the brand identity through that. But we've done an immense amount of work to carry that brand over into the digital space through, you know, Instagram and Facebook and the e-commerce site and all that. I would say one of the best bridges that we have is we do a live stream every Tuesday. Our comics come out every week on Wednesday. And so we run down some of our favorites in a live stream in which we're interacting directly with customers who are both e-com as well as in-store.

9:10And we're getting comments and interactions that way. And I mean, it's developed its own kind of lore for people at this point. So there's good entry point for new people as well as an engagement for ongoing customers. Do you have the ability to mobilize your community such that it's advantageous for the business overall, like for the online side of the business or for retail? Do you think about using your customers, I guess, as marketers or marketing advocates? Yeah, I mean, you know, like Joe was saying about our live stream and things like that. we're able to pitch them directly on certain products and then they then get excited about those and talk about them with other people.

9:50So I think it's important for us to engage with those people so that they can spread the word for various products. Are you able to get them to actually take certain actions on social media or is this all happening organically? Yeah, I mean, we do a lot of giveaways and things like that where it's like a call to action, like do this and then you can enter in for this sort of thing. So we are able to mobilize in that sense for sure. I mean, we do also a lot through like our newsletters and things like that where there's lots of call to action in those which go out to a much wider subscriber base.

10:23I think one of the other things we do is we have a lot of branded merch that then people tag and share when they're at like conventions or other signings. So we see a lot of engagement in people who go to like San Diego Comic-Con and they wear the Revenge of gear for one day. Or one of the other simple things we do is we have tote bags and other incentive programs that, you know, carry on our brand above and beyond. And people reuse those and then tag those and show them. We have someone who creates secondhand bags of our bags. And people are very passionate about the brand in that way. Let's rewind back to the store stuff for a moment.

11:01So talk to me about the store opening, which was what, 2022? How does financing this look? I mean, we were fortunate enough to have a career in film and television, you know, at the time and still, where we were able to self-finance this sort of project. And we also, I mean, it's important to note that, you know, we have a production design studio and a fabrication shop. So we were able to design and build the entire thing ourselves. So you're bootstrapping this yourselves personally? For sure, yeah. From the start. Yeah. No outside investors. No outside investors. I mean, we definitely got some help when we expanded, as we expanded the store in the first year.

11:39We just became profitable after 36 months because we've been pumping all the money back into the business. I mean, none of us take a payment from the store at all. It's mostly just there to exist and run itself. But yeah, the entire thing has been one giant passion project. The biggest passion project. What about that as business strategy, as a long-term business strategy? Like there is obviously an element of passion that has to be there. Yeah. But at some point you want this to be profitable. You want to scale this. How do you think about it? I mean, it's hard to quantify some of the profitability that's come out of Revenge of because since we've been able to kind of build this thing with our production design studio and show off everything that we can do, it has opened so many doors for us to be able to do other businesses for other people and events and other TV shows and all sorts of other things that it's helped to elevate our original business into what it is now.

12:39So we do a lot less film and television now and a lot more bars, restaurants, retail stores, office spaces, events, things like that. And most of that is all from doing our own thing and creating our own sort of brand there. Joe, do you feel like this is a business that you're going to work on or work in for the next decade or two? Yeah, absolutely. I also think as long as people are passionate about storytelling, we're going to have people that want to read either a comic or a book or a graphic novel. And one of the surprise things has been watching kids grow up through the store already. We have so many families who stopped in for the first time and their kids are now avid readers or they picked up their learn how to read books and now they're on middle school reading books.

13:25It's been really cool to see kind of the generational familial growth that's happened since we opened the store. Yeah, that's one of those surprise things that we weren't like, wait a minute, kids want to come here? So, you know, we've seen just in the four years, we've seen kids go from 12 to 16, which is like a huge difference. And it's been kind of mind blowing to like grow up with these people. Yeah, we have like a lot of fathers and kids come and either play pinball or play card games. We have a father who comes in every month and picks up My Little Pony, and he sits down with his daughter, and they read it right there and share a sandwich.

13:58So it's been a really cool and rewarding experience, above and beyond retail, to be in this third space. It was an unexpected, rewarding experience. So to that point, I think, yeah, there's no doubt we'll be doing this for the next decade, at least. I mean, one of the things that I think you guys have done incredibly well is built on this idea of community and creating a space or a brand where people are coming together to share in a common passion. And I think that that is a strategy that a lot of companies are trying to pursue. And I wonder how you think about it. I remember I was in Miami a few months ago and I walked into a store called Walt Grace Vintage.

14:35I don't know if you've ever heard of it. It's a physical retail store where you can buy a vintage guitar or an exotic car. And it's all right there. I mean, these are beautiful, you know, vintage Lamborghinis and Ferraris next to Gibsons and, you know, Fender Strats and whatever. And the founder was talking to him and it's just exactly like you guys, like building from passion first. Yeah. And then layering on business strategy second. And I mean, this has become like a bit of a success playbook, I would say. For you, like, does any of that resonate? Yeah, I would say so. Like, I would say 95 % of our events are free for anyone to come to.

15:16Yeah. There's a very select few that we charge any sort of admission to. And those tend to be because of the extravagance level or our agreement with some third party. But I mean, we're primarily about sharing and being excited about things. We didn't open it at a time of a lot of revenue growth for the individual family in California. And since we've been open, we've seen the collapse of one industry. We went through the largest strike that has ever happened in Los Angeles, as well as the fires that happened last year. So we've seen a lot of reasons for people to not be spending a lot of money.

15:54And we've been able to provide an outlet for them to come to an event, get a free item, hang out with a creator that they maybe enjoy or at least is writing on something that they are passionate about and maybe pick up like a$5 comic. So it's been a really privileged thing to be a part of that and to be that forward with the events. and then add on, we've still learning marketing, I would say for like retail, but we've been kind of growing and not overwhelming people in that way. That's what I would say the success has been surprising because, you know, in a lot of ways, we have no idea what we're doing, which I feel like in business, there's probably a lot of people that don't know what they're doing, but it's a lot of trial and error and building off of the experiences that we have in film and television, but also as a consumer.

16:44and creating experiences. So, you know, the first couple of years, it was like, okay, cool. People are like really enjoying themselves in here. That's fun. And then it, you know, turned into, we did an ad campaign with Apple last year and like doing stuff like this and like, you know, bigger things like that where it's like, wait a minute, maybe we're actually onto something and we're like going in the right direction. Getting that confidence has been really great to like help us push harder and go further. So talk to me more about going in that right direction. So how long did it take for you both to sort of assign, let's call it KPIs or metrics or goals to the business.

17:20What are those goals? Do you have KPIs that you track and measure? What's that? Key performance indicators. Yeah, okay. Do you have certain objective markers, data points that you think to yourselves, we need to hit this by this quarter, by next year, by two years from now? That's definitely an aspect that we're learning to grow with is like looking to the future, you know, at least for me, like I'm very much like the creative guy that's like, let's do this crazy thing next month. Whereas he's more of the metrics guy trying to figure out our subscriber base and things like that. So yeah, I would say our biggest KPI was probably just getting profitable.

18:01Those first, you know, three years of making sure that we're like actually getting closer that we're increasing our daily revenue. We've hit a point where we are not so much watching the daily anymore, but looking at, you know, starting to be in a point where we can viewpoint our monthly and our quarterlies. And so we are working towards that. We've increased our subscriber base because that is a large part within our industry of... Poll box subscribers, like people who have like a weekly box that, because, you know, we're in periodicals. So a new product comes out every single week. People have a subscription where they subscribe to X amount of titles and then pick them up weekly.

18:37When we started, you know we had 10 to 15 pull box subscribers now we have over 500 which is tricky but a lot of that growth that we've experienced in getting profitable is like been in a large part due to our boom in our online sales you know we're at the point where we're doing like 80 to 90 sales online per day and we've learned a lot on how to engage that customer get repeat customers things like that through newsletters. Got it. So to double click on this idea of new initiatives and tracking success versus say a pivot or something else, you guys are masters of storytelling and community building, I would say.

19:17You have this podcast. How often are you releasing the podcast? Weekly. So let's use the podcast as an example. How do you know if the podcast is working or not? That's another thing where it's like, we're doing all these things that are just more passion projects to add to the passion projects, like live streams and podcasts and the social media stuff and all of that. And personally, I try not to get too wrapped up in the numbers as a creative guy. I don't want to see how many people are listening or viewing, but I watch the in-person feedback. So there's a lot of customers that I've never met before that come in and want to talk to us about what we said on the podcast or whatever.

19:55So in that respect, in my mind, I'm like, it's working. but again it comes with a cost it comes with your time yeah like podcasting is a heavy lift right bottom line i mean you've got to produce at your time you've got to research you've got to edit right there's all those things so it's a cost center at some point you sort of have to weigh whether or not you continue to pursue it and i wonder you know how you think about podcasting versus you know these live events or any other initiative that you're doing to build the brand or build the community. Yeah, we did something that I think is smart in the last year is we consolidated all of our businesses into one location.

20:32So we ended up buying the warehouse directly behind our store. We moved our design business in there. We moved our offices for Revenge of in there. We moved our podcast studio in there. Like everything is there. We opened a second business, the And Destroy Coffee, which is in the same building as Revenge of. So now we've created like a headquarters where we can spend more time on all these different things, but also have a little bit more free time, you know, to not have to do so much running around. And Destroy, right, is the cafe next to Revenge of. Do you think of the cafe as an additional revenue stream?

21:06Do you think of it as an expansion of your existing store, of the expansion of the brand or the community? How do you think about it? I wouldn't necessarily consider it an actual additional revenue stream besides the fact that since we opened Revenge of, our initiative has always been how do we keep people in the store? So like, you know, different drinks, and we added sandwiches, and we added seating and all these things to get people to spend more time in the store and hopefully spend more money. And And Destroy is one of those things where, you know, hopefully it keeps people around, like they can go next door, grab a coffee, hang out, come back, spend more money, do whatever.

21:44So it's creating its own little community hub to where people can bounce between the two locations and I think stay longer. Yeah, we have a lot of people who come and pick up their comic books on Wednesday and then go and read them while having a coffee and a pastry next door. And we've seen the reverse. We've got a lot of tables and a story set up so it's good for like board games and card games. We have a lot of people who come and need to get like the next Magic, the Gathering Booster, for example, which they'll go to Revenge of, they'll pick that up, they'll come back over and play with their friends for an hour or two over at the coffee shop.

22:18So it's creating a little bit more of a synergistic community. Whereas I would say we're a little less hands-on with And Destroy. Because we don't know anything about coffee. Yeah. We do now. Where we developed and put a lot of our own strength right in the forefront of Revenge of, we found the right people to hire to kind of kick off And Destroy. Yeah, I mean, we've only had the cafe for about a month open, and we've already seen like a synergistic relationship where people are coming just to go to the coffee shop that have never been to Revenge of, and they're checking it out and vice versa.

22:52So it's been pretty cool, for sure. You know, I was reading through all the reviews on Google, and there are people traveling to go to Revenge of from across the country. Yeah. This is incredible. I mean, this is rare. Yeah, no, it's very strange. We've got people that come from Japan. We were in a Japanese fashion magazine. Like, you know, it's it's weird. But I think it just shows that if you create something with a lot of passion, and you think outside the box, and you try to be a bit of a disruptor, then people are going to notice, you know, can we talk about the brand cohesiveness or building brand cohesiveness when you are a multi channel business, in your case, omni channel retail online, you know, brand builders, think of these in silos.

23:36So they think of what is the feeling of the brand or what is the vibe of the brand in store? And what is that vibe going to be online? Do you think it's all one entity? Do you think it's a different vibe online than it is in store? How do you think about it? We developed like almost a brand narrative when we first opened. And I've tried to keep that in all of our online experiences. We're very creator forward. So we put in some extra code into our online store that allows someone to click on their favorite creator and it takes you to a page that's dedicated to the things that they've done. Our online correspondence is all very on tone with where we've started.

24:13We very intentionally created an experience that you can have both online and in store. That's been our goal. Yeah, and it's a constant thought in the back of our mind of keeping the online store and the retail store as cohesive as possible. And that's something that comes from film and television where it's like, you know, you're doing a TV show and every frame has to be cohesive to the brand of whatever that show is. So I think that was like always been first and foremost when creating our brand is the interior of the store, the social media, and then, you know, now the website. We were able to bring on a couple of years ago our in-house graphic design person.

24:52So that took a lot of the way off of me and Joe who were doing the graphic design before, but we can sit with that person and they create the assets for both the in-store, the social media, and the website. So everything looks cohesive across the board. Plus, when we do an event, you know, we do big prints and big builds and all that sort of stuff that we do through our design business. We also create those assets. So then when other people are taking pictures, you know, we make sure that every shot has the logo behind it, and it all looks cohesive to that online experience as well. What do you guys think about this resurgence of collectibles in general?