The Biggest Lessons From a 3x Founder

0:00I spend millions of dollars on my own business. I screw up all the time. Before you ever spend a dollar in advertising, you need to have your entire pipeline understood, documented. That's what organic and PPC is. It's a ride that you're constantly on and you're just figuring out what portion of the bell curve you're on on the roller coaster. Welcome to the DTC Insider Podcast, where online business owners come to find actionable tips and tactics to grow their businesses. Now, here's your host, Brian Roizentl.

0:40Hey, welcome to another episode of the DTC Insider Podcast. I'm Brian Roizentl, your host. And today I'm joined by the great founder of Multiple. He founded multiple companies, actually. His name is Josh Sprave, and he founded companies like Seven Clay, Orange Mud, and one more that we'll be telling you about in the episode. Hey, Josh. Thanks for being on the show. Hey, thanks for having me, Brian. Appreciate it. Yeah, my pleasure. So I said that you started multiple companies. How many did you start? Well, so I started three. Yeah, I started the first one, Orange Mud, in January of 2012, and then Seven Clay in September of 2019.

1:16And then Anvil and Acre started in the beginning of last year, at least officially. Yeah. That seems worse than because 2012 probably, I don't know if it was like the early days of e-commerce, but e-commerce was not what it is today. It was not what at the point it was. Then 2019, right before the big thing, right before the pandemic and e-commerce acceleration, world exploration. And then the last one was, you know, very, it's very, very recent. So what could you say the big difference is where, when you started all of those companies? Well, so yeah. So what is really neat about the year 2012 is that I've met so many other businesses where I'm like, well, you've been around a long time.

2:03How long have you been around there? I started in 2012. And then I meet another person. When did you start? 2012. A lot of people started businesses back in specifically that year. And you'll find that I read a study years ago about it, that the business has like a, there's some sort of weird curve to it, but, but you'll find a lot of businesses will, you'll have a giant period of time that will drive. Like I'm sure COVID started a lot of businesses, people working out of their homes. Like, Hey, you know, I just want to start this, you know, boss is paying me while I'm sitting at home, twiddling my fingers, might as well so i'm sure it's a similar thing but but yeah when when i started in 2012 everything at least with orange mud was which i make hydration packs for endurance runners and cyclists and it's all direct to consumer we we did b2b but but it was you know it was it was a goal is b2b but it was really deep b2c is that we knew that was going to be the premise and so at the time you actually could do a lot organically it was facebook and it was great instagram great twitter even was great Twitter's a completely different landscape today.

3:07But yeah, at the time, I could sit on my couch on a Saturday and just engage with people. And which back then, Facebook would actually send you a lot of organic traffic. Like we would post something when we only had 2 ,000 followers, 1 ,000, 3 ,000. And we'd get 60 or 80 comments. I'm like, wow, this is awesome. We're killing it. Well, everything organically was great. Again, you engage and you see sales come in on your Shopify app. I'm like, ah, that's good. And then all of a sudden, one day we hit, it was somewhere either four or eight, somewhere between four and 8 ,000 people. I don't remember what that threshold was, but I remember it distinctly because the second we hit that whole number, our engagement went just disappeared.

3:48And I was like, what happened? Because back then I paid a lot of attention to organic engagement. Right now you could ask me what my organic engagement is. And I would say, I don't know. It sucks. And that's just the truth. And that is pretty much the truth with any brand. Like it doesn't even really matter. You just have to have a basis for your PPC. But the basis is like people click and like, oh yeah, these guys look like they've been around a while. Cool. All right. Then they respond to PPC. But back then it wasn't like that until you hit a certain size threshold. Now I think it probably starts out that way.

4:18It starts out bad. But yeah, the organic side used to be such a huge piece. And maybe it still is, but I think everyone has struggled with maintaining organic strength. Two things I can say on that. One, I started my, like the first version of my marketing agency back in 2013. I say, all I remember is that, of course, back then Facebook, not even Meta, was very basic for e-commerce. There was only right column ads, like the, I'm talking about ads. I always hated those. But definitely ads there. And I remember that organic, as you said, it was everything. And brands were giving away things that today couldn't be like realistic for them.

5:04Like they were giving away trucks, cars, like all kinds of things in exchange of likes and comments. Share, right? Yeah. Play along. And I, by the way, like a small thing, I come from the background of computer science. My first company was a software factory. and then through a tech startup i ended up owning an agency after i exit so it's a sorry for another day but the point is that i couldn't believe that i was reporting to my clients shares likes and comments before i was delivering you know uh web applications like is this working like are we giving away like this so yeah it was crazy crazy yeah i think i wanted to say sorry like the other thing is that on to to your point about you know that today like the current state of organic one thing i would say is that here on the podcast i interviewed many companies without millions of followers or of youtube subscribers and there are two sides to the coin one organic reach is real for them of course they have millions of people but the other side is that they require a lot of paid ads still to they spend a lot.

6:21So it's not one or the other. One works well and acts as social proof and let's say paying less in the auction and all this stuff. Word of mouth, that's useful, but they do rely on even if they have millions of followers. Oh, sure. Yeah, I mean, I just think that the amount of energy you spend in creating organic content in many cases for most brands won't translate to revenue. It won't translate to a revenue that will offset all of those expenses. Again, there's some people that figure it out. But what I've seen, and we even see it with clients on the Seven Clay side, I've worked with a lot of influencers.

7:04And it's amazing to me. I'm like, God, what are you buying a thousand hats? Who are you buying these for? Or you just bought a thousand hats two months ago. Where did they go? And like this one guy was working with, he's like, well, it's just all my fans. I'm like, your fans are buying that many hats from you? I'm like, who are these people? He's like, well, they're mostly, you know, children, but they're with their parents' credit cards. I'm like, what? But then all of a sudden, you see somebody, they're thriving on a channel. They're thriving. And we've seen this, this was probably five years ago, this one guy I'm talking about, and he was killing it as a cowboy influencer, basically.

7:39And he was killing it. At the time, I believe it was YouTube. And then all of a sudden, And oh, no, it was TikTok at the time. And then all of a sudden, TikTok changed their influencer strategy. And like he was making like, I forget what he told me. It was something crazy. Like to me, it was crazy. He was a smaller player, but still making a few hundred thousand of a year off just being an influencer and posting, you know, funny little videos. But then all of a sudden, TikTok changed everything and he was making like 10 ,000 years. It just went that fast. Overnight, it changed. And this is the crazy part about some of these influencers.

8:13This is what kids don't often understand. is they see these guys like, oh, these influencers driving all these fancy cars. That's what I'm going to be when I grow up as an influencer. I'm like, yeah, you know, it might work. I wouldn't turn anybody off to it. But I've also seen the other side of the coin, which you don't hear people talk about, is that, man, I'm making a ton of money. All of a sudden, it's gone overnight. And like this one guy I'm talking about, he went from TikTok to YouTube shorts. And then he's like, man, I'm back. And now I'm banking a couple hundred thousand dollars a year.

8:38And that went on for a year or two. And all of a sudden, that turned off. And then now I don't know what he's doing. I think he's maybe done. But it's a wild time with organic and it is a ride. That's what organic and PPC is. It's a ride that you're constantly on and you're just figuring out what portion of the bell curve you're on on the roller coaster. And sometimes you're winning, sometimes you're really losing. And in the end, you hope to just come out slightly ahead. Yeah, I think what you're saying is true and happens to everyone, right? like to to creators to agencies to sass the landscape and even more in the last few years changes rapidly yeah and to adapt because at the end of the day we live in a rented land and when it comes to advertising and all this stuff and but we all need it at the same time so whenever something changes or ai right now why not right it changes the game for everyone new players new tools, new ways of doing things.

9:42And all of a sudden, I would say before that I have a background in computer science. If my kid asked me what he should study when he's old, if he asked me like five years ago, I would say, I don't know, if you like it, let's say, you know, programming, like learn how to code. It was the old saying, not that old. Right. And now it's like they are, I have twins, a boy and a girl. They are almost seven year old. thankfully because if they were like almost 18 year old i would tell them right it's scary yeah i don't know if my kids are 13 and 14 i don't know what to tell them i tell them try hard school and sports because at least maybe you know if you're you maintain your competitive athleticism you at least may be able to stand out from the crowd but honestly it is the wildest wildest time right now with ai and i love it i mean i love everything about it i think it's fantastic but it yeah i think most of us are like maybe the trades i'm not really sure so yeah it's a wild one that's for sure before we go into the you know the story of how you sort of do those companies and talking more about what those companies are about i know you're also a founder i'm sorry a founder uh fractional cmo right so how did you decide doing that and with the conversation say I'm bringing this up right now because given the conversation we're having what could you tell you know founders listening to this you know they should do we talked about you know organic paid growth and you know you sorted your company like the first company early in their journey like earlier than most people listening to this and no landscape as we already briefly discussed was very, very different.

11:26And I personally love your take on this, that many founders, they want to go fast. They have some fundamentals and they just go as fast as they can. And they want everything right now. And maybe it's the world they're wheeling in. But as a fractional CMO, what are the top things that, the common mistakes that brand founders are making? right now. Sure. Yeah. I think it's the one that people have probably always made. And, and, uh, and now is the, probably one of the easier times to leverage AI and, and, uh, even if you don't have the knowledge in it to, to largely fix a lot of it, but it's really understanding the whole, the whole pipeline.

12:08And you need to look at before you ever spend a dollar in advertising, you need to have your entire pipeline understood, documented processes, understanding, you know, clear everybody on the team clear. And what I mean by that is, you know, is your website complete? Is it adequate? Is it match your brand? Is it match? Do you have call to actions? And then whatever those call to actions are, you know, contact form or, you know, buy here or whatever, is all of that set up with proper analytics and measurement in the backend. And then from a customer acquisition perspective, before you again, spend anything on PPC, you need to make sure that you have a tool to be able to capture those customers on the backend, whether it's a CRM or a newsletter system or whatever.

12:51But those are to me, the foundations that a lot of people struggle with. And admittedly, it's hard. I am really good at it. And I still fight daily with attribution and ensuring I have all my proper analytics set up because they change. And I can't explain it other than I could rant about Google for, I don't know, six months, probably straight right now, but Google is a freaking monster and you got to make sure it's set up right in the backend of your website. So you can truly track once you start spending that PPC money that you are actually getting a return. It's easy to spend and then look at Facebook or Google and they're like, wow, I'm killing it.

13:32I got 170 ,000 web clicks last month, like for Orange Mud, for example. Or sorry, I had a spike, 170 ,000 clicks above normal coming into my website. And I was on vacation and I was coming back from vacation. My wife was driving and I'm looking at the analytics. I'm like, that's strange. I sure didn't see sales go up that much. And so I dug into it. It was a bot. Why? I don't know. And I've never had a bot problem like that. Not at that level. I've known I had, you know, you have bot issues. It's all over. But never to a spike like that. They diluted my PPC return on Google. Totally screwed up my campaign.

14:11So what I have to do, I have to go install bot. I put a software in, installed it, negates bot traffic on my Shopify site. I'm like, man, there is, I've been doing this 14 years. You would think at this point, I would be an expert in everything, but you're not. You never are. There's always something changes. Hence why you have to have the measurement. You have to have the measurement backend properly documented. And then you have to understand how to measure it. It's one thing to have somebody like, hey, set up all my measurements. Cool. But then you never look at it. You have to look at it and you have to understand what's happening.

14:42You have to constantly monitor to make sure the math matches what you're spending for. And then once you do that, life is significantly easier to make those decisions and to spot like, wow, there's this big spike. Okay, why is sales not going up? And some people will be like, well, you know, it's delayed attribution or whatever. I'm like, no, I don't get 170 ,000 web visits without converting a good percentage of them unless I totally screwed up in PPC ad spend. Or in this case, I think Google's auto-applying thing's got a little eccentric and hit some bad guys. But yeah, man, set up front to back, understand it all before you spend a penny, and then go cautious and build it up.

15:25And it's slow. You know, like building PPC, I get how everybody wants to move fast too, but I start slow. And I've spent millions of dollars in advertising on my own accounts. I'm not some agency that's like, oh yeah, I spent$100 million. I don't care about those people. You know, you hear people talk about that. I'm like, I want to know like what happened to your business? Like, let's hear about yours. And like, for me, I spent millions of dollars on my own business just with Orange Month and PPC over the years. And I can promise you, I screw up all the time. And that's the first thing that everybody needs to understand.

15:56PPC, you're constantly testing and you're going to fail over and over and over. But I have the math to back it up till I can make the better decisions to fail less than the other guy. And, you know, that's my stick. That's pretty important. Like, I attribute a lot of, you know, people going crazy about. I tell them that, of course, they need to get it right. But that's only the tip of the iceberg because, you know, come, for some reason, I guess because it's easy. You know, it turned into a numbers game. And this is numbers. And that's what many founders, from my point of view, at least in what we work with, or I speak with, some, not all of them, of course, are missing.

16:42They look at numbers. Those are typically, like numbers are a lag measure, meaning that it's already late. Whether they were bad, it already happened. Whatever you're seeing. They don't pay as much attention to the non-undefiable things, the non-numeric things. like post-purchase surveys, renewing, calling customers. It's like everything that you can, I don't know, if you have a community, building a community, engaging with your community, like knowing what your customers want, really what you don't want. Like recently, and this is a real case, real story from a real brand, they came to us and it was like, what can we do to improve?

17:22And of course, aside from technical aspects or technical advice, it's, hey, let me take a look at the reviews, post-purchase surveys, whatever you have but the AI is much easier and faster to do things and no kidding 72 % of the purchases these data said were gift oriented they were gift givers different locations their marketing didn't mention anything about gifting at all they were surprised we were really surprised to see that as well 70 year round they weren't starting they were starting out you know they didn't so sometimes is paying attention to what your customers are saying, speaking with your customers as well.

18:03And of course, working on the offer, everyone talks about, you know, diversity. But when they say that, they said, I have diversity, creative diversity. What about offer diversity? You know, they have givers or by price point, depending if you have a wide range of products or not, but like different things, right? So offer diversity, creative diversity, the getting the zero party data, these post purchase survey answers, reviews and attribution as you like the whole thing to, to, to be able to grow in this stuff. Sure. Not only social speaking, but also it's more expensive to grow a brand. And so, yeah, we did work harder than ever because the, the 2019, probably the, the, the other year you started your brand in which probably up until 2018, I believe like in which you could one per meta and got five ten out of it easily easier those days are gone now they're gone yeah yeah you're lucky to spend a dollar and turn it into you know two two you know i mean anymore yeah it used to be always three was the the minimum that i always set for return on ad spend and anymore it's like okay fine yeah maybe 2.5 2.4 2.3 but you know it's it's it's tricky because there's still things that you can attribute in B2C like Amazon sales.

19:29I know for a fact, you know, I like I have a love hate relationship with Amazon. We do really well on Amazon as a business. And but it's a it's a frustrating platform. And it's frustrating because I know, well, for a lot of reasons, but but I know I spent a lot of money on Facebook and Google ads that they get that web traffic to our site, but then they'll go to Amazon and make a purchase. And I lose the attribution. There's no way, to my knowledge, and I would love for anybody to educate me on this, but there is no way to track the attribution of Facebook and Google, anything outside of Amazon PPC or organic to Amazon sales.

20:04And so there's, there over the years, because I recognize my own buying habits, which is how I shape a lot of my decisions. I know that I'll see an ad. I'm like, oh, that's cool. Let me see what Amazon has. Cause I know I don't have to put my credit card in there. I know I'm not going to get 8 trillion emails from the company or whatever. and I'll just go on Amazon. But I know that company, they're like, man, we're getting all these clicks, but we're not getting conversions. But some people have a better product for Amazon. Like it's a better purchase just to go there because you don't care to get product education or whatever.

20:31But ultimately, it's that side of things because of Amazon's growth in the market continually that I also have made an acceptable level of return on ad spend to lower it to two-ish. You know, I'm not happy about it, but I accept it because I know my return is likely higher than that. But there is just it's just hard to measure it. And but I like I know for a fact I can tell you exactly where every single order in my business comes from. For the most part, of course, with Apple privacy and various different things, it's not perfect. But but I have a server side attribution, so I have quite accurate.

21:09I can look and see the channel history and where that every single order comes from. And with exception of, you know, Amazon, but anything to my website, I can see it. And so I know that I know all my PPC traffic is sending a lot of people to Amazon, but I have no way to measure it. And that is just so dang frustrating with that in general. And then, of course, yeah, iOS changes, you know, privacy across the board over the last couple of years has made it even harder. So it is a wild, still the Wild West, I believe, in PPC with what us brands are left dealing with in terms of measuring attribution.

21:44What would you do differently if you were starting a brand today? Like the same brand you started, like let's talk about Orange, but it was during 2012. What would you do differently if you started in 2026? I don't know. I'd probably keep my day job, maybe. I probably would have stayed in my, I'd probably be retired by now. But yeah, I mean, I think the B2C, the B2B business, you know, I still, I think that is a still very powerful market. And honestly, like I could start any B2B business tomorrow and I can tell you a million different angles that I would approach it from. B2C, it has gotten way harder.

22:23I mean, it really has. if you're a brand that has your own products, we have been rife with problems over the years from COVID and tariffs and duties and shipping increases, increases of PPC and everything. It's really impacted the overall fulfillment cost. So if I was to start over with Orange Mud, some of the things I would do differently is I would probably almost build it for Amazon. You have to build a brand, otherwise you're just competing against whatever the cheapest thing is on Amazon. Then that's just the reality. That's when you ask, why do you build a brand? Why do you build a website?

22:58Why do you build organic social media? It's because you're differentiating yourself and you're showing the reason why your product is better than whatever the low budget import is on Amazon, which that is a problem. That is a giant in the United States. It is a giant problem is the crap that's sold on Amazon. It's mostly a Chinese depository of low budget goods. And there's also good things. And I'm not going to say all Chinese is bad. There's just an incredible amount of suppliers, vendors, whatever. They come in, they dump low budget stuff, they get a bunch of bad reviews, they shut down, they reincorporate in their new brand, and they just keep repeating.

23:35But then you see brands like mine and many others that we try, we make a very precise effort to only treat customers with 100 % respect and to only manage problems and obviously provide solutions, everything with products. And you'll see those of us on there that have been around a long time and we have great ratings. But then you'll see the Chinese guys and they'll get like, I've got 500 trillion ratings. You're like, there's no way you've had that many reviews on whatever it is. They bought a listing and Amazon's allowed so much falsity to happen for so many years. I know they're cleaning it up, but it's still ripen the platform.

24:14So slight diatribe, but I say it because I want anybody to understand if you're going to start a brand, you have to look at what is your competition. The competition almost has to start on Amazon. because that's ultimately where the market continues to scale regardless of what you're going to do in organic. And so, yeah, if I was to start Orange Mud again, I think I would potentially make a lower budget price point item that's scaled back for simplicity. I wouldn't make it cheap, but I would scale back all the bells and whistles and I would have more of kind of like your B-range product that just is bare bones.

24:52And then I'd still make the premium products that I do without any exception. I always focus on quality. I don't care if I spend an extra$5 on a zipper. You know, I don't want my products to ever fail. And that's been the relentless pursuit always, without exception in any of my companies is always quality first. But I would build the channel really almost completely on Amazon. But then again, all the product education, the branding, everything, you've got to have a robust website for it. But I would have less SKUs. I would focus on higher AOVs just because anything less than$100 AOV in today's average order value in today's e-commerce market is a brutal landscape for success.

25:33From a shipping alone item, I mean, just to ship something costs you generally 10 bucks, a single thing, almost anything, seven to 12 bucks, let's put it that way. And then of course, PPC conversion costs are almost always 15 to$30. It's okay. So then you get your product costs, you have your overhead, There you go. You need at least$100. So I would probably have less items that are in the lower cost price point as well. But at this point, I have a well-rounded portfolio. I like having a big diverse mix of things. And of course, lower value items aren't always bad. You just have to focus on bundling and whatnot, which is hard to do on Amazon, but on your website, you can.

26:12But yeah, long and short of it, keep your day job or put on your big boy panties, man. and keep your day job until it is cash flowing well. And I did that. I waited two years and we weren't cash flowing well, but I knew we were scaling and I knew if I dedicated my time that I could scale it. And so I waited two years before I ever quit my job, but it allowed me to be sloppy and to burn money on ads, not knowing what I was doing as I went through those learning curves and to make the mistakes that most all founders do. You take on these random like, yeah, yeah, this new software is amazing. It's 20 grand, but it's going to change your life.

26:46And then it doesn't do anything. And so it allowed me to burn a lot of money and still be able to live and learn from my mistakes. But I would do that same thing again. I would have basically not slept at all for two years like I did. And that I would definitely repeat if I was starting over from scratch. Many founders do that, by the way. Many founders, I know at least, they keep their day job until they feel safe to jump ships and go up. the let's say sort of for the brand and that's okay yeah so for first model which is the older brand of the ones you own like what was growth like as you know as you know the years went by what are the things that you remember that were the key turning points the key decisions you needed to make maybe still growth or no team at all maybe it's i don't know starting a new channel killing something that was already working to grow to the next level.

27:49So what were the things that you remembered that were the key milestones in that journey? Yeah, I would say that the key things there was really, there were three. And so the first one is we started in the very, well, we were probably, I'd say a year into it when I started our ambassador program. Technically, my social media manager, Holly, it was her idea and she started it. But, and I even told her, I'm like, that's, I don't know, that's stupid. I don't know why anybody would want to do that. And, and I was just, I was wrong. And, you know, we had a lot of people that were big fans of our brand.

28:23They like what we're doing and, and, and they just wanted to, to have, you know, more input and, and, and, and wanted to help. And so the ambassador team, we call them the Dirt Unit, they have been an essential growth for me over the years due to the way organic traffic has changed over the years. They don't have the organic reach to help as much as they used to. But that being said, I still appreciate everything that they all do because there's still boots on the ground. When they're at a race and they're repping our stuff and they're going out for a run or whatever, having a good time, that, of course, still translates to real organic.