473: From Internet Sensation to Category Contender with the Co-founders of HiSmile

0:00Hey Founder fam, before we dive into another incredible conversation, I want to share something really special with you. Whether you're just joining us or you've been following us since the beginning, you've been a critical part of our community working to change entrepreneurial education. I started Founder almost a decade ago with the mission to provide entrepreneurs access to the world's greatest business leaders. Our goal was to break down barriers to entrepreneurial education, and that's taken us on a journey from Founder Magazine to this podcast and beyond. And today marks the next step in that journey, Founder Plus.

0:35I'm proud to introduce you to Founder Plus, which is an all-access pass to each of our online courses and programs and their proven frameworks for success. It puts every strategy we've compiled from world-class instructors at your fingertips while connecting you to a global network of like-minded entrepreneurs. Founder Plus will take your business to the next level for today and tomorrow. So whether you've just joined our family or you've watched us grow from humble beginnings, We're really thrilled to have you join us in this exciting new phase of making the founder brand and this company the world's best entrepreneurial community to launch and grow your business.

1:16So finally, before we get into today's episode, I'm inviting you to come back, check out Founder Plus and go to founder.com forward slash membership. I'm really excited, guys. This is an incredible new evolution of entrepreneurial education and our mission is really to get as many of these founders that we interviewed to teach and also give back on the founder plus platform and really go more in depth with the knowledge and the experiences and the lessons learned that they're sharing all in founder plus so guys please go check it out if you're enjoying these interviews that's it from me i hope you enjoy this episode now let's jump in What you need is thirst.

1:59You need to be a thirsty human who is intent on learning. It's a really fascinating exploration of human potential. Now. The Founder Podcast. Even the greatest entrepreneurs had help. If you want to learn from the most successful founders on the planet, you are in the right place. Branson, Mark Cuban, Tony Robbins, Tim Ferriss, Ariana Huffington, Steve Case, Gary Vee, Sophia Amoroso, Amber Corcoran, Damon John. Learn from the greatest minds in business today with interviews hosted by Nathan Chan. This is not your average entrepreneur podcast, The Founder Podcast.

2:42Hey, Founder fam. Welcome back to another episode of The Founder Podcast. Today, we're sitting down with Nick Mirkovic and Alex Tomek, the co-founders of High Smile, Going all in with their investment of$20 ,000 of their own money, Nick and Alex started High Smile with no prior experience in business from a small coastal town in Queensland, Australia, with ambitions to create a globally recognized brand. Today, High Smile stands tall as a half a billion dollar a year company with 3 million customers globally and celebrity endorsements from the likes of Kylie Jenner, Kim Kardashian, and Conor McGregor.

3:19And in our conversation, we're going to go deep on how they identified and dominated their market, how they approach and partner with celebrity and high-profile ambassadors, as well as how they approached a market dominated by established industry giants such as Colgate. So please welcome to the podcast, Nick Mirkovic and Alex Tomek. So welcome to the Founder Podcast, boys. It's been a very, very long time coming. I'd say at least a good three, four years in the making because I've always said when you guys are in town, we'll do this in person. We'll do this in person. So you're finally here in Melbourne.

3:58So thanks for coming down. Thank you so much for having us. We were saying as well, we've been waiting a long time to jump for the podcast. Schedules didn't align, but we've made it worse. We finally got there. So look, as I was saying offline, massive fan. You guys have built an incredibly large business. you said you've you know on track to do over half a billion dollars in annual revenue next year doing over you know 300 like the business is growing super fast you've been doing it for nine years but the first question I ask everyone that comes on is how did you get your job okay how'd you find yourself doing the work your day how did this thing start it was crazy crazy yeah it was a crazy story I think really random people look at us two young guys and first it started teeth whitening and now it's where we're an oral care um company that's really competing with some of the big guys and i think how we started was there was a big pain point in teeth whitening particularly amongst our age group we were teenagers at the time a lot of people were getting their teeth whitened both professionally and over-the-counter supermarket strips and different types of products and there was one common theme the results the products work but every single person had that same pain point with the pain and sensitivity and the issues that went with whitening us being young naive teenagers we sort of jumped in headfirst saw an opportunity reached out to a bunch of chemists and pharmacists from all around the world and universities who were studying and working on whitening products we found a formulation that we found we thought worked wasn't being commercialized at the time we bought a heap of formula packaged the product and then yeah fast forward to where we are now we've had a lot of learnings over the years we brought R &D in-house about four years ago and that took the product and the business to another level so yeah I think being young naive seeing a small opportunity and then taking heaps of learnings to get us to where we are now yeah amazing so you guys are based out of Gold Coast so for people that are watching and listening that's not really like a a place or an epicenter for talent or even where businesses like well-known companies start it's usually out of Sydney or Melbourne um so i'm interested like in the early days what inspired you guys to want to start a business you saw an opportunity like did you did you know anybody on like they had online businesses did you read the four-hour work week like where did that come from exactly we were actually talking about this the other day and it's funny that i and i know for myself personally ever since i was 14 15 16 I would always look at brands in a different way well try to say okay why do they perform better why do these do these do really well or why these sort of fell off um and the likes and I feel that intuition is the thing that got the hunger for business and it was something natural it's not necessarily didn't come from any one place but just the interest and the intrigue in the world of business and always keeping my eyes open.

7:02And that's where me and Nick sort of joined forces and it was something that it was inept in both of us and something that excited both of us. And we saw that there was this opportunity, a common theme that I was seeing the same thing in the teeth-widening field. And we just knew we could do something better. It wasn't sold. No one had this great product that everyone wanted to get behind. Everyone used multiple products that had the problems. but yeah i feel like it's us looking at it young naive um hungry to sort of get ourselves um to do something and we found the oral care business and teeth widening to be the one to really target and solve the problem there and make something great out of it yeah so you guys are how old at the time 19 or 20 yeah i was 19 i think you were 20 when we first started and launched and how'd you guys meet you played soccer together is that right yeah our mums actually worked together so i played Yeah, I played football, soccer.

7:56Alex also did, but we met through, yeah, our mum's working together at SeaWorld on the Gold Coast. And then, yeah, just became family friends, friends for probably five years before we started the business. Got you. And so you got obsessed with the problem. How long did it take to launch and what did that launch look like? Tell me about that first sale. I'd say it was a good 12 months before launch of doing research, testing product and really making sure we had something that was a bit different. talking about launch i think yeah we we basically manufactured a heap of product with this formulation that we thought was really good um and i think influencer marketing companies were doing it but it wasn't really a thing and now the only reason we started and people think of is this influencer brand because that's how we started um we didn't have the budget to market this product so we thought this product was so unique and so different in how it worked it was whitening that didn't cause pain sensitivity and it looked different we could send this out to a heap of people um get them to give feedback on it and hopefully they'll share it to their instagrams at the time so we did that it looked cool enough look unique enough and it delivered results in a different way and at that time people weren't being paid to post or paid to promote so people were just sharing it um they felt a value in that product and the value in the brand that we're trying to create and they started sharing and it felt special and we started to gain a little bit of traction and then yeah the funny thing about the first sale we got i think five sales in the first couple of days yeah but us again being young and naive and trying to do everything ourselves we didn't connect the payment gateway correctly so we didn't collect any of the sales so the revenue that came through which was five six hundred bucks which we were like this is amazing there's proof of concept people are buying this just went to nothing we had to contact those people hoping they would come back and buy i think one of them did and they were buying two two kits at the time um but we just had to start from scratch and honestly there's about a million stories like that where we took learnings that we paid the price at the time but because we paid the price and we felt that pain ourselves we won't make that mistake again yeah so you guys weren't using anything like shopify no that didn't come until like three years two years later really and there was crashes so we'll be launching we've got this big person to post and then it crashes and it's like your whole world comes crashing down it's like this is everything that we had 100 of all the money i had nick had all right let's do it things are crashing and we're learning on the fly we're figuring things out and then we came across all right this thing shopify you don't have to you can't uh shut down the server like and i remember yeah and we're not technical people so it can't crash it can't what do you need a car we were just used to this hosting it on our own or with like one of the web developing agencies on the gold coast a small mob and thinking we're a small business they put us on a basic server basic hosted server plan shared server with a few other of smaller clients and if we were to send 50 people to the side it would crash um so yeah we just learned the hard the hard way i guess and if you look at it now looking back we wouldn't change a single thing i think the fact that we took those learnings on ourselves and we felt those um pain points is why the business we believe is in the place it is today yeah so i'm really curious um just the whole gold coast piece you guys meeting is this your first business yeah yeah it's his first business business so the success you've had is just like out of this world out of coming out of gold coast like i mean a lot of founders a lot of people and like i've always been really impressed from afar just like the moves that you guys are making um so i'm really curious like when it comes to the brand like a lot of people watching this they want to start an e-commerce because they want to start a business but you have this feeling like well that's already done because it's so easy now to start an e-commerce business and like there's a lot of copycats and I saw like in your industry there were starting to be a lot of copycats and you guys were an early adopter but I saw like there was a lot of teeth whitening companies out there and you guys really legitimized the product I thought that was a brilliant move which I watched from afar where you brought r &d in-house you clearly differentiated your product you did a rebrand which was really fucking cool and you really kind of stood out in the marketplace and now are clearly just growing like wildfire can you talk to me how you came to that realization that you needed to double down on product and because you guys are great marketers too you did influencer marketing really well like you know there was a time where we were very very high high high spenders on facebook ads for founder and i we used to share the same account manager from afar like and you guys were in the top and we're at the top so i'm curious like you guys were really strong marketing but you made that shift to product so for the first question is how did you come to that realization and the second one is what advice would you have to people when it comes to wanting to start a product or they have an idea they're passionate about a problem but there's so many other competitors i think two parts i'll touch on the product part and that's if you wanted to go in the marketing and the evolution of that side but quite I think how we looked at things so we obviously built our business with this Teethwired singular product and which worked really well helped us stay very lean but I think the thing that makes us unique we're very extreme we go down paths and down rabbit holes and we really take as many learnings as we can but we're never too obsessed to Sake we have to stay on this path, even if it proves us wrong.

13:28So we learn, we learn, we learn, we did amazing with this kit. And like you said, a lot of copycats started to come and what we had to do, we had to completely break ourselves. We had to change and remove pretty much all this content, all this cashier that we built over three, four, five years and say, put that in the bin. We have to transform ourselves over the next three, four years. And that's where we said, okay, let's go heavily invest in r &d let's get the brightest minds we can um let's rethink what not just teeth widening but oral care could look like and we wanted to expand that out instead of just being so niche yes um and yeah we got the brightest mind we we ticked that box we invested in a great facility that we were able to test every product in-house and that speed and efficiency of from concept to a product that we could actually send to our manufacturers was happening in months as opposed to years and the quality that we were sending was just immaculate.

14:24So if you go then back to, okay, if someone's looking and wanting to create a product, I think ignore the fact that there are a lot of competitors out there. That to us doesn't matter. Look, people have done toothpaste for a hundred years. It doesn't mean we weren't able to create a toothpaste that's more exciting and more fun. Just because there's a lot of competitors, it doesn't have to necessarily stop you from making the best new version and it doesn't require the biggest change like what most people think and i think not being overly obsessive with oh it has to do this or it has to that just make something fun that works with the market that people are going to love it will work so you look at the flavor toothpaste for example we really flip that on its head we created a great base foundation as opposed to sort of these sensitivity or gum health ones we said let's make one that ticks all the boxes but make it fun and exciting and make this so tasty that everyone wants to have it so whether you're six or 60 you're getting excited about brushing your teeth again and it was that that breaking of the mold it didn't mean because there were thousands of different toothpaste options that we couldn't do it it's just you've got to be the one to put it in market it um get people excited about it show the difference through reactions of people um and yeah it will work so i think that sort of ties that little story together yeah hey founder fam i want to talk to you about something super exciting we're officially partnered with omni send the email marketing and sms platform built specifically for e-commerce founders we've been recommending omni send to founder students for a while now because it just works whether you're launching your first store or you're scaling the seven figures it really helps you automate your marketing and get real results did you know on average omni send customers make 68 for every one dollar they spend which is an insanely good return on investment and because you're part of the founder community you get 50 off your first three months with the code founder 50 just head to omni send.com forward slash founder without the e to get started all right now let's jump back into the show and i'm just curious though like That strategic move has been a stroke of genius for you guys and it's really helped catapult the brand, I'm sure, because now you're not in a red ocean.

16:44I don't know if you guys read the book Blue Ocean, but you're in this big blue ocean now. You're not fighting against everybody else. You're carving out your own niche and big market. Where do you learn? How did you guys work that out? Do you guys have mentors? Who do you learn from? Are you inspired by the States? Are you part of any networking mastermind groups? are you part of YPO? Like talk to me about where do you, how are you guys feeding your minds? Because there's clearly something going on there. I'm curious. Yeah, no, honestly, from a mentor or group's perspective, we've never been a part of groups.

17:19We learn from everyone in every situation that we interact with or engage with. Those few little stories we shared at the start, there's a million of those that we wouldn't have enough time if we spoke for a week to share all the learnings that we had throughout the business. And our obsession to want to get better we put our own money in we wanted to taste every part of the business and and when we come back to how we how do we pivot and move to caring more and investing more in the product and why was that important and now you talk about the blue ocean that we now swim in that all came from us feeling enough pain early on we'd make a move someone would copy it we'd make a move something else would happen and and it was almost like we're competing and i think back to what you said about the gold coast the beauty of being on the gold coast is you're isolated you're not looking left to write you're looking at your own self and you're running your own race and i think that early on really really helped us and then i think as we started to do things in the business and test things and bring people in and go okay we're great at marketing we need a better product or we need this or we need to bring our operations suck like we don't understand the final cost of our delivered product or we don't understand true profitability we understand cash flow we're suffering on that side like our obsession to want to understand the full wheel made us really come back to okay when we're building this business moving forward we need to build a moat around what we do we can't just do a moat early on the first three years we're making moves those moves are either getting ripped off getting copied whatever's happening people are taking what we're doing and trying to do it for themselves and then you're swimming like you said in the red ocean for us it's like how do we build a moat and protect every single part of what we do because these days you've still got the same amount if not way more brands that you would call copycats however they're copying copying one move you can't copy the full pie you can't we're swimming like you said in the blue ocean swimming we believe by ourselves we've got big competitors now got the colgates and the and the big unilevers but we're in our own race because the way we do things is so so different to the way any other brand does it yeah and i can clearly see that right and i've been watching the journey from afar so you're not part of any networking groups do you guys have mentors that you're learning from people that have built large e-commerce brands or exited so it goes back to it's everything like i'm learning from the conversation we had five minutes ago about what you did with founder and how your trend like no matter who it is there's something to learn from someone and sports teams sports managers like no matter who what where if it's a good fundamental principle it's something you can take and bring into business so it's like just isolating it to other business owners or people it's like it's too limiting there's other people other principles that you can really grab from.

19:54And if it's really, really good, bring it in. And so we're made up of thousands of different minds and the way people do things. And we try to bring as many of those good habits, good principles into what we do. And I think it's served us really well. And like Nick said, being on the Gold Coast, we do our own thing, run our own race. We're not looking at what the other guys are doing, whether you're big, small, medium, left or right, we're doing our own thing. And we're loving to do our own thing and trying to get other people excited and encouraged to do that as well yeah so talk to me about team right because at the size that you guys are at you can to really grow a business and scale it to the to the heights that you want to scale it it comes back to people it's going to come back to your leadership team the strength of your leadership team and the leaders around them how have you guys approached talent being in the gold coast we talked about it just briefly offline but i said let's talk about it while we're shooting because i think that's an interesting challenge because a lot of people they think oh you know if i want to start a business perhaps i need to go to silicon valley right or i need to be in a happening area where there's a lot of great talent or people around and you guys are starting from the gold coast and you build a very large business competing on a global scale how have you found developed talent and really built your people and culture to scale this business i guess yeah it's it has been very very tough and very very challenging and like the business itself um the people in the team side has had its own ups and downs and own challenges from how we operate as leaders to how we thought the teams would best work to how we thought a leader should be and operate with we've brought through so many different types of people from super experienced people from overseas yes to a young hungry person who's fresh out of school who just wants to pick anything and everything up and they sometimes turn into an absolute weapon across operations or whatever that might be and we've done everything in between and there's no right way of doing things i don't think um but for us it comes back to like alex said running our own race we we never wanted to run a business the way other people would run a business because we're two very unique different individuals and high smiles are very unique different business so for us it wasn't about looking at other companies and how they were structured anytime we did that and tried to follow another model or Apple's organizational structure or how they hire people or how they ladder up and how they have their leadership sort of sitting, whenever we did that, we'd fail.

22:23Coming back to what we're about and who we are as people and what we've found is the best leaders and our best leaders roll up their sleeves and get stuck in. They don't host meetings for meetings' sake. They do the most work. And if anything, when you're a leader, you're someone else's assistant first and foremost. You're assisting your team, not the other way around because that's the way that we operate and we run. We're assisting our team, not getting people to assist us. I think if you earn that respect, you earn the position of a leader. The other thing is we pick leaders who are, yes, they're in specialized roles.

22:53You might be the head of creative. You're very much a generalist when it comes to that. You've got to have an open mind. You've got to have a little bit of a touch and understanding of business. You've got to have a little bit of a touch and understanding of marketing to understand that full scope, to better brief and better work with a team that is super specialized and the best at doing what they do. So for us, we're in an amazing place now. we're always aiming to get better and better and better and develop the leaders that we have within but we truly feel when we look today where we're at with the people in the company we've just reached I think 110 just over 100 heads yeah um in the office we've got some amazing leaders in place who feel empowered who feel like they they own their role they feel like they're not micromanaged it's not reliant on myself and Alex um to make every single decision and the teams are thriving because of that because you get to a point where it's easy to manage a team of 20 with myself and but you get to over 100 you really need to have some really really good smart um well-developed well-trained leaders who you can trust and who trust you to then develop and grow the next crop and the next crop to get us to 200 300 and whatever that means um in terms of people so what do you guys look for when it comes to to great people um i think it's if i look prince and I'll use a couple of examples.

24:12It's the people who are hungry and willing to get to work and get stuck in. The people who are really smart and know what they're doing in their field but are willing to pick up the dirt and work at the lowest level if required. I'll give you a great example of the R &D position at HighSmall. So this is a position that we searched far and wide. We looked at the top head of R &Ds from your Unilever top, top firms. We spoke to all of them and there was always something with a preconceived notion of and a limitation that existed there from whatever exists, you have to fit within that sort of mold.

24:52Yes. Our idea was we wanted to completely break it. So we needed someone who had the knowledge of the science and the chemistry required, but didn't have any true understanding of what already existed so that when they came on board, it was just an open playing field, go as far and wide as we could. So in the end, we recruited a head of science from one of our local universities on the Gold Coast, one of the brightest minds that we have at High Smile, really open, but someone he's willing to get stuck into the little, most micro details and think as broadly as possible. and he didn't come with the limitation of, well, we can't do this or everything we try, everything.

25:33And then once we try, if it doesn't work, we're all happy to part ways and move on to the next thing. But it's that willingness to try everything to get to that new product, new concept, that's the ideal that we're sort of looking at throughout and I think it's a great example because it's so complex and so technical that we've been able to break it even in that R &D side as well. On what Alex said, it's like when you mentioned about Mauro, our team, like if I was to say our head of product and procurement, she wanted to be a teacher and she came through our customer service team. And now she's head of product and procurement, procuring some of the most amazing and getting to market and manufacturing some of the most amazing products in the world.

26:15Our head of supply chain, the guy who runs our supply chain, he played football with me and he just happened to come through actually working in the warehouse and now he's running the supply chain side of the business. Justin, who you've spoken about, our general manager, he was writing copy at a marketing agency, working casually for us at the time on a trial. Today, he's our general manager. I think you look anywhere. Head of marketing used to be in sales for a software business. So if you were to look at them when they started at HighSmile and when they came in, I don't think any other company would have given them the chance.

26:51Like Alex said, it's character. Character over everything. because myself and Alex didn't know a thing about R &D, didn't know a thing about business, didn't know a thing about anything. It came down to what we believe is character and competencies and then just willing to pick up things and a good personality to work with other people to make things happen. Yeah, I love that. So I used to watch from afar as well this vlog that you guys used to put out. A lot of friends went overseas as well, being in the e-commerce space. I used to watch that. You guys probably wouldn't know. you never used to get many views and you you went down this pathway for a little bit where you guys it looked like you were looking to build your personal brand and then you did it for a year so i got to know and feel the team um there was the videographer was it stefan or stefan's brother daz is the videographer yeah yeah so like so i used to watch that it was so cool you guys should have put in a lot of effort as well and then after a year or so it was all gone what the hell happened tell me about that like i've got to find because i've always wondered like because it looked like you guys saw the power of building a personal brand and then you just wiped it all and you just cut it all because it looked like you're putting a lot of effort and it was cool but you weren't getting many views either so it's funny and it's funny you said that there's nothing at high smile that we haven't tried and i'm telling you nothing we've tried it all and through that again well every situation, every occurrence, every little detail, we're learning from every moment.

28:22And it always guides us in what is the right path. It was a great example of, okay, let's test this. Let's really try to build up that personal brand and see what can we build beyond this. There were so many exciting things. And then when we took a step back and it's like, okay, what are we doing this for? For us, it's really about creating this new category, what we're calling small care. And it takes a lot of time to do that. If we're taking 1 % of time off that, we're losing. And that was something that just took so much energy and time because not only are we now thinking of what is our progression forward, which business always moves and it's always changing.

28:58And to then have to think about, okay, are we getting this on camera or not? It's like our North Star was how do we create a new category? How do we make something special? And we can't have any distractions from doing this. So it was a great, great time and something that I'm so happy that we did do it because it made us learn a lot. Okay, what's it about? What really exists there? And it gets you out of the present because you're always thinking about, okay, am I saying this the right way to appeal instead of am I actually just saying it the best way or thinking in the best way as well? So it took us a bit off track more than what was necessary.

29:33And I think, yeah, I wouldn't change it for the world, but I think after we looked at it, our North Star to do what we're doing in this space requires full 100 % focus and we can't change from that. Because, yeah, I remember watching one and you were setting up an office and you wanted multiple walls. I remember you were saying, Nick, you were like, oh, we want multiple walls so then we have multiple locations to shoot from and multiple backgrounds. That's how I thought about it when we moved to this office. I remember that from that particular tip. So I have a crazy memory and I always wondered, like, why did you guys stop that?

30:04So was it literally like just one day you came in, one of you guys and said, this has got to stop or, like, what happened? We spoke to each other. I think like Alex said, it was the North Star thing was so true. Like Alex said, we've tested and done so many different things. Sometimes it takes us in the wrong direction. I think we personally, we don't want to be famous. Like if people know us, cool, we're friendly, we're happy to say hello, speak to people, but it wasn't where we wanted to go. Speaking opportunities, podcasts, we love doing them, but by all means we don't want to do a world tour and just do that.

30:39We want to build the best business and get people so interested that they want to ask us a question. We don't want to build the best personal brand because we're really interesting characters. So it's like we went back to our roots and went, let's do it with the best that let's build the best business. People will be intrigued. People will be interested. There will be plenty of opportunities for us to speak and get out of our comfort zone because we do like doing things like this. Gets us out of our comfort zone, shares a story, inspires someone. It's amazing. But through the vlog, like Alex said, it was so labor intensive.

31:06took up so much of our mind power that sometimes you feel like you're not being authentically yourself the more you get into that race and we were conscious we're like we don't want to become actors that's not what we want to do we don't want to be on tv yeah it started going all the emails were getting down the wrong path was to be on tv and do all this other and we're like no no that's not what we are and who we're about served its purpose i think it helped a heap of people but i think we can do more by doing good work and then speaking about it on on platforms like this Hey guys, I hope you're enjoying this episode and learning a ton.

31:38As you know, in this series, we interview some of the greatest founders of our generation to find out how they did it. However, if you're thinking of starting your own business and you want to hear from some incredible stories from everyday people like you or I who are actually in the trenches, only been building their business for maybe one year or two years, like they're building right now and they're really in the early stages, but they're getting success. You should come and check out our new podcast, From Zero to Founder, hosted by our community manager, Molly Flynn. These are in the trenches stories from our very own successful students that have gone through some of our programs.

32:17People just like you who are deep within the process of building their very own successful business. These are the founders of tomorrow. You can find the From Zero to Founder podcast on all platforms. And remember, it's founder without the E. All right, now let's jump in the show. So I remember even during the vlog, you guys were working on some other products or it looked like you're looking to launch some other brands. Did that ever happen? What happened there? No, we did. You had like a secret project or something you're working on? Yeah. Your memory is probably better than mine. We did flirt with the idea of launching other types of brands because again, when we did launch into High Smile and we saw the early success, we were like, right, we've got the recipe for success.

33:03as you've seen a lot of people do. And then again, the vlog was almost a bit of a project like that where it was a bit of a wandering eye. We started dabbling into something else. We're like 1 % of growth in high smile is better than 3 ,000 % of growth in something else. And truly, we truly mean it. We're passionate about this category. A lot of people go, what's there to be passionate about? Teeth, whatever. It's boring. It's a boring category. We're really, really excited. I think we're starting to see that come to fruition now in the products that we're bringing out, the battles that we're having with competitors, the retailers that we're playing with the activations we're having we're truly making a dent there's a lot of skincare brands hair care is a big a big market but when you look at small care oral care no one's done what we've done and no one's going to do what we're about to do and i think that's we've got this once in a lifetime opportunity in everyone brushes their teeth every single person not everyone uses this skincare product not everyone cares for their hair every single person that i know has to be 99 percent in our major markets brush their teeth we've got an opportunity to be the brand that that dominates that category for us being competitive people who have always played sport our whole lives there's no bigger stage than that to compete on and to to wake up to every single day um to that massive never-ending challenge yeah so so you you really focus like it's just so dialed in yeah so switching gears as well um you guys have done a lot of cool stuff on the influencer side you've worked with i think is it all the kardashians yeah we've worked with i'd say yeah all the all the kardashians but maybe one or two now i know you probably can't share exact details around the commercial arraignment arrangements can you give us like kind of a an indicative figure around what that kind of investment is in any capacity to work with them and why do you choose to work with like influences this big does it do you get the return but i guess that's what people would be curious about right like is it worth it 100 i think that's what people ask every single day it's like is that worth it working with kim kim's a massive face for the brand we work with her a lot on a lot of our products look when it comes down to what something's worth i think it's looking at the business holistically what like when you look at nike for example they'll attach themselves to certain figures not just to sell more product but to tell a story to tell a story to retailers and and to it to sell dreams to to potential customers as well for us we look at it in a similar way working and engaging with kim to launch a product um get does it get sales it gets sales does it get attention it gets attention but it takes the brand forward it positions the brand where we want the brand to be positioned it taps into a customer that we we want to sort of get the attention of um and it obviously helps and assist now that we're in retail, helps and assist our retailers with driving people in store and making high, small the beast that it is today.

36:00I think just working with big talent isn't going to make a brand, make or break a brand. I think for us, influencers now is maybe less than 5 % of what we do and where we put our dollars and where we put our attention. Like you look at what we spoke on, R &D, other marketing avenues, retail support the team itself and what we do there spending money on our own internal culture to to get that team sort of firing and make them want to work for high small influences went from something that was such a huge part of our business to now probably where it should be around five percent of what we do and where we put our energy and focus and i think yeah for sure working with someone like kim elevates a brand positions us above a lot of the competitors like when you talk about our space i don't think some of the big brands are cool enough to work with a character like kim and i don't think some of the smaller brands are reputable enough to work with someone like kim so we're in this unique place where where kim is a is a great influencer for our brand and a great face for the brand and and someone who i think has a unique alignment with high smile compared to any other brand in our category yeah okay awesome thank you for sharing And you guys were pretty heavy on direct response, paid advertising.

37:15I know you did a lot in the Snapchat space as well, killing it on TikTok, very early on Facebook ads when CPMs were much more cheap than they are now. I'm curious, for many e-commerce brands or many companies in general, when the privacy stuff changed, iOS 14, a lot of brands that were heavy reliant on paid advertising direct response type stuff they suffered but there was one key thing that I saw and that was the brands that had a strong retail arm behind them they didn't really feel it but the ones that were heavy paid only they really really really felt it what did you guys do and how did you guys overcome that challenge in particular and talk to us when did you start looking into retail because i think that's a big piece of the puzzle now for d2c brands definitely i think on retail probably about three four years ago we had the discussion and then actually properly started activating about two three years ago yeah um from a d2c perspective and when you talk about the advertising ios 14 i think it always comes down to owning what you do building a motor around what you do if you overly rely on influencers overly reliant on advertising overly reliant on retail um some you're you're at the mercy of something i think if you want to build a true brand true business you um you want to swim in that blue ocean that you spoke of before you want to own as much as you possibly can in that wheel and you want to be in control of that success as much as you possibly can i think that gives assurance to the people who work for the company the company's not yo-yoing up and down um you know there's some stability in the strategy and what's going on if retail if there was to be covered retail stores closed we've still got online something happens that we've got the professional network as well for a product um perspective we're not just in whitening we're not just in oral care we're covering that full um that full range of oral care um from cosmetic to general care so for us we've we really looked when we when we spoke a couple years into the business about building that moat we took that super super seriously and even today like we're nowhere near where we want to be when it comes to protecting what we do and it doesn't just come from people think of protection as ip or or something legal it's like no no there's much much more depth to that make it so so difficult for someone to literally copy exactly what you do because what you do is so much more than what you're putting out it's it's what's in those four walls in the office it's the people that are there it's how you operate it's how you move it's your strategy and where you want to be in the future no one can copy can copy that you said that you guys got a lot of stories a lot of badness little lots of battle scars can you both share maybe from both your different perspectives kind of the hardest time in this journey because building a business is tough the the level that you guys are playing at with such aggressive scale and growth fundamentally things break all the time to my knowledge you guys are bootstrapped is that correct still to this day so you you know you've got to you've got to worry about cash flow and sales sales is one thing another thing is to be able to fulfill that with an e-commerce business and you can get yourself into a lot of trouble especially when you bootstrap so i'd love to hear from each of you like the hardest time that you've ever experienced during this journey and it was there ever a time where you but either of you felt like giving up?

40:49It's a good question. I feel if I go back, the toughest time was at the time that we made that decision for that transition, that transition from singular product, business is going great, things are working, it's easy to manage, and it's a team of say 10 to 20, um what things were things were up and breaking that so obviously transforming to r &d led building products that cost more at the time that everything becomes more expensive advertising marketing the whole lot came this oh my god we have got to roll the sleeves right up so this was called three odd years ago um and yeah it it was the time that was very difficult bootstrapped cash flow all of that we had to really say okay we've got to make ourselves out of this we know what we're doing fundamentally makes sense it will be for the longevity of high smile and we'll be able to carve our own thing but it's going to be a tough year and a half and it was a tough year and a half um and i and going back to to us looking at things it was the best year and a half for us that we could have ever gone through because it's the thing that taught us about so many things in this short little window from how do we look at sales how do we look at the business as a whole how do we look at products and create these amazing products and how do we make something more so how do we expand it out how do we not limit ourselves just to one thing whether it's advertising or the products or retail or online and i think that those that key moment is what has transformed the business the toughest part which is my which is what most people say it's the toughest part is what makes um makes it shine and make it makes it what it is and i feel no more is that true than what we experienced just on that one did you did you guys have to go on the hole to be able to make that significant investment in the hole as in negative absolutely and we and looking at it's like what it was the toughest most grueling thing because it was on our own back when the the last result we're never asking for anything external because we have this vision we knew the vision never changed it was just that transition period with everything stacked up at the same time um made us that crystal clear focus of like it is exactly what we need to do and that's business that's what makes business so special is there are these tough times that you have to become even more clear and even more precise with the actions and the moves you make um and yeah again speaking that's what has made i i guess and created and curated what we are today and how we sort of operate in this very unique um way where we're not overly we never now go too crazy in that one direction so we have these amazing people who we work with who each own their own thing but our goal is to always take all of the moats into perspective to make the best decision so it's a bit of a change in the perspective of how we we operate it but yeah i think that that's someone i'll tie it down to thanks for sharing yeah i think alex has pretty much covered and summed that up but i think one thing that's interesting from what alex said and it's i don't know if this is luck intuition i think you need a bit of both when it comes to um running a successful business and getting to where we are now um but we've never waited for a catalyst we've always been that catalyst for change so we didn't decide to change as a as a brand and from a product perspective and invest all that into r &d and product because something happened or something triggered it we've we always had this gut and we still go off gut feeling and i don't know it's just just something that we've always had and it's we've got a similar gut i think because the intuitions tend to align um but there's something in us that goes we think we need to go in this direction it's not like you said you spoke about mentors before we don't get on the phone and speak to someone say should we do this should we not it's the two of us jumping in a room going i've got a bit of a gut feeling we need to do a bit more of this and then alaska you know what that's weird i i agree with that and if both guts agree we do it and every single thing we've done we've pivoted when we moved it's not been because of a catalyst we've felt something and before something's been on fire or something there's been an issue or there's been a drama or something's forced us to change and move we we have seeked to make that move and i think it's because we're never satisfied or never we never sort of sit there and go oh what we're doing is amazing we're always looking forward always looking at that next step um and i think now we've got the responsibility to do that we don't just have myself and alex we've got over 100 people that we're responsible for as well for their growth and their lives and their passion and their careers so for us we always have to be obsessed with moving forward moving forward not smelling the roses but instead looking at what could be a potential red flag what could be a potential harm in the future rather than waiting for that catalyst to bite you in the ass and go make that change yeah and where does that come from like that hunger where does it come from is it do you guys fall like did you guys always have this your whole life i think it's that competitive nature that our obsession with sport and the teams and the managers and the great sports stars and sports managers who have done exceptionally well it's something they ineptly have in themselves if you look at the top top top level of performance in sport you have to be another level you have to transform yourself whether it's football you're talking about you have to treat if you're a striker 10 years ago to what a striker is today it's two completely different things you have to transform yourself and become something even better whatever the standard is you've got to break that as well and I feel business is the never-ending version of that it's every 10 years you look you're always in that business you have to transform the business the way you think the way we're going to elevate in our category how we're going to we need to accept that over 10 years there'll be someone that creates something special in our category how do we keep our eye on our eye on the pulse and how do we obsess so much at where the one's constantly transitioning and everyone's looking at us as what the next move is in the category and And yeah, it's just this obsession that both of us have.

47:04And yeah, we just don't sleep on it. It's not something that we practice. It's not something that we have this technical thing we do. It's just a never ending every day type of thing. It's that constantly that 1 % effort goes to that every day. Yeah, you guys love to compete. Yeah, we love it. Yeah. Put frankly. Are you hesitating to take the next step in your e-commerce journey? Founder Plus has you covered. With proven frameworks tailored to your business needs for fast results, a supportive community of over 30 ,000 like-minded entrepreneurs, and weekly live mentorship sessions, Founder Plus is your key to success.

47:41Try Founder Plus today for just$1 for seven days and start building your dream business with confidence. You can visit founder.com forward slash start dollar trial or click the link in the description to claim your trial. So this is what's interesting is like to get a business to any kind of true worth significance, it has to be an obsession, right? But there's the other side of the table where you can burn out. Have you guys experienced burnout before? I haven't experienced burnout. I think as hard as we try on the business side, and I'll speak for myself and I know Nick's the same, we try equally as hard at home to be there for our families at the same time.

48:20And I feel it's not something that, oh, I've worked so hard, now I'm home, I can relax. You have to work hard to creating a good family, creating a good home. You have to be emotionally there. Your attention has to be there. So when you get home, you're there. You're not, oh, now I can relax and go to sleep. And I feel that's the thing that makes it most. It's the thing that's the ultimate true north star for both of us, that family, nothing really matters more. So you're doing this amazing thing, this business that we love to do, but coming home, seeing my kid, there's nothing better. There's nothing that excites me more.

48:56So I think it almost, if anything, neutralizes me really well. It keeps you grounded. It keeps me grounded. You guys on the Gold Coast, you both surf too? Do you have time for a surf? We try. We try. We're not too good at surfing. I've tried. I wish I picked it up as a kid. I might do better, but we're probably the only two people born and raised living on the Gold Coast that don't surf. We love the beach though. Yeah. to. So people would look at you guys from afar, especially younger types, early 20s, early 30s, and kind of look at you guys and go, wow, you guys have got it all. An interesting question I like to ask people is, from your perspective, is it ever enough?

49:38I think it depends what you're doing and what you're trying to do. I think people usually look at that from a financial perspective and we i think early on is when you get carried away from success by success and you think about i want to do this and i want to do that because you're young you're immature but now we feel so content with what we have in that respect but our competitive side it'll never be enough no matter where the company gets what the company gets to ignoring the revenue numbers ignoring anything on that side for us it's like the obsession of developing the next rough diamond from high school who had no opportunity and now they're now they've got the opportunity next five years to become a head of or a leader in a department or whatever that might be that's exciting and the challenge of taking on the biggest brands in oral care that have been there for hundreds of years and dominated every single bathroom for us to be able to have that place so from that perspective the challenge i can't possibly see where where that stops and what the limit is because every time we think the companies at a level where it's like oh this is great it's like there's always another level there's always somewhere else we can take it um which is super super exciting the competitive nature never is about the dollar you make or the dollar you have in your account it's a weird thing and yeah it's always about how do we transform what what we're doing the category we're in how do like nick said how do we get the team like these superstars and how do we make them more special And the absolute last thing that you think of is how much do you have?

51:06And the competitive nature isn't around that, which I feel if it is, it's hard to create that business that survives a lifetime. Yeah, 100%. Because you're not focused on the right thing. You can't really think of the best things because it's always an incorrect sort of path that you'll take. Well, yeah, it's just really a scoreboard, right? That's all it really is. Correct, yeah. so the reason I ask that question is because I think all of us as humans we always tell each other oh when we get here it'll be better when we get here it'll be better how amazing will this be and then when you when you get there it's like what's next and that's very common amongst founders successful founders and you guys have the same kind of makeup right you guys are telling yourself how good is this going to be when we get there and then when you're there you don't even smell What's next?

51:55What's next? What's next? What's next? What's next? What's next? So look, I could talk to you guys all day. We don't have a all day, unfortunately. But I have to ask, like, for people watching, if you guys were to start a brand now in 2013, like, what would you do? How would you approach it? Like, with everything you've seen, all the lessons, all the money in the bank in terms of lessons that you've had. like incredible like how would you approach it can you give our community kind of from a how you've built high smile how would you do it in 2023 just because a lot has changed and it's still very possible right like it's absolutely um and maybe you can talk from a product side you can talk from a marketing side yeah okay good idea i think first and foremost not to get crumbled by there being too many competitors in whatever you want to do.