527: From $0 to $100M a Year Selling Products on TikTok & Snapchat | Hudson Leogrande [VIDEO]

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0:39Just head to omnisend.com forward slash founder without the E to get started. All right, now let's jump back into the show. When I started in e-commerce, we like bought everything before we even knew how to start the company. So I was burning through money that I really didn't have. We had zero idea what to do, no idea what was the first step and What was the last step? It really just a complete shit show. People do not need time to make a decision. They need information. Go get a ring light, make the content that is authentic to you, be as relatable as possible, and you will get the best results for your videos.

1:14When our creators start to do really well for us and showcase that they're an extension of my brand, they will do everything and anything for growth.

1:25Hear the stories. Learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to the Founder Podcast with Nathan Chan.

1:38Hudson, welcome to the show. The first question that I ask people now, we've changed it up, is what did the first 30 days of your first e-commerce brand look like, Purely White Deluxe? So, listen, first of all, pleasure to be here, Nathan. It is interesting because I started Purely White Deluxe in my mother's basement. So the first 30 days was pretty interesting to say the least. Um, we, when I started in e-commerce and I got involved with purely white, we had no idea what private labeling was. We didn't know anything about that. A manufacturer had an MOQ. We got a bunch of boxes shipped to the house and a bunch of charcoal because we were selling teeth whitening charcoal powder.

2:27There was a trend going on where people would brush their teeth with the charcoal powder. Their mouth would turn black and they'd spit it out. And that was the creatives that were going around on social. we would pack and put everything in the basement and we would like try to figure out a way to get the poly bags and everything to the house so that we can ship products but we had no customers so the first 30 days was just no customers trying to figure out how to get a website up and running it's pretty crazy because we bought everything before we started the business like we like bought everything before we even knew how to develop a website or how to start the company.

3:07So I think that, I guess now it would be a little bit different, but the first 30 days was just like, it almost felt like it just a complete mess. We had zero idea what to do. We had no idea what was the first step and what was the last step. And I would say we made about 15 bucks. We sold one item. There you go. So then what happened next? So with Purely White, the first few years were really interesting because I was still working a job. I was in the car business. I was a car salesman and I was constantly trying to pursue having Purely White Deluxe be a success for me because I was so eager to get out of the situation that I was in that I was just trying so hard to see how can we possibly make this work with the company.

3:57So the first few years was really just a complete shit show. And that was just us trying to understand how to even get the product marketed that people would be excited enough to make a purchase. My website looked like it was built with a banana. Like there was literally nothing going on with the company that you would even trust to check out with our brand. So really the whole thing for me was just trying to figure out every aspect of the business. So the first few years for me were just, like I said, in my mom's basement, I would have my brothers go outside and we would pour the charcoal into these little jars and I would spray them with a hose after because they would be covered in charcoal.

4:39And we were shipping out out of the house as well. I would have these big black garbage bags. I'd be walking up the stairs. I'd look like Santa Claus, bringing everything to the front door, trying to get it to USPS so we could ship out to customers. When the company's finally started selling. But the whole first few years, I would say, was just the biggest learning experience of my life and showing me every single time that I wanted to quit. The idea in my head was like, oh, well, this is where everyone else quit. So I might as well just keep with it, because I know that I want to be an entrepreneur.

5:12So I would say into the third year was when we finally started seeing success with the company. Yeah. Okay. And so what kind of sales were you making for those first couple of years, man? I would say when we were, I mean, every time I would hear a cha-ching on my phone, I would freak out and it was the most exhilarating feeling of all time. We probably got two to three sales every couple of days. And that was when we would do these influencer posts on Instagram. I would just send out a bunch of product and hope that people would post about it. And when a couple of them did, we'd get like one or two sales.

5:47And then that was, I guess, my journey into figuring out how to work with influencers and content creators. Yeah. So what happened next? So third year, what happened? Like what was the shifting point? So third year was where it got interesting. We discovered Snapchat and obviously I used that as a kid, but we had never seen a company before do Instagram. I mean, Snapchat stories where they would post a story for my company. This is when, by the way, when we figured out, you know, we private labeled our teeth whitening kit, which was our bestseller, still is one of our bestsellers. And what we did was we took that product and we worked and recruited hundreds of influencers on Snapchat.

6:30And throughout their day, when they would post, they had no brand deals. Snapchat didn't have mid-roll programs where ads were running yet. It was very beta. So what we would do is we would take influencers on Snapchat, they would post a story and say, and they would reply to comments of people asking how they get their teeth white. And they would put a link right on that 24 hour story and I would pay them. And when I did it with a couple of people just like to test, cause they were like, Hey man, I'm getting 500 ,000 views, a million views a day on my Snapchat stories. I think this would be a good idea to post purely white on it.

7:06Immediately. We had no paid ads cause paid ads never worked for us. We could not get met at a work. Well, at the time, Facebook, we couldn't get Facebook to work, Instagram to work. Nothing was working for us. Snapchat, cold traffic. We were getting so many visitors. Our conversion rate was horrible, but we figured out that we actually broke into something, a market that was untapped. And we had about at our peak, 1 ,200 people a week posting for Purely White Deluxe on Snapchat about five to six times a week. Wow. 1 ,200 people a week. Yeah, 1 ,200 people a week. We'd pay them every Friday on PayPal.

7:42And we were able to build the business from zero to north of 10 million a year in sales just on a cold traffic. No Google. Again, Nathan, I didn't know anything. So no Google shopping. There was no Facebook. There was no retargeting. There was nothing. It was just, you see us on Snapchat, you buy on the website, and that's it. Wow. And when was this? What year was this? This was right as COVID hit. So right as COVID was starting to get into the States was when our company started really picking up in sales. And so when did you launch Comfort? So Comfort, I launched, it will be two years next week.

8:28Yeah. Wow. And we were introduced by a mutual friend, Greta Van Riel. And she said to me, literally you guys got to interview the founder like hudson one of the founders of comfort this thing is blowing up they've gone from like zero is it zero to 60 million in like two years or something insane we're gonna do a hundred we're gonna do over a hundred million this year wow yeah and and i just want to make a point i bootstrapped this company so um i bootstrapped purely white and i took the funds from purely white and that was how i started i started comfort with$50 ,000. And we were sold out probably four months in year one because we had no idea how to run a clothing brand at all.

9:12So yeah, it's been a very interesting journey to say the least. Okay. So what inspired you? You had an eight-figure business to start another one. Most people would just focus and double down on that one business. Yeah. So I'll tell you, when we noticed how many customers we had, but nobody was posting about the brand, I had said to myself, imagine if everybody was passionate enough about my company to go and post and showcase that they're an extension of my brand. because word of mouth is still the best way to advertise for a business. And no one really wanted to showcase when they're in their personal space in their bathroom using a teeth whitening product.

9:59So it was interesting for us where we didn't get a lot of that posting, a lot of that social media traction. And when I was younger, I had struggled a lot with my mental health. I had a pretty interesting childhood, and I at one point even dropped out of high school. So I dealt with a lot of anxiety and a lot of adversity early on where I wanted to create something through clothing where people felt like they were part of a community. And when comfort came about, I had the idea to make slightly weighted hoodies that I didn't even mention to anybody that had to do with stress or anxiety, but just it made people feel calm.

10:37As soon as the company started picking up, which by the way, I started on Snapchat with that, people were raving about how comfortable it was and how it made them feel and how their anxiousness was lessened when they would wear it or how they wore it into a surgery or when they had a rough day at work. And we immediately started to see this community being built from the ground up. And the idea behind the brand was always to do something like that. But I did not know at that time that it was going to be as big as it is now. For comfort, what did you take from your lessons with Purely White to launch comfort?

11:11What lessons? How did you have an incredible pre-launch? Because you said you sold out in like the first week, right? Yeah. So what happened was we had already established great growth on Snapchat. And all I did was plug and play. So I took my creators and influencers that worked with me on Snapchat for purely white. I prepped them, sent them products in advance, had them try it on, make sure that they loved it. They were part of the reason why we launched the brand so fast. Because once they tried the hoodie, they were like, man, this is something different. Like, I don't know how to explain it, but the way that it feels is just so comfortable that like, I haven't taken it off since you sent it to me.

11:49And when we had everybody on board for that, their actual true emotions followed through with their ads. And when that started to happen, we noticed like day one, we were priced too high. We were just too highly priced in the market for such a new product, but we still sold very well. As soon as I noticed that, like the conversions were sold down, we dropped price for all of our customers and immediately went through the roof and we were able to sell out within the first seven days. We did somewhere around like 150 ,000 in sales. Yeah. Wow. In the first week. Yeah. In the first week of the business, which was, yeah, it was pretty crazy to watch that.

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13:51We wanted to operate on anywhere from a 3.5 to a 5 % conversion rate. We knew that it wasn't going to be that high because a lot of it was cold traffic, but it was less than one. and that's very low. So we knew that there was something going on. The website wasn't great either. I mean, we have incredible CRO teams that work on our stuff now. We've done so many changes to increase conversion, but even with the website, the way that it was, I knew that it wasn't a great site, but I knew that the price point was what was teetering people because they were like, wait a minute, this company has no history.

14:24They have no track record. We don't even know what this is going to be like when we get it. They don't even have a review yet. So that was kind of like, to the customer's mindset, they were like, wait a minute, maybe this isn't for me because it's this luxury priced item, but we have no idea what it is yet. Yeah. So a big part of your strategy was following the same model that you were using for purely white, but you took that creator, like that creator influencer marketing model and then applied it to comfort. I'm curious because most people would look at Snapchat and be like, it's not that big anymore no it's it's not but so i guess i'll kind of again touch on like the this point of we could not get ads to work so like no matter what i did ads never worked my my my roas was was was i was very unprofitable i was burning through money that i really didn't have.

15:26And Snapchat was a way for us to get our brand out there where there was so much awareness to the product. So the conversion rate was not good. Again, all cold traffic. But when you're throwing, I don't know, maybe we did 100 million views to 200 million views a week. When you hit that, you have to convert for something. And that was my idea. Like all of it was like, hey, I mean, 200 million people are seeing this product. Someone has to buy it. um you know like someone's gonna have to just say yes and just you know give it a shot and click by um but we broke into tiktok early early with purely white as well and that was another big winner for us before every influencer had rates that were like they were you know starring in the next avengers film it was very very um easy for us to get a decent budget where we could allocate that to different creators and get a really good ROI.

16:25Well, that was very good for us in the beginning. We had a couple of creators that we would pay, you know,$5 ,000 to for a promotion, which was still a good amount of money, but they would make us, you know,$50 ,000, $60 ,000 on a video. So we were seeing huge success there. And remember, I'm not spending any money anywhere else. So all of that money's coming in house. That's how we were able to build up the bank account so that we could really start to try and test to see, can we be profitable on TikTok? Can we actually make it work on Facebook? What type of ad creators are actually going to work for this brand?

16:56But I will tell you, even until this day, Comfort right out of the gate was killing it on Meta. It was killing it on TikTok. Purely White was still struggling. Purely White still has problems on Meta. But what we did with Comfort was we got into a market that has so much, the TAM is gigantic, right? So you have the total addressable market is huge. Everybody wears a hoodie. Now, if you could find a way to market your product, and this is for anybody in any niche that you go into, as long as you can show how different your product is from the rest and your marketing plus your product quality is going to equal an incredible customer experience, they're going to share that with others.

17:37So comfort immediately out of the gate was resonating with people on an ad perspective with my creators, which I can get into. But also that was very profitable for us where we were able to dump all... I haven't taken a dollar out of comfort since I started the business. Every single dollar has gone back into my employees, my ads, and my inventory. The way we want to take this thing is so incredibly huge for us. I'm so passionate about it that I'm just so excited about the future that we're just coming out with things at lightning speed for our customers. Yeah. And so you haven't taken a dollar.

18:12That's interesting, right? Because if you're on track to make a hundred million most people would be looking at that going wow like surely you would have taken something right sure you would pay yourself a massive salary you said you know off uh offline right you're living in miami yeah the lifestyle right like yeah yeah yeah i um i live out of my my oral care brands and um every dollar that comfort makes it has to go back into inventory and ads at this scale. There's no time and there's no money to waste on anything else other than the business. And I think that a lot of people in, I guess you're saying like in my position, they would maybe think otherwise.

18:57But I think that when you see what you can build and you're so excited about it, it's so much bigger than me that I've taken myself completely out of the equation. I've watched our company change girls' lives that are in college that make$15 ,000,$20 ,000 sometimes a week working for our business on TikTok through commission ads. I've watched hundreds of thousands of people that become ambassadors with us be able to pay their rent. I mean, we've just been able to do such incredible things that it's not just me anymore. It's not just about me. It's about the thousands of other people that look at this brand as a way to take care of themselves and their family.

19:37And I think with where we want to go with this thing, I just have the blinders on. Yeah, I really respect that, man. Because so many people will be watching, listening to this going, man, even paying$50 million a year, you haven't really taken a cent. You haven't even paid yourself, you don't even pay yourself a salary. No, nothing. Wow, that's insane. Yeah, I guess until the tax structure that we need to make work for the brand, it requires me to make a salary, which maybe it does. But as of right now, no, this is all going back into the business. We launched Comfort Paws, which is for dogs. Dogs are going to match their owners in hoodies.

20:18And then we have Comfort Kids launching in two months for anywhere from four years old to 13 years old. And that just requires all of our attention. So, yeah, it's definitely been exciting. Yeah, no, that's something to be admired. I know a lot of people watching this would find that very surprising. So let's round back to the creators piece because it's clear that there's somewhat of a blueprint or a framework that you use. So what to you makes a successful creator partnership? So the one thing that we've done is we've relied on trust. Every single thing that we do for my business is trust-based.

20:59We DM the creators and we talk to them. So I'll give everyone kind of the play by play so they can go do this for their brand as well. We will send a message to the creators and we will schedule a call with me, myself personally. So with every single person that has joined my organization, even now till this day, I take phone calls. So I'll take time out of my day to schedule a couple hours where all I do is take calls with creators and I make the introduction and I build the relationship and I start to find rapport with them. because the one thing that we've noticed is when people feel like, again, like they're a part of something bigger and that there's a lot of growth and opportunity with the business, they're more keen to take it seriously.

21:45And that's something that we've noticed a lot. So right now we work with about 250 girls a week and maybe like 20 guys a week that make content for me on TikTok that we repurpose across Facebook. We repurpose across Pinterest and Snapchat ads and all these other places. But what makes a really good creator, like you're asking, is when I don't even work with big celebrities, I work with people that are extremely relatable, that don't have a big following, that actually will give you their honest and true, and not saying that bigger people don't, but they give this honest and true opinion where people look at them and they see that they only have a couple hundred followers or a couple thousand followers, and they can relate right away.

22:26And I have everybody make the content the way that they want. So I tell them, don't try to be anybody you're not. Make the content that is authentic to you. And the people that watch these ads that are so desensitized to watching ads all day on TikTok and their dopamine scrolling, they're going to watch you and say, wow, this girl's really being authentic and honest about what her experience is with this company. We sell an emotion. So when they learn how to sell an emotion that's catered to them and what they feel people will like through themselves personally it's done incredible for us yeah that's fascinating because you bring me back to i basically run an e-commerce brand and sold it it was a time-marked water bottle called healthish and when we worked i never forget the first creator that we work with that really popped off she was super relatable and one of those reasons was was because she had her heart broken on the bachelor in australia and it was like a big sub story and everyone loved her but she was a really really relatable person she was like an everyday person she didn't prop herself up as this big time influencer or creator and that's something that i've always found from my experience the creators that you work with that have a youtube channel always always always all the people that are posting constant stories and are vulnerable and have that relatability.

23:49There's just so much more trust, right? 100%. Yeah. Because they're used to being on camera and also being themselves. As soon as a camera turns on, especially for me even, it almost felt like it was changing me for a second because I felt like I had to perform or I had to act because I was being recorded. But meanwhile, if you're just being your authentic self day to day, those are the videos or that's the content that does the best every single time, no matter what. Yeah, I agree. So how do you find creators? Yeah. So great, great question. So what we do is two different things. We will scroll through a TikTok shop.

24:26We'll see what creator that has a small following had a blow up video that did really well for them. We know that they got a taste of how much money can be made. And then what we've done is we've taken those creators, we've put them through an incubator with our business. We've explained to them how to make content and make it even better than what it is right now. And then we just give them all the tools. We use something called Notion.so. It's like a note-taking app on steroids. It's a really good app to run your business. I mean, we run our whole business on Notion. And we bring them through this whole incubator for a week and we teach them exactly how we feel content has worked for us and how they can kind of dive in and get dug in with themselves on how it's going to work for them.

25:06So we've done that. And then what we also do is when our creators start to do really well for us, they actually become the outreach. So we'll pay them on the side, a portion or a salary to go and do outreach because they have had the results. So if I have a girl who makes$10 ,000 a week promoting my clothing brand and she goes to 10 other girls and says, Hey guys, you know, I found a way to make, you know,$10 ,000 a week myself. This is the company I'm working with. This is what they stand for. They donate to mental health charities. We're a mental health brand at the end of the day, Nathan, like we donate to over a dozen different charities every month.

25:41We stand for something so much bigger that people, again, they want to be bought into something that they feel they can build a community around. So these girls that have worked for me that reach out to other girls, the amount of responses and the amount of people that want to schedule a call after that, it's tripled just because of their personal experience with us. And they get to share that with those girls too. Yeah, that's really clever. And how many creators might you have with a relationship like that working for you or with you? So right now we have about 10 that we work with that do recruiting for us.

26:18The thing is, we've stopped a little bit because what happens is, you know, you want to give, we want to make sure that with the amount of people that work for us right now, ambassadors, we have over 5 ,000 ambassadors that promote with their code and they get paid every month with whatever sales they get through their discount code. Shout out to Social Snowball, because that's a company that we use for paying everybody all at once instead of paying everybody through PayPal. That takes five hours. So we've been doing that with them. And the other creators that work with us on a weekly basis that make several videos a week for us, we want to make sure that everyone gets train properly and everyone has the best opportunity with us.