570: Your Toothbrush is GROSS - They Fixed it and Made MILLIONS | SURI

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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 people try the product, they don't like it. They love it. The way they describe it, the way it's changed their life, it sounds kind of crazy, but those people then become such advocates. They're telling their friends, their family, and then those people also love it. And you can see then how it kind of grows. You want to know why Suri has grown so quickly? Go and read those reviews. They're the co-founders of Suri. Who turned an everyday habit into over a$40 million brand.

1:13From 5 ,000 pre-orders to 10 ,000 glowing reviews. Here's how they built the world's most loved electric toothbrush. We actually had this pretty big disaster that felt existential in our very first week of shipping. We had a call from our 3PL one day saying, oh, we haven't actually shipped any of the products. There's been a problem with the labeling. And it just felt in that moment, the world was holding around us. Gone are the days when you can just drive sales and lose lots of money. Nobody wants to support those businesses anymore. Today, it's much more about how do we make sustainable businesses.

1:45Hear the stories, learn the proven methods, and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to the Founder Podcast with Nathan Chan.

1:59All right, well, let's start from the beginning. What sparked this idea for Shuri? Well, to start and explain that, actually, it's probably worth explaining where we first met. So it's a really funny, bizarre story, but we were both at this thing called the Cannes Lions Festival, which is like the Oscars of the advertising industry. and I just by total luck had a conversation with the chief marketing officer of Unilever who told me he was hosting a party off the coast of Cannes and someone had dropped out would I like to come along and so I said yes of course and then he said well get down to pier two at 1 30 p.m there's going to be a rib that's taking you across the island say my name and you can come and I jumped onto that boat and then to my left was Sir Martin Sorrell the founder of the world's largest advertising agency group WPP and Sabasidem was this guy.

2:55And at the time I had my own agency and I really would love to sell it to WPP. So we got chatting at the island and it turned out that we both had started our careers at Procter & Gamble. Me in sales and marketing, even in marketing and finance at Gillette. And, you know, we were just chatting generally about business. And he said to me like, Hey Mark, do you ever think about like all the waste that was created by, you know, the brands that we worked on, you know, on mass scale, like all the plastic, all the excessive packaging. And don't you think that, you know, consumer experience could actually be really improved with the product?

3:29A bit like the way that Apple have improved, you know, the way they do things. And that was the spark of the idea. Yeah, completely. We, I mean, that was actually eight years ago. So it took us some time to come to market. You know, we, we spend a lot of time doing consumer research and then finally three years ago we jumped into it yeah and so you guys came up with the idea eight years ago started thinking about it but you launched three four years ago so what happened was uh in between um i sold my business i gave worked um parachuted into some e-commerce companies on behalf of a vc and then it was actually then we started doing research and we found out that every year over four billion toothbrushes are thrown away and end up in land full of notion nathan probably almost every brush you've ever used since you're a child still exists somewhere which is absolutely crazy when you think of like all the waste across all the people who brush their teeth so we thought well let's dig into it further and we researched with thousands of people and found out that well actually here's a good question like do you use an electric toothbrush yes and you've been using it for a while right 10 years yeah long time as i said um right and how often do you use the bluetooth function when you do do you connect to your phone no never no never right do you ever get that horrible gunk on the bottom you know that crusty yet absolutely foul um many people tell us they don't take it when they go traveling because they're bulky the charge iode yeah you have this like charger that only works on your toothbrush and so not only are they not sustainable but all these features that you know people don't enjoy and so we thought lots of people brush their teeth with a product that's unsustainable and an an experience they don't enjoy what if we can make a product that's both more sustainable and more enjoyable to use and that was the that was the foundation of the idea for suri which is short for sustainable rituals yeah love it so talk me through guys like why why why did you guys think you'd be a great pair to start a business together like i don't do many interviews in a group but i'd love to hear from a more personal side like what what was the spark what was kind of like you know let's do this thing together so we we started the idea came up eight years ago and then we we put you know i think sometimes things get in the way when you want to launch things and it took a while it took a lot of research it took a lot of i just needed to be pushed into it right and took one of actually founders courses i was saying earlier six years ago um and so i had a lot of motivation but the time was never really right and then came covid and i had started working on a deck resurfacing the idea trying to get some designs done uh and i bumped into mark in the park because obviously we were in lockdown and we couldn't go around uh and i was desperate to find somebody to join me at the time and i remember playing really hard to get saying hey mark you know we had this idea do you want to bring it to life um you know and i was like i probably don't need somebody to help me but it'd be really great you could join and I and I played really hard to get and I was like you know what he's probably not going to join next day he called me up he's like I'm 100 % in when are we doing this like I'm not working right now this is the perfect time and look for the next sort of whatever I'd say half a year we were on zoom 24 7 uh you know we talked to each other more than we talked to our wives our our zoom cameras were pretty much portals in our house where we were just walking into a room talking we'd walk out get lunch uh and it was intense i mean we we overlooked whether we were the right partnership for sure uh and i and we're happy to share some stories around it we're very different people uh and i think that is our magic today that we made that work but uh definitely when you're on camera 12 hours a day talking to somebody remotely uh it's not easy in the beginning for sure and and like it was actually is it's been like a strength ultimately because we are so so different you know gives a very detailed i'm much more big picture um you know we have different like uh speciality backgrounds but just personality wise we're so different and like being totally honest like you know during those hours like they we would say things to each other and you'd be like that's kind of like i kind of annoyed me the way he said that and then then i'd probably be a little bit prickly and be like oh oh, well, you said this and I'm going to act like that.

7:56And so quite early on, we were like, hmm. It accentuates when you're on Zoom, right? I mean, obviously the founders, the number three reason companies fall apart is founders fall apart, right? Maybe it's number two. And once you're on Zoom, it accentuates. So I think we were fortunate to be in that period that we learned how to deal with it a lot quicker rather than waiting maybe two years to be like, oh, you know, we don't get along on these areas. And we had this thing, you know, we used to call it friday complaining sessions or bitching sessions if i could say that and we would we that's what we started with uh and that was our sort of therapy session where we would fr it started out with friday 10 o 'clock one day mark's like can we just chat about like what's not working between us and i was like what do you mean everything's working of course being like i had a list of things i remember it wasn't like there must be things that like i do that annoy you and gives i no no like everything's all good everything's all good i was like well i'll go first um because my mother like was a was a therapist was a marriage counselor for a long time and so I just thought you know what let's just get this stuff out into the open and it was amazing because I really learned quickly like I would say to Keith hey you said this the other day and like it really like annoyed me because and he was like oh no no like that's not what I meant and I was like what like but I'd attach this meaning to like this thing that Giva said and then that annoyed me And then he was like, oh, no, no, I was I was actually just worried about this.

9:18And and that that was like, oh, wow. OK. And then after I shared a few of mine, he was like, actually, now that I come to think about it. And then, you know, sure enough, you know, we went through it. But it really meant that we cleared the air super quickly. And I think at the end of the day, we want we like most co-founders want the same goal, scale, be profitable, get great success, potentially a liquidation event. But the reality is we all come from very different backgrounds. you know what even if we're from the same country which we're not where we live in multiple places around the world we we have uh different you know styles of working our parents are different uh i mean the cultures that we were raised in and so when you really take a step back you realize people think ultimately differently and they come to the similar they have similar desires and goals but the way they work is different and if you can learn to to respect that and so to say like i get you meant that and you want this but i'm looking at it this way should we consider this then you can you can sort of find a way to slot in your differences to build the sort of super superpower that you want to achieve and i think so many times people overlook that sort of soft skill of making things work and and really it's a trust element like i can come to mark and be like that was terrible i hated the way that meeting ran and i think we should do it differently and i really didn't like it when you said that in the meeting you know uh what do you think i didn't do well how can we do this better yeah and i think it really i can see you guys have that common sense of trust and that common respect and i think that that's that's how speed is built on trust right like like you've got to have that trust so talk me through guys like you say you had this idea eight years ago you came together um eventually launched this product how much can you share how much it cost initial moq like how did you bring it to life because a lot of people i read it in the youtube comments every all the time like i wish nathan would go deeper on how they actually built the product how they actually created it how did they manufacture it what was moq how much did it cost like talk me through those integrate details so i think um a few things one you know scaling a brand with lots of stock which is you know expensive costs money and and it's fair to say like you know we didn't have like a huge huge huge amount of money to start with so um even like with the concept we took it to angel investors and said hey look we've got this great idea we've got this relevant background and we've got this vision for the future we need to raise some some capital And so we did a pre-seed investment round and raised£800 ,000.

11:57And so, you know, that gave us enough money to then be like, okay, we'll place our orders with the factories. We went to, what, 24 different factories? Yeah. And they were all like, that can't be done. Like, what you're saying, the materials, that's not possible. Now, fortunately, I'm sat beside one of the most stubborn, determined people I've ever met. because like i after 25 years i was like maybe this isn't possible like should we just compromise in certain areas um but gave us like determined you'd done the research and and you know just kept going so i think that was such a like when i look back that was one of the most crucial things that you know there was just this like absolute determination that we could do things very very differently than they'd be done before yeah and i would i would just add that And to any entrepreneur out there trying to do something different, the goal is very much to do something that is meaningfully differentiated.

12:51And I'll talk a bit about that. But the reality is when you talk to a factory, that's exactly the opposite of what they want to do. They want to make what they've already made, skin differently. And for them, innovation is efficiency. I can make these models. I can slightly adjust them. And then I can continue to make more margin because I've made them for a while. And that's great. But the market doesn't want that. you know people want to see things that are meaningfully differentiated and i would just sort of dig into and you need to have a strong margin that's that's that's you know at least i would say above 70 and that's what we were targeting um and it's a negotiation and so i would say once you've found the partner that is really willing to work with you you have to be willing to accept to negotiate uh i'm not very good at negotiation mark is is epic at it and i I would say it takes you out of your comfort zone, but in the beginning when you start, you have the worst terms on everything, whether it's with your factory or Shopify or any site.

13:50They're just giving you the worst terms. And it's kind of counterintuitive. You'd think an early stage company would get better terms because they need support. But the reality is until you have scale, everybody gives you the worst sort of like payment terms, the worst sort of variable costs. And so, you know, it's important to start with something that you can work with. But then after three months, negotiating even better prices. After six months, being like, can we get a better payment fee on Shopify? Sorry, Shopify. But like anything, right? And I think that's important because there are clients that are at much higher volumes that are getting significantly better deals than you.

14:23And for your survival, that is critical. Well, one day I would add, though, because, you know, for your audience, like just some couple of people I really admire. I don't know if you are familiar with True Classic. Yeah, of course. Scaled to hundreds of millions of dollars, bootstrapped. And Ryan, who was a former professional poker player, from the very beginning, sat in front of some of the biggest factories and persuaded them to give him, I think, I'm not exactly sure, but I think like 90 or 180 day payment terms, which is what enabled him to do it from the start. And so although he's absolutely right, like, you know, no one wants to do that at first, it's definitely possible.

15:01And some of the best entrepreneurs I've met have thought really upfront about the importance of, you know, payment terms, negotiation, ensuring that you have like breaks, like so that, you know, when you hit this volume, the price is going to come down and you do that all upfront. I really think that's a bit of overlooked advice that I would definitely sort of rethink about if I was to set up other future e-commerce companies. Yeah, I just add on the differentiation because differentiation is, you know, it's vital for success because I, you know, everybody talks about MVPs. The reality is anybody can find a product in Alibaba, reskin it and get some good branding work done for maybe a few thousand pounds, maybe not epic branding work, but some branding work and they can start this out.

15:44So the market has become so much more competitive in almost every category today. And so really, you need to find out how can you meaningfully differentiate your product and find a way that is desirable. And so we did 5 ,000 customer interviews. We didn't have a lot of money in the beginning. And we used SurveyMonkey. You can get like 200 responses for 50 quid quite fast. And we asked, you know, questions about what people wanted. everything around like i hate the fact that my brush doesn't last more than seven days on a charge well ours we last 40 days i hate that it has a gunk build up we have a stainless steel plate under our brush uh that that makes it practical it's not a fake background uh and uh and that stainless steel plate um it's just easy to wipe off so you don't have like gunk that builds up these are little pain points that larger brands were just completely ignoring uh and one thing that that they were focusing on was apps that we found out nobody was using and so we said how can we just make the experience better how can we deliver an exceptional performance because it's kind of table stakes in the category and then as a foundation also how do we push the boundaries in terms of sustainability you know we have plant-based heads we recycle them for free we have a brush that has an aluminum body that is more durable than others um so yeah and the culmination of like it's kind of business 101 you read about this stuff but it's so easy to overlook is like listening to your customer you know like that 40-day battery life is more important you know the travel case the fact that it's slim it's beautiful it's you know it's more sustainable like these were things that customers truly wanted and just by listening to them and developing the product for exactly that that that's why we're now the most highly rated electric toothbrush in the world with a 4.8 out of 5 rating on trust pilot with over 10 000 reviews it's really based on on listening to customers and delivering what they want which i i think you know is so applicable to any great brand with longevity yeah you mentioned something there interesting to me around the validation piece right you did 5 000 customer interview surveys whatnot like how did you do that and how much did it cost and like talk me through that because that's interesting right like not many people would do that so that that is so we we set that up on we set them up on survey monkey we we combine them with qualitative reviews you got to look at the setting also it was covid so it's very hard to do qualitative reviews so it's almost like we had to do it in a park or walking and talking to people and that would we tried to stay away from friends and family which is the first starting point of most you know customer surveys because they're always going to buy us towards it's a great idea uh and so random people we chose you can easily choose the sort of segment of um you know you know how much money they make you know a disposable income uh where they're based and and then we we started with simple concept slides so you can you can create a little concept slide which shows what you're like a rough sketch of your product uh the the less pretty the better because then they're not judging it on the design say what are the key benefits and then start out with like what product do you use how often do you use it uh what do you think of the concept slide what would you pay for this in pricing there's certain there's the the waste sort of test which is sort of four things you want to ask which is at what point do you think this product would be too expensive you never consider it at what point do you think this product would be too cheap you think it's badly made and that gives you sort of two outliers of like cool these are the boundaries i should stay away from and then at what point do you think this product is not too expensive but i need some time to think about it because it's it's a meaningful amount that i'm i'm paying for and then the next one is at what point do you think this would be a good bargain.

19:22And so you get these four curves that get you a really good idea of like, cool, this is the price area I can play in for this concept without even thinking about design and features yet or visual features. And to the exact software, there's multiple ones. We use SurveyMonkey predominantly. And then you just pay a set amount per number of customers. And then we scale that up depending whether we're looking in like the US market, UK market, different ages, et cetera. But using exactly that. The second thing, and I don't recommend this for everybody. We came from Procter & Gamble, so for us, share data was really important.

19:54We wanted to know what was the retail share. So we spent quite a lot of money on that. I mean, I say at the time, I think we spent 5 ,000 pounds on getting share in major developed markets. And we saw this trend that kind of would scare most people, which is that two brands dominate in almost every market. They have a 75 % share. Those two brands, Orbe and Philips. and so it was a bit us uk australia all around the world uh and so we thought well maybe people don't want a new brand if they're really happy with these two brands and so that's when we in the qualitative interviews we really started digging into it and we found this really common thread that that surprised us which is we'd ask people what do you brush with i used uh or electric brush okay you know how much did you pay for i paid 100 quid for it all right how long ago several years ago how often do you use it every day twice a day except when i travel what's the name of the brand ah it's the one that does this or it does this and and here we were thinking you spent quite a lot of money on this product you use it twice a day and you can't tell us the name of the brand that tells us that the loyalty is really through sort of like it was available on shelf rather than i love this brand uh most brands that you use every day that you love you can name and so for us that told us now that wasn't everybody but that was a common thread we saw on a meaningful amount of people that were like wow that means that people don't love these products they're just there and they're using them maybe they're recommended by their dentist yeah that's a good pickup and that's that's your product development shops coming through right that's it exactly yeah and so there we were like cool we really need to make something people love the subtleties that they go wow why didn't why didn't anybody else think of this and also the sound like i'm gonna try and see like they're really loud like we tested with our wives in the beginning like can we have a conversation or at least hear them talk to us like i don't know if you can hear it's not very loud at all you know so just focusing on on some of the subtleties and features like that all right take me back how long did it take obviously when you you know you went to angels um you you spoke to many different factories you obviously did the the whole china tour um from placing that first moq to launch how long did that take too long no from from placing the order i think it was about nine months there were various delays um we wanted to launch sooner but you know there was delays and delays and delays um but what was amazing is the moq was 5 ,000 units and within uh we'd actually we totally sold out before we even shipped the first product so we'd had a pre-sale which it was kind of great but then when we shipped the first product we went back in to pre-sale so far like two months and we sold out again and it was it was um it was an exciting time but uh you know we actually had this pretty big disaster that felt existential in our very first week of shipping.

23:02So it was just one of those early, terrible moments where you just think, we're over, it's done. And the reason was people had been waiting to have their products received. They pre-bought it. And a bunch of those customers were in the U.S. We'd sent an email to everyone saying, hey, we've sent out the product. worked but then two weeks later we had a call from our 3pl one day saying like oh we haven't actually shipped any of the products to the customers in the u.s there's been a problem with the labeling and it just fell in that moment the world was crushed like falling around us i remember distinctly it was just the two of us plus i think it was like 3 000 order that yeah we had already been there's a bit of context we've been as most products we we had said we were going to launch four months before and we were delayed every month people were telling us they were going to get refunds and i think we it was about we're about three people at the time and we were all on just on our on our customer service software gorgeous you know constantly writing back to customers being like we just wanted to let you know there's going to be another month delay sorry about this and we just thought everybody would go for refunds and instead because we were writing them all personally we got emails back being like no problem we're you know like thank you so much for writing me personally and taking the time to explain this to me you know look forward to getting it and i think then we always knew that customer experience was important i think that was a sort of foundational moment where we're like look if we treat our customers well and we really care about them and treat them like people and we're constantly reaching out to them and talking to them that is that is something that will that will differentiate our business from our competitors which they're not doing today so that was a moment where i mean it was painful in the sense that we were answering emails 24 7 uh but it did uh it got us over the line and it's become a foundational sort of value for us yeah and look that's what you have to do like in you know doing things that don't scale right that's that's grassroots early days getting close to the customer the closer you are to the customer the better the products so um you kind of skipped over something that i think a lot of people's ears would perk around is like you sold basically all your 5 ,000 units in the first day of launch, right?

25:16How did you do that? Like talk us through like, that's not easy, right? Like what did you guys do there? Talk us through what was some key decision, decisions that you made to make the product, like besides creating an epic product, you know, you left no stone unturned around recyclable heads, sonic power, UV cleaning, like all these cool things. The product was truly unique in its kind, but what did you do from a marketing perspective to to sell out your product and just just drive so much so one thing that i didn't mention on product validation that we did when we got past sort of the surveys and we got initial concepts we started doing landing pages uh to to see if people would sign up to emails we used meta predominantly um i had worked at a few startups before where i had seen how hard it was to scale with Meta because Meta can just the CPAs can be quite high so I knew a little bit on how to use Meta and we basically did ads to landing pages to see which elements people liked more particularly from a communication point of view so that when it came time to launch we knew that sustainability was really important but it couldn't be the only feature we were driving in our ads and so we had pre-launch ads we thought really hard about going into Kickstarter which a lot of people do for hardware but we we knew we wanted to to move on really quickly we'd take an angel investment uh and become an e-commerce store so we did our pre-launch on shopify uh and we built our our site ready to go and it was just a pre-launch page all there which in hindsight made us not do two things you know because you have to learn all about kickstarter and build kickstarter's page and you have to learn about shopify and it's just a bit of stubble work so that worked out really well for us um most of it you know i really want to say this there's a lot of tips around at least at the time there was so much around referral marketing viral marketing creating people and and i thought that was going to it wasn't working when we started doing some of the sort of viral sharing and referrals and instead because of the incentives we were getting the wrong customers we were getting people who just wanted a discount and free products rather than actually really sharing.

27:30They'd found ways to game the system. And I spoke to a friend of mine who worked at Meta. And he didn't, but he did a time working on brands that were scaling. I said, listen, what are your sort of growth tactics when I don't have a lot of money? Like, how are we going to really scale this company? And he said, Keith, you've got to nail ads. He's like, it is, if it adds an influencers, I would add as well later on. But he's like, it's one or the other. You need to nail a channel that scales and reaches a lot of people. uh and so we spent a lot of time really sort of finding the the storytelling elements of our pre-sale ads that would really drive a pre-sale and then obviously a healthy discount helps so i think there's another element uh which was really important and you i think we also follow as well as founder there's a guy nick sharmer who does a lot of tips on d2c and yeah he uh uh i'm sure i read in one of his emails about you know trust and this element of like you're launching a new brand and so you know if you think from a consumer's perspective they're they're looking at spending money and it's like how can you reassure people and so you know we have a hundred day money back guarantee so that that was one element but very early on we had a big stroke of luck where um we sent our product to uh some different journalists and one of them who is you know uh they they write reviews of the best electric toothbrushes so if you type best electric toothbrush into google um they were the number one search in the uk and they they said this is the best toothbrush like this is coming soon and like that is gonna be great and so that we were able then to use that legitimacy and to borrow the trust from from that brand um to show like hey look this is this is a real thing and to try and reassure people and even i would say in the first year a lot of people like oh i'm not i wasn't sure if this is you know like going to be good and so i think just building that trust with the consumer and sort of validating it through you know real life reviews or or people with authority who also believe in a product and was really crucial just to build on that like early days you know we obviously the ads were important but i i kind of lost went over this a little too fast pr was really important to what mark was saying we were constantly reaching out to journalists trying to get sort of free awareness we applied to awards left right and center i think one of the moments for us that that was really validating was we we won 250 000 uh pounds from the sunday times uh for their earth fund and that was just like in our pre-launch stage they're like here's 250 000 free advertising which you know i would say that that really we were then able to put all these like full-page spread prints in in the sunday times which had a highly affluent sort of readership and so after that we must we i think 20 of our time was just applying to awards and trying to get journalists to write about us uh or maybe even more in the beginning the great thing about it as well is that it's like very low cost do you know what i mean like it's it's time it's it's time but like you know when when you're at the start and you're being scrappy you know it's like anything like that has like such a high reward ratio for investment yeah i was gonna say it's interesting um the prps like interview some founders and it's been so game-changing for them but then you hear you know other founders didn't don't don't really rely on those kind of traditional media channels.

31:06But yeah, that's a great insight. So I'm curious around what happened next. So you've built this incredible product, extreme demand. This was only three years ago, right? Like three years ago, guys, as well, Facebook introduced something called iOS 14. so for so for a lot of us old school been in the game a while paid you know pay to play marketers founders whatnot that was not the easiest time to navigate um so you guys have had tremendous growth it sounds like you've you've still built a really large channel through paid media um what happened next? Well, just on iOS 14, it was definitely painful for us too, I would just add.

32:02And, you know, we were spending money on Facebook and the dashboard was saying we were making no sales, which the perfect, like we didn't have very much money, but we were getting sales. And I was like, I don't know these customers. So where are they coming from? They must be, we must be getting through Facebook. So the tracking was totally off, but we're like, look, if we're spending money, we're making money, then let's just forget what the dashboard, which sounds ridiculous, but we were just looking at total numbers. I spent this, I made this. And so that worked out really well not to look at the dashboards and the CPAs at that point in time because the tracking just wasn't making sense.

32:33And it's gotten better now, but I'd still say with AI audiences, ASC and Pmax on Google, but it's still not perfect to back in the day when you had really good tracking. To your question, what's driven the growth? And I think where we're really lucky is when people try the product they don't they don't like it they love it like if like you know we have these 10 000 reviews the 4.805 rating but you know i would ask anyone you know if you're looking at setting up your own business and you want to know why suri has grown so quickly like go and read those reviews because you have people writing the following things and you know you can see it really clearly like i've never written a review before but oh my goodness i think i love my toothbrush like i you know i'm 50 years old and i've never enjoyed brushing my teeth now i look forward to i'm brushing my teeth four times a day because i enjoy it so much and like look we you know we we love the brand but like there are people who really love it and and the way they describe it and like the way it's changed their life is it sounds kind of crazy but like it truly is like you know i love brushing my teeth have a look and holy crap i've never said that before like these are real reviews and so we obviously have negative reviews too like our package didn't arrive uh you know i dropped it and it broke and or some people you know it's just not for them but like now a really decent portion of our business comes from an excuse the pun word of mouth and so you know when when we talk about like you know what's helped drive it so like you know, ads drive awareness to get some initial sales.

34:15But those people then become such advocates that they're telling their friends, their family. And then those people also love it. And you can see then how it kind of grows. And then you combine that with an enormous market. Everyone brushes their teeth and you can see where a lot of that growth has come from. I mean, and then just in terms of our journey, you know, we started out really lean. We were three people. And then in the first year, I think we were five or seven. We did about, I guess, two million sales. And then we went on to do 10 million and then 30 million. We're now 36 people. For us, it was really important to try and maintain profitability because I think gone are the days when you can do this and just drive sales and lose lots of money.

35:01Nobody wants to support those businesses anymore. And valuations have gotten lower, so you can't go and raise tons of money. so and it doesn't make sense probably also to like that that whole model i think was a model maybe that maybe wasn't a proven there's a few winners and very many losers and i think today it's much more about spreading it even like how do we make sustainable businesses that that are just healthy our name is sustainable rituals and we just did not like buy into this idea of just like raise lots of money lose lots of money and one day things will work out it's like to be sustainable you need to be profitable right you can't you can't be sustainable if you're not profitable um and so that's been a key focus from day one yeah yeah i look it's funny how fast the market changed right like post that covert piece things really changed everyone thought it would last forever i was guilty of it as well and uh yeah i think things really changed fast and now it's yeah that's that's what's definitely in vogue in the business world is uh you know staying profitable having a profitable business it's it is harder though to uh you know grow and grow profit at the same time but um it sounds like you guys have been able to do that uh you mentioned you know where like do you when so it sounds you're able to talk about like you said year three at 36 where do you think you guys will where you're forecasting for year four a lot a lot ask us at the end of the year um so we have um we have some i mean we can't share too much now but we have some really genuinely game-changing exciting things and and it's not one it's like three different uh very significant uh innovations innovations and and new news that's coming and that that could be a real game changer i think for the size of business yeah okay interesting so you guys also have a pretty strong retail push as well you guys are in amazon self fridges uh goop why why not just stay d2c talk us through that strategy so yeah sure so um we we are we're customer obsessed right everything we do is for the customer and the truth is the customer they they love to shop on amazon sometimes they're in boots boots is in the uk that sells 35 of all electric toothbrushes that are sold in uk are through boots and it's somewhere that people go you know every week every month and has got like a great reputation for being you know great health and wellness beauty retailer we're super lucky that um uh gwyneth paltrow's company goop you know picked us up and you know they absolutely love the brush and you know we became the top selling product there actually on amazon we were very lucky to be invited to join their sustainability accelerator so we were actually head our office was in the european headquarters of amazon for the first year so they incubated us and gave us a ton of support it's pretty amazing and i'm like on it it's one of the proudest things right now that for the last i think 10 weeks we've been the number one best-selling sonic toothbrush on on amazon which is about 40 percent of the market so for us like we don't think of a company as a channel there's a lot of brands before who like oh we're a d2c brand and it's like no like d2c is a channel and a brand is is just a brand and like how people want to shop and where people want to shop we want to be available at the point at which they're making their decision so that necessitates that you know we have a d2c business an Amazon business, but also a retail business.

38:41And I would just add that for people starting businesses, early stage, we started DTC only. Retail, obviously, they didn't take us. We wrote to them consistently, like, we don't know who you are, go away. Of course, Mark says I'm stubborn, but he is persistent also, and he didn't take no for an answer. So he found every, but he's very charming at the same time. So whether it's texting, any way you get in. So the good thing about that is DTC, as a starting channel, we were able to grow awareness through Meta. and then when we got to a certain point then we turned on amazon and then people shopped there because maybe it was more convenient for them and then by that point retail we're like when can we list you know let's talk again and so when you have enough and you don't want to go into retail without a certain level of awareness because then they'll just sit on shelf and be like i've never heard of that brand i'm not going to buy it uh but you can use very much so dtc media channels to drive awareness for your offline retail channels and and the other thing is we also looked at retail from a marketing point of view so we went into some specialty stores or one very premium store um era one in la is it's kind of probably the most premium retailer they have about 11 stores in la most premium retailer uh that celebrities shop from consistently um we went to them early on and that has been a great marketing awareness channel you know people obviously buy a lot of products from there but if they haven't they'll be you know they'll recognize us it boosts awareness and then maybe they'll buy it from somewhere else or or there and we have these beautiful displays in air on and i don't think it's a coincidence that a few of the kardashian family posted about us because their local grocery store is the air one in calabasas um and so you know we kind of started building relationship that way but uh i think there's a guy i follow on linkedin i think i can't remember who it is but i think he's the CEO of chubbies or something but he just looks mathematically like if you look at the number of people who are purchasing uh products and where they purchase you know e-commerce like in different categories obviously but in you know in our category the vast majority of people around the world buy their electric toothbrushes in retail not online and so if you sort of think to yourself i'm just going to focus in this area like by all means you can build a great business but you're going to miss you know this this like massive portion of consumers who want to buy it in a retail environment so i think to think about like an omni-channel strategy is really just to think about a shopper strategy like what does a shopper do and how do they want to purchase things yeah and i want to i want to ask something really interesting um about suri that i recognize fast company named you guys one of the most innovative brands in the world how did you find out about that like how like what was that recognition like why do you think that is that was we came second to walmart in fact the the ceremonies in new york uh among equals of course yeah um so uh we're hoping to go to the top spot next time but no like again this is so cheesy this i'm not a cool guy right so i like i'm not going to even pretend to be cool like we're huge nathan chan fans we're huge founder fans and we have been from before we set up surrey yeah i was a training uh or a course early on i was saying that and that and i was saying earlier that there's a lot of insights that i think helped us uh go after this product category but like probably like a lot of your listeners, like we're like, we want to set up a business.

42:12We want to be successful. Like what would our dream be? And one of them as well as fast company, like, you know, looking at the most innovative companies, like I would scour that list and, you know, be like, wow, imagine one day, like, you know, like really being in amongst these, these other companies. And so before we even set up a business, like the business, we wrote down a list of, wouldn't it be great if we could do this and that? And, and it's bizarre because, you know, fast company, most innovative list would definitely be one of them you know being on the founder podcast would have been one of them and it's just amazing like now that i look back on i wish i'd written other things like you know me yeah because they keep coming through right yeah they keep coming true so i'm like i probably should have like gone a bit more ambitious but another one just we got this week was uh there's this this very famous list in the uk about uh the top 100 best companies to work for like you know in terms of like culture and environment um and that was that was fun and listen and you know we're on that list now and it just it's amazing um how even just like thinking about these things in advance like this like visualization this kind of like intent of like this is where we want to go writing it down how these things are coming true you know like even the fact that we're having this conversation right now at some level we discussed what like five six years ago yeah it's crazy and it's really impressive right like the speed in which you guys are growing the business and i think a lot of it comes down to like the product the execution the brand you've done such a fantastic job and i think you've spent the time right like you like not many people go through 5 000 customer interviews or you know customer data points right um and there is a common thread that i see among super successful founders that we interview, they spend the time getting the product right and really nailing the product.

44:08And then they nail the branding and the packaging. And then obviously the marketing as well, but the marketing becomes so much easier if you've got product market fit. And that's, I think what a lot of founders tend to skip over. They've got the idea, they want to launch it and they don't spend enough time on really thinking about the problem that they're solving and how to really differentiate in the marketplace and uh it's tough you know that's why founder exists right like we connect you with some of the greatest entrepreneurs of our generation either through you know free content podcast or our education platforms and all sorts of things but like it's not easy right no i mean there's a lot of i mean we've we've been fortunate to talk about the good moments and and our on our wish list coming through but there are definitely lows and i would i would just add and you know a lot of work uh you know a lot of sacrifices made uh we both have young kids and mark said he's not cool but we have no personal life like we don't we don't get i mean we get to go out to the occasional business event i think but like friends wise like yeah we i'm terrible on what's up like terrible getting back to people terrible on email but like i would say like we really enjoy it right so these are these are trade-offs that we made that we massively enjoy um but it's hard hardware's hard i wish i there's so many things i wish i could tell myself when we were starting out like launching a product that is physical is very hard compared to well everything's hard but you know you have the capital you have products you constantly have to evolve the product and constantly make it better behind the scenes and not tell people about it because things need to change and and you don't get it right in the first batch or the second or the third uh so that that is that is definitely um something that i wish i i knew when i started maybe better i didn't know right because you have you're just going to be continually learning failing and learning at the same time the the thing you said though nathan is like i i think it's been probably my biggest lesson i had i had a business before this and it felt every single day like i was pushing a rock up a hill I fought for every single pound of profit in that business.

46:22You know, it was just like at no point did it get easier. Whereas this time, because we did that upfront research and because it was really based on genuine consumer insights within a very large category, that product market fit just totally changes the game, as you said. And getting that product right, that customer experience right, is so fundamental. And I think often I meet other entrepreneurs and I think, wow, you are such a better business person than I am. But they might be working with an undifferentiated product or in a category that really has no growth or requires a lot of like expensive education.

47:02And it's just so much harder than if you find, you know, like a large problem and solve it with a great solution and then bring that to market. Yeah, I agree. talk to me around kind of like what are some other mindset shifts or things that you think founders need to know that is not talked about enough when it comes to starting or even just scaling an e-com brand at the speed in which you guys are growing uh yeah i mean i would say like one thing for me uh is don't don't be a perfectionist in the beginning uh like we were so nervous about our branding in the beginning uh you know now we're very happy with it but we it wasn't perfect and if you go onto our instagram we've left all those posts early on so you can really see how we've evolved but we were you know in the beginning you you really want to create it's your baby you want to create something perfect and sometimes you really over you you waste stress on perfection uh on certain elements i now it's it's we're saying that the product needs to be perfect right but what i'm saying is like as a founder you're constantly going the 110 and 10%.

48:11And sometimes you need to accept that things will evolve over time. And so you're going to make, give it your best effort now, but you've got to be continually willing to evolve it. And I think branding is a good example of that. So we were constantly evolving our branding in the beginning, because sometimes you might need to hire the right branding person and you can't at the start, you know, so you have to wait until you can evolve things. So accepting imperfection on, on branding, I would say is, is something that, that I would encourage, you know, that not everything is going to be perfect get it but get it right but i think the key point there is don't just accept it accept that you're going to continually improve it and and that's the goal like don't don't say well it's not perfect but it's good enough be like tomorrow i'm going to make it better next week even better but i'm just going to do what i can do and keep improving for my side as well like i i think there's like some solid foundational truths which if you follow as like an early stage founder, like it's just going to set you in great step.

49:10There's a guy called Drew Sinoki, who again on LinkedIn, he's turned around these massive e-commerce companies and now he runs, I think, Postpilot. But like the following is true in e-commerce, like try and have as high a gross margin as possible. If you can start your brand and it's got, you know, 70s, 80s, high gross margin, like that's going to be fundamentally useful. two if you have a small and or light product that's really good from like a shipping posting packaging storage like it is just such a fundamental truth um and like the the best example i can think of this is there's a brand in the uk called lounge and i've read the interview as the husband wife partnership i think they were boyfriend girlfriend at the time and they took that same advice and they're like what can we do and they made women's underwear right so you think about that stuff it's it's so like the stuff they produce is very small super light and it's unbelievable margins you know what i mean it's like this like bit of fabric this size uh but huge margins and they have scaled this company profitably into the hundreds of millions and you know again it's sort of for an e-commerce as founder, if you can find something that's like small, light, durable, doesn't go out of date, has great margins, and is based on like a fake, you know, there's a big addressable market, and you've got a differentiated product.

50:39I think if you get those fundamentals right from the beginning, you make your whole life easier in the long run. The one other sort of like controversial thing that I really want to share is that early on when we were starting, as a founder in general, you're constantly seeking advice like you're constantly looking to people who've done it you're constantly looking to your investors you're seeking what what do you guys think we should do and you're you're you're ingesting that and sometimes you're taking it personally if they're not happy with something and i would say one of the best i asked an early stage investor who passed on us i said what do you think of the product what do you think of the concept like would you invest and and he was like what do you mean what i think of the concept i said what do you think the concept and he was like you don't want my opinion i'm just an investor what you want is your consumer's opinion and if your consumer likes it they'll reward you with a share of wallet but like me telling you what i think like i'm a millionaire like i'm probably not your customer like ask your customers don't ask me what they think and i was like you're totally right and i was at a stage when i had a lot of people sharing suggestions and feedback and i was trying to ingest it all with mario's like what should we do this should we not and the reality is sometimes there's there's a lot of there's a level of advice that becomes noise and so seek the advice you need but always be willing to sort of take what you want and leave what you don't right because you don't need to take something that you don't think will work on your business and and maybe your customers haven't told you about so always be willing to sort of leave what you don't need at the door yeah i agree with that you got to be careful right like i i often talk about this thing called situational stage advice like I never forget a mentor of mine I used to you know love Gary Vee and he used to say you know he responds to every single Instagram comment and I said to my mentor of mine oh like you need I need to build a stronger relationship with our community at founder we need to respond responding to everyone you know thousands and thousands of comments every week on our Instagram and he's like he just laughed and he's like Nathan the reason that Gary Vee has the time to do that is because he has a hundred million dollar a year company and he has you know 500 plus employees like it's not relevant to you and I think it's so easy you know to to speak to somebody or see something online and then go oh that means that's what I have to do and it you like you said you've got to take what's relevant to you and discard the rest completely 100 love that example yeah okay so look we have to work towards wrapping up uh this has been a awesome interview you guys have been really candid and open around what it takes to build like a super fast growing company you guys must be you know one of the fastest growing brands in the uk right like like like it's insane growth um i'm curious if you could give your 25 year old selves one piece of advice what would it be you should set up suri right now and do this before you have kids and like just start sooner like it like i wish we'd had the sort of concept and and wherewithal to do it that would be my advice probably that being said you know like going through the journey that we went uh from 25 to when we set up the business has actually probably been foundational truthfully you know it's like like would i be the same person that i was like starting surrey now if I hadn't gone to like the ups and downs of my previous company, probably not.

54:01So I guess that's. I totally agree with that. I would say, I mean, not to be cheated, I say don't stop being curious. You know, my younger self, I wanted to be an entrepreneur since I was 10 years old. And I never really took that path. I worked at big corporate companies. I was worried I was getting too old to be an entrepreneur. I, you know, I moved to a large, a few other large companies. And then finally, I applied to a lot of startups and they said, oh, you're overqualified and you're overpaid. They're right about the overpaid part, not the overqualified part. I can roll up my sleeves and do anything.

54:34And I just and I and then I moved to a venture company where I got firsthand experience on companies that were not growing as well and trying to turn around. And I would say that path looking back now is in the perfect path for us to set up Suri because I learned about companies that weren't doing well. I learned the product market fit wasn't good. I learned the fundamentals of like marketing and finance at a larger stage company, which now as we move bigger and we need more, we get bigger and need more processes, those skills really come into play. And so I would say chill out, be curious, continue to be curious, because like there's always, I had this like burning desire of like, why have I not done it now?

55:09When am I going to do it? We talked about the idea eight years ago. What's going on? So, yeah, I think things work out sometimes when you're, when you remain, you keep to stick true to your values. I agree. and I've got one last question for you both. What's one question that you wanted me to ask you that perhaps I haven't? My question was that I wanted you to ask me was like, what is the most important thing you would tell any founder about starting a business? And my answer would be enjoy the journey because you are going to have down times that are just painful to get through and you're just going to get through them and then you're going to have the most epic up times.

55:46and I was maybe superstitious. I just didn't want to celebrate the wins even when they're small or big. And early on, Mark was like, we're never going to enjoy this journey if we aren't like absolutely celebrating at our hardest at any moment possible. And he's great at like bringing our team on on having just an amazing culture, but that is so true. And we've done that. And I was like, you're right. I'm just going to sell the whole way through and just be like really modest about it. So I would say like enjoying the journey, any moment to celebrate is an epic moment to celebrate take it and you know celebrate even harder because those down times are really hard for any founder and there's a lot of mental sort of struggle that you go through and and it's important to have that balance and to get out of that i mean i listened to a lot of uh podcasts and you know i know that's a common theme that you you that is shared on yours and also the founder of shop by tobias lucas says like he you know he's he's he's his company has done so well it's on a stock market right and he's he's well from any struggles now but he says i still get those low moments he's like i've just learned to minimize them to five minutes and then i'm moving on to the next thing so i think it never goes away as a founder so you've just got to learn to celebrate the highs and pull yourself out of the low moments when they come and i'll tell you where that came from because it this is like you're actually so right it's so fundamental in my last business everything that i was built towards was like uh the exit right and i like I was so focused on the exit and it meant everything to me and my identity and my ego and my value as a person was like, how much do I exit for?

57:18Like, can I achieve it, et cetera, to the detriment of the journey. And it's such a cliche. And like, you know, I'd obviously heard many people be like, it's about the journey. It's not about the destination. And I was like, yeah, yeah, whatever. You can say that because you've already got your millions, whatever. But like, like at the end, when I exited my last company, I had like real burnout to the point of just like existential, like, what was this all for? Like, why have I done this? And it was in my lowest moment post exit that I was like, I will never do that again. Because if you just look at like the amount of time, like, you know, we've been doing this now three years.

57:55I genuinely can say like it's just been the best three years of my life because I'm so much more present. and then just trying to enjoy the journey. And because of that, no matter what happens at the end, if we have this incredible exit or if we don't, I can genuinely say there is not a single thing I would do differently in terms of how I've spent those three years. And if I can live my life for the rest of time, just being like enjoying each day, enjoying each week, obviously there's highs and lows, but really just like there's nothing I'd rather be doing. And that for me is now success. And I think I'm so glad we get to share that together.

58:31yeah that's a that's a really amazing thing to share so and i agree it's easy to forget though right it's easy it's it's not it's not easy to remember it's easy to get because you just caught up right it's like this crazy thing but guys thank you so much for your time i really appreciate it it was really really valuable for all of our listeners and i look forward to continue to watch the journey from afar as you really scale this incredible brand thank you thank you so much Alright, so if you love this episode, make sure to check out my interview with Alex Homozi on how he scales companies from zero straight to$2 million a month less than a year.