#10 - Using $1k to Build $100M Deodorant Business

at some point we tried to raise more money and you know the investor was like the entire natural deodorant industry is something like thirty million dollars a year so why would anyone be interested in investing in a category that only has thirty million dollar a year run rates and i was like if the natural deodorant owner industry is thirty million dollars a year we're the entire natural dealer in we're doing thirty million dollars a year at this point okay i gotta say this was my favorite episode of the podcast what you're about to hear is a episode i just recorded with mo ali he is the founder of native deodorant which is a natural deodorant brand it's basically a twelve dollar stick a deodorant my wife just bought it she doesn't know that i know boys she bought it because she didn't wanna use deodorant that had aluminum in it or para all kinds of funky chemicals that you see on the back of a deodorant stick so this is the story of how he started it from his brother's dining room table essentially where he was doing the packaging he was doing the sales the marketing the customer service as a one man show for a very very long time and over over two and a half years he built this company raising very very little money mostly because investors were kinda just laughing him out of the room like okay you're starting a deodorant company like what is that and so he sold it two and a half years later to pro and gamble for a hundred million dollars i like this episode not just because the story is great and the tactics that he shared are actually quite insightful but because he's a very entertaining guy very charismatic in fact there's a portion at the end of the episode where he is talking about how some people who didn't believe in him and he named some names that we had to bleep out so we we left the story in but we had to bleep out the name which is a a podcast first but i think you guys gonna love this episode let me know what you think as always you can tweet at me i'm at sean p or email me p dot sean at g mail dot com love to hear from you guys alright enjoy this episode native deodorant you build a deodorant brand of all things yeah you build it from scratch from a dining room table you build a actually good enough business where pro and gamble one of the biggest companies in the world looks at it makes an acquisition and buys native deodorant for a hundred million dollars so that's the end but we're gonna rewind to the beginning the beginning is what set the scene so where are you when you have the idea for native deodorant so i'm in new york city running another e commerce business i'm buying like ax deodorant from a duane reed at fourteenth and third in new york city you know i've i've lived in the same place for like four years and so i'm really familiar with this place i go by it i'm waiting in line i flip over my d end and i can't pronounce a single ingredient on the back of that thing other than the word aluminum and you know i i've been seeing this problem for the last four years since i've been buying the deodorant room from duane reed and you know i'm an attorney i i'm not a dumb guy i i know how to read english and i cannot pronounce a single one of these words and so i'm like if this product is gonna stay on my body all day every day you know i put it on right after i get out of the shower it's on my body for twenty three hours and forty five minutes and it'll be on my body for twenty three hours and forty five minutes for the next sixty years i should at least be able to pronounce some of the ingredients in this thing and so that's really where the problem starts and then my sister gets pregnant and you know she's telling me how she's using dove and she's like i'm really scared of dove because i'm about to start breastfeeding and what happens with the ingredients in my dove and do they like get into you know my baby as a result of me using this anti and so i'm like okay now this is not a hair on fire problem but a problem large enough for me solve right that's that's how native starts yeah so my wife is currently eight months pregnant and she started using native and she was like yeah just bought this like twelve dollar deodorant and and i was like is it native and she's was like yeah i was like i'm gonna about to have on the body and then she was like i was why did you choose to buy it and she was saying the same thing like oh you know because of the baby i'm like have a heightened awareness around what am i putting on my body and in my body and she was like it's para and free and i i was like what's a pair i what is your pair i actually don't even know like the the real thing that we shoot for is like we're aluminum para and ph free aluminum is probably the largest thing that we're like people are concerned about when it comes to the deodorant category and what it does is aluminum acts as like a plug to block your sweat glands from ex screening sweat i see and so if you think of your sweat glands as like a duct aluminum acts as a plug and as a result you can't sweat and and that's why when you use it a aluminum based product it's called an anti per sprint it's stops you from per aspiring and the way i always like it it is look if you could take a pill to make you stop urinating would you take that pill doesn't that sound so weird like if your body is trying to expel a fluid from itself shouldn't you let it i'm like yeah okay i wanna go to the bathroom like there's a bodily need i don't wanna take a pill to stop going to the bathroom i just wanna go and pee and so that's the way i thought about sweating i was like look if your body wants to sweat because it's really hot let it sweat let the deodorant sort of absorb the sweat and block odor but we don't need to prevent it from wedding and so that that was like the genesis of like okay look we think we can create a deodorant that does the job of an anti per sprint the other way i thought about it was look like a lot of us work in office environments where we commute in a car we get to an office we sit at a desk and work at a computer and you know using an anti person every day we're generally not in environment we're gonna be sweating a ton so it's like taking an advil in the morning when all you need is glass of water you're like dehydrated and so you what you should be doing is drinking a glass of water but instead you're like let me take an advil to cure my dehydration just take the glass of water it's a lot simpler and safer right and and so that's the way i liken using native to an anti person i was like look you're probably working in an office job or a lot of a lot of our customers are working in office jobs you don't necessarily need all the effects of an anti per sprint and aluminum free deodorant and do the job for you and so you say we but at the beginning it was just you correct that's right so we launched the company in july twenty fifteen i remember i bought the domain name on my birthday in july twenty fifteen why the name native right why that domain yeah sure i really liked what it stood for which was like we wanted to use ingredients that were like native to the earth like we weren't trying to say hey this is owned by native americans and we weren't trying to say we're a natural product and we'll never use an artificial ingredient because i don't think that that's necessarily the case what we wanted to say is look look we wanna use ingredients that are native to the earth and we wanna make those ingredients part of our deodorant rent as opposed to using ingredients that nobody can pronounce and so that was the genesis of the name bought the name in july twenty fifteen basically twelve days later launch the business i was like you know i i think we can launch this business really quickly and see if it works but what you what do you being launched the business because i how do you even have deodorant yeah if i wanted to launch a deodorant brand i'd be like okay i guess i need to manufacture something deodorant or buy some up you know how did you do something twelve days later yeah great question so launch the website had zero deodorant in stock was speaking to a couple manufacturers about using a our deodorant formula and having them make it but initially i was like look i don't think this business will work out like are people gonna buy a deodorant online generally they're buying it duane reed and walmart and targets so i was like we'll launch it and we'll see what happens and so we had contacted some manufacturers particularly like small mom and pop ones and our first mom and pop manufacturer was basically making the deodorant out of like their hobby room in their house right somewhere in southern california i've launched the product on product hunt and and so day one i i look you know it's late july i put it on product hunt product hunt has multiple pages and i don't even realize that we're on page two of product hunt we get one sale and i'm like okay this business is over we forget about like i'm not gonna do all this hard work to sell twelve dollars of deodorant every day i can open up a lemonade like i'm thirty years old and i'm basically have a revenue of twelve dollars a day right so you you literally launched like without a bang that's right opposite of a good launch yeah exactly opposite of a good launch that one sale had zero product in inventory i was gonna email the guy and basically be like look we were trying this out it didn't work out we're gonna refund your order have a nice life right and then what happens is i'm working out of this c working space called the founders dojo and one of my friends in that c working space is like hey i know an employee product hunt and what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna have him try and put you on the first page of product hunt again tomorrow and usually you're not allowed to do that you're not allowed to be on product hunt two days in a row but he got me an exception and i'm on the first page of product hunt the day after i was on the second page and what was the little tagline at that time because i know that for businesses the pitch evolves like right now when you describe data it was like really compelling i loved it made sense to me it was kind of inspiring yeah i should use products like that but i know at the beginning our pitches like kinda sucked or are they you know over to sucked less yeah yeah oh was terrible what was it at the time of i think it was like invest in yourself i'm not even sure it was like and you know we got some financial product yeah exactly and we got a photo like you know we didn't take any photos at the time because we didn't have any products so we got some guide like three d render the image of what a native deodorant bar would look like and like that's the image that we have associated with product hunt on our website we have a hero image and the hero image is just a bathroom it doesn't even have a photo of native deodorant on it because no native deodorant exists at this point but on that second day we get like fifty sales and i'm like you know what maybe this can be a real business right so as a result now we have like fifty one sales we got fifty sales day two one sale day one we contact our manufacturer and we're like okay we're gonna buy a hundred of these things right ship them over we have a tangled history with the guest that you're gonna talk about so you you mentioned product out we had ryan hoover on the podcast yeah you mentioned founders dojo i think earlier when we were talking sam was on the podcast earlier and your brother was the first episode of the podcast actually told us day the highest highest sort of listened to podcast good for yet and so he said that he said to hold the story on the podcast which was that at some point you guys were like ordering deodorant off at etsy and like you're just testing deodorant you were like put one under one arm the other under the other arm and like go run around the block and see which one work better was he full shit or was this real no that was definitely real we were like before i launched native i was like okay you know what i want a natural deodorant that works not so does my sister because she's pregnant so i started testing every deodorant i could find i tested like the tom's mains of the world the sc of the world the you know the etsy deodorant of the world and i was just like look these products aren't cutting it i'm not sure if it's my personal body chemistry or what it is but yeah there we were testing natural deodorant left and right from etsy and from every store you could possibly imagine gotcha so you ordered those that first batch order that first batch fifty customers yeah i'm living out of like selma i i i moved to california like you know during that time period basically moved to california living out of my brother's apartment order a hundred units start packing amount of dining room table so i get like line boxes delivered to the house i get a bunch of crinkle paper delivered to the house what's wonderful is my brother is the messi person in the world when i moved in he had a birthday cake from like three birthdays ago still in his refrigerator i moved in and i'm like i i can't live like this you're you're too much of a pig till like i i can't live like this and then i was like you know what this is perfect because i've got all this crinkle paper and all these shipping boxes and all this stuff floating around here and it's making a huge mess and my brother's the only person in the world that we would care yeah he he doesn't even notice the mess because he's just like living in a side himself and so we're shipping these boxes out we ship sixty out and then sales start dropping because you know we're off a product ton and i'm like okay and my last business we had built the entire business on p r i start contacting all these like reporters and i'm like hey do you wanna write about native and they're like no they said deodorant let's let's take a chill pill over here right this isn't that compelling and this is in twenty fifteen you know like today there's a new natural deodorant at the launches every day in twenty fifteen we're basically one of the few guys out there and so we start like we start running a bunch of google ads and you know we haven't fund so it's all my own money i spent five how much money yes it sounds like you're gonna answer that how much money did you decide like i'll put into my kinda testing and figuring out if this is real budget yeah i'm the cheapest person in the world so i probably spent like a grand launching the business so the first five hundred dollars was to buy products and the next five hundred dollars is to like buy google ads and i'm buying google ads and i spent five hundred dollars and i get like a hundred dollars in sales and i'm like this is not working out well i found a way to yeah burn money yeah exactly and the this is the like my mom would be so upset at me right now she'd be like go quit this business tomorrow and so i'm like okay google ads are working so we start advertising on facebook and like pretty clearly we get some product market fit on facebook facebook ads start going well and like what it happens is i created this excel spreadsheet where every day i tracked every single ad i had the click through rate the you know cpa the return on investment and i started doing that day starting you know probably august twenty fifteen or maybe september twenty fifteen and like that's really how i started getting good at facebook ads i was tracking every single ad we ran on a daily basis and i'm a guess you're now you know company got acquired company's much larger lots of people in the company do you still get hands on with the facebook ads definitely you're saying to yeah absolutely yeah i mean that like like that's that was our bread and butter and i i really enjoyed it and it's something i'm good at and it's not just a job for me it's something i really enjoy fact i was at facebook's headquarters like two days ago talking about facebook ads with a bunch of their execs and it's great like to understand what products that they're launching and how they're thinking about the business it's insane but in any case so so we're like running these facebook ads we see a ton of product market fit and then our manufacturer you know scales from a hundred a hundred units a week to about five hundred units a week she calls me up and she's like boys this is a fantastic business i used to be selling you know products at a farmer's market and now i'm making five hundred dealers for you a week you know they're charging me about six dollars a unit so it's pretty expensive right and i'm like okay great i'm glad this is working for you and she's like we're gonna scale this business we're both gonna like hit home runs with this business and i like right great this is like i really appreciate your commitment to this two days later she calls me and she's like my son is sick i'm out like forget it i'm not making any more deodorant it and i was like are you kidding me we had a conversation forty eight hours ago when you were in forty eight hours later you're out and so that was really jarring and i'm like okay you know what we're selling five hundred units of deal in a week which is you know a few grand in revenue and it appears to be working well but like it's a few grand of revenue you're out how do i replace you don't really wanna be making these deodorant into my apartment like at some point while solomon doesn't not he doesn't even have pots we're not gonna be able to make this over here and so i'm like okay maybe this business is over and then i'm like and then i go on vacation with a girl that i was dating at the time we go to like the dominican republic or something we get back i i'm a little bit more like patient now i call the manufacturer and i'm like okay look how about you make five hundred units a week for the next four months and and then afterwards i'll pay you like a few thousand dollars bonus i think was like a five grand bonus i'm not entirely positive like think i'll you five grand bonus and and then i'll find another i'm committed to finding another manufacturer in that period of time and you know she's like okay that sounds fair and reasonable and so let's do it and so she starts you know making the five hundred a week again and in the meantime i'm like googling and i'm like who makes deodorant like i've got a formula i wanna make who who can i get to make this alright quick break in the action to talk about hustle khan so as you guys know this podcast is published by the hustle they send out a daily email newsletter with the best news of the day everything you need to know about tech but that's not all they do i've been two or three times to hustle con it's a conference it's happening december second and third in oakland they rent out the paramount theater which is really amazing venue i saw chris there jerry seinfeld there and i guess hu khan is happening there they have a stacked lineup up of speakers so when i went founder we work was talking i let me look at the list for this year the founder of him the founder of madison reed str calm method and holly lime a bunch of ceos and founders of multi billion dollar companies and startups that come on stage and share insights about how they did what they did how they got started and also con is very different than a normal conference normal conferences are kinda stuffy you where you know i see a lot of people in suits like shallow networking going on household content is very different five but meet ton of people who are guests and attendance but also the speakers are very approachable so they are not only sharing good insights on the stage but you could meet them afterwards and and that's a really cool experience so highly recommend coming in fact i'm bringing out the editor of this podcast to come because i just think it's a really great opportunity he's nineteen twenty years old this is an amazing way to just sort of get in the mix if you're thinking about starting an idea of business or you are you wanna do that someday or you're doing it right now either way listening to speakers tell their stories being in the audience amongst a bunch of other like minded people that is a really really good way to get amongst it so that's my genuine recommendation for hu khan they gave me a promo code let me give this to you guys so that you can get a discount if you do wanna get a ticket with the promo code when you check out is my first million all caps all one word again that's my first million that'll give you fifty bucks off a ticket to hustle and you know what if you are listening to this and you wanna go to and you can afford the tickets i will buy four tickets for for guests myself and i will send you to you gotta figure out your travel to get there but i'll buy your tickets to the conference itself email me corey dot sean at gmail dot com happy to give this as a gift to anybody because i think that going to con it can really like sort of change the trajectory of your business life one meaningful relationship or one key insight while you're there that can make it worth it that's been my experience with conferences in the past so okay you guys know the deal hu con december second and third try to get there if you can i called some guys up or there was a guy in chicago i'll never forget forgot i called him up he get it was like an hour long conversation and i probably said five words he talked the entire time and he's like yeah so we'll make your data and i'm like you don't know anything about my needs and you spoke for fifty nine minutes and fifty five seconds so like i don't think you're the right guy red flag yeah it's terrible red flag finally we find a contract manufacturer that's like yeah we have a low minimum order quantity a low mo q i think their mo queue is eighty and so i was like great we can we get we want more than eighty i'm not gonna like you know bankrupt the business right i don't have to mortgage my house based on this and so she starts making five hundred a week for us in this tiny like eight hundred square foot manufacturing facility in the united states and things start going well and so like you know we launched like you know in july twenty fifteen we're doing a couple hundred dollars in revenue a month by january twenty sixteen we're probably doing around seventy five k in revenue a month and things are starting to scale well wow then like you know the first the beginning of the summer hits in twenty six sixteen in may twenty sixteen and somehow all of our deodorant and start melting i go to our shipping facility which is located in san lean it's like these two guys called fulfill c nicest guys in the world you know i call up all the time we like you know they're a small business i'm a small business easy to talk to the owners i go over there there like you know it's probably an hour drive i rented a zip car and i go over there and i'm just looking at our deodorant and i put my finger in one of the deodorant because it like looks weird and it turns out it's got a consistency of lotion you can just put your finger all the way down to the bottom and i'm like holy shit and you like how many how many units are are we talking here you know we probably have a couple thousand units which is a lot of money at the time because that's like you know we're not we're not doing a ton of sales that's a lot of lotion it's a lot of lotion yeah it's no deodorant in a lot of lotion and so our manufacturer at the time like she didn't like the woman who ran it didn't fly so she was randomly had driven up to san francisco to have a meeting with me like the day beforehand and so like all of this is just like works out randomly so like i call her up and i'm like hey are you still in san francisco i wanna have another meeting because i think there's a problem with the deodorant you just ship me she's like yeah i'll come by your office later this afternoon she comes by and i'm like here i brought a few of the deodorant and she's like holy shit what happened to these like you she sees it immediately she calls up her facility and she's like stop making deodorant we've got a problem here and i'm like okay well maybe this business is over again like you know we we moved to a new manufacturer like what are we gonna do here and are you the type to get down on it what's the like when stuff like this gets horribly awfully wrong yeah are you some people go inwards they get very quiet some people get angry some people get sad yeah what's your a reaction like all three of those anger is the number one thing for sure like i i'm fuming but this i think for like the first hour i'm just like forget it this isn't worth it and i think every time i have a major problem like that for the first hour i'm less like this isn't worth my time timing i'm quitting right divorce right away yeah exactly divorce right away and then like hour two comes along and you start getting like determined and you're like you know grate your teeth and you're like wait i'm better than this i'm gonna fix this problem i've got something that's working for me this is not gonna stand in my way i don't care what it takes i'm gonna fix this problem so like hour one i'm like forget this business hour two i'm like nothing can stop this business we're are gonna are gonna succeed and be like thank you yeah thank you're bring it on yeah exactly yeah i'm like problem don't worry about it you've got that that's problem solving in the world right here and so you know like what what had been happening is that over the course of the last eight months since this or like last four months since this woman had been making deodorant for me like we've gotten a lot of customer feedback basically saying our formula was kinda of mediocre there were a lot of problems that we were trying to solve for people were like look it does a great job at absorbing wetness and blocking odor but it's really flaky it's hard to apply men in particular were like look i've got hair under my arms i like this pulls the hair under my arms out and they're sticking to the deodorant and so for a while we've been attempting to make a better deodorant like a better formula and i've been sending out samples to people and say like you our best customers who are like communicating with me and i'd be like hey what do you think of this formula is it any better than like you know the formula that you actually paid for and a lot of people like you know we said we had done hundreds of these formulas i i was at home i would rub the formulas on t shirts throw them in the washer the dryer and see if they stain shirts and like you know i i have a thousand of these stained shirts solomon like you're running the washer and dryer every day what's going on over here and you're not a scientist or bio or so how are you even figuring out the formula right like whenever i listen to a guest tell stories i think to myself could i do this business and when i think there's a lot of things that are relatable right because you started this with essentially note you didn't have to be a programmer right yeah that's right e commerce site that's great you didn't make the stuff yourself you found a manufacturer just by googling who the heck makes deodorant yeah that's right but then when it comes to like figuring out the right formula to prevent fl is that's one where i'd be like well i don't even know what's i don't i don't know what to do there so how are you figuring this out that's really true like i remember starting the business i told one of my friends from law i'm starting this business and her husband was like what the hell do you know about deodorant like you know nothing and i was like yeah you're right and in the next six months i will be an expert on deodorant and really what happens is like you email all of these customers like you know the customers are like hey here's the problem customers will even like do diagnoses and they're like hey i think it's because of this and i'm like wow great thank you for like doing the them like the science that i was supposed to do but in reality hero was a little easier because like one working with our contract manufacturer they did have a chemist and two is easy to diagnose the problem because with the deodorant you wanna balance then the amount of powder and the amount of oils you have in that deodorant to make a product that like absorbs wetness blocks odor but still glide on really easily and so like you know sometimes we'd make a bad batch of our deodorant and we'd be like oh how did this batch turn out because like you know oh we forgot to add this amount of oils we start pouring it like you take a look at it and we're like oh this is what we forgot to add oils and it's way pow like way more flaky so you're like you know what it's the oils that make it glide how frequently were you going to the actual manufacturer and also it sounds like really paid off that you weren't just using a chinese manufacturer that's hard to speak with hard to work with and doesn't guarantee quality definitely so one we've you've never used a chinese manufacturer all of our deodorant are made in the united states for two reasons one you're right it allows us to have a really flexible supply chain two it allows us to have like faster demand creation so like you know when we we give them a purchase order they're able to make it much faster and three i would be scared as hell using the chinese deodorant like that is something i don't wanna do i don't know what quality control looks like over there and it may look great the day i go over there and terrible the next day yeah and we didn't want it we didn't want any of that kind of stuff got like the whole point here was we wanna avoid the dove of the world and in order to avoid dove to dove anti per make it in the united states with ingredients you know like you know where they're being sourced from and you know what they are right okay and we're gonna jump back into the story but one more tactical piece when you when i build i build products that are like software sure with software it's pretty easy to iterate it's pretty easy to try you know ab b test we can send one one visitor of our of our app to see one experience and the other visitor to see another experience very easy to do that sort of thing how can you talk tactically about how you iterate with a physical product sure i'll talk talk to about how we did it at the beginning first and then how we do it today in the beginning what we do is we'd send out samples to our best customers who would like we're vocal and be like hey i love your deodorant and i'm be a customer but i wish it did this and we'd say hey we're trying to solve your issues hero two like i i remember we were doing this as like this is version seven of the deodorant we produced and this is version eight of the deodorant we produced they're like you know you don't know what's in them we're giving you free samples compare it to the one that you purchase from us and tell us what you like more and like that's the type of feedback that we would do early on and that's unusual right like i've bought deodorant owner in my whole life i've never had anyone from the deodorant owner company ever reach out to me i never spoke to them they never sent me different variations so this must have been kind of unusual for people i guess yeah i i guess that's true i i the way i think about it is if way yeah if you buy deodorant room from like target and you like you know you you buy an axe deodorant room from target you're never gonna contact the manufacturer if you buy it directly from us we were following up with every customer like you know if you purchase from us with twenty days after you purchase from sent an email to every single customer saying hey how do you like this deodorant do you like it do you hate it if you like it leave a review on our website we'd really appreciate it and if you hate it please reply back to this email there's a human being on this side of the table and we wanna make this product better and so that's how we got feedback from consumers and today what we'll do is we'll actually run those ab b tests along huge swath of the population so we'll send you know the sean's of one world baking soda that's milled to a certain particle size and sam's of the world a baking soda that's milled to another particle size and we'll we'll monitor your reviews six weeks after you purchase and your repeat purchase rates twelve weeks after you purchase and say you know what the sam's of the world are buying again more frequently than the sean's of the world and as a result it must be that that's the formula that we sent to the sam's of the world are better and that's how we can monitor and what is the best baking soda particle mill size that we should have that's kind of amazing is that standard because i've never heard it's definitely not standard because like we have this direct relationship with consumers that allows us to monitor repeat purchase rights and have a direct line of communication with them been really phenomenal for us because things like baking soda particle size are unique and you have no idea what's better like you know in a laboratory versus in a consumer setting you're gonna have very different results and and so that's how we ab test formula changes to so you guys are sending different versions of of native deodorant formulas to batches of people cohorts of people and then you're able to see these guys at twenty eight percent versus this one at twenty one percent therefore we believe this formula is better that's exactly right but we're doing like tiny changes like you know like it changes that wouldn't even influence the ingredient deck that we're like hey look do you think we should put in you know one percent of this ingredient or one point zero five percent of this ingredient to see what's better like you're like nerdy deodorant stuff yeah exactly we're getting into yeah you're we're getting into the weeds as much as possible right okay alright so we're gonna hop back in so re rewind that part of the story where do deodorant lotion oh my god we gotta fix this and you guys are starting to troubleshoot so this is sort of like near death experience number two definitely take it from so so we talked to our manufacturer and we're like look let's first we're not setting up any more of these deodorant that are lotion we're either gonna refund the customers and close the business or do something and so what happened is we we've been working on different deodorant formula to fix for consistency and so we're like look we think we have good feedback on here we don't have as much feedback as we would have liked you know we still had a bunch of samples that we'd sent to customers in hadn't follow up with them yet and so we're like look push it pushes coming to shove where either they're gonna close this business or switch formulas let's switch formulas and see what happens so we switch formulas basically because we have to and we think it's supposed to be better and start shipping that out we email all the customers and we're like hey look your product was supposed to ship out today we had a problem it's not gonna take two weeks to ship out customers are up irate just absolutely irate and i don't blame them like you know deodorant not something you can really go without right you like toothpaste i i i need this so i'm gonna go get another product they're right irate but a lot of them are really kind and they're like hey we appreciate the you know the honesty we're we're willing to be patient for it two weeks later we start shipping it out this is may twenty sixteen we're probably doing around a hundred can revenue at this point and immediately we see reviews go up like the quality of our reviews has gone up significantly you know six weeks later we'll start seeing repeat purchase rates go up as well we can monitor the cohorts and early on we get a really good indicator that repeat purchase rates are gonna be substantially better with the new version of our formula as compared to the old version so we're like you know what maybe this like you know this terrible experience has led to something really good a much better formula and and then like you know may twenty sixteen we're doing a hundred k in revenue a month and i'm still the only employee the company i was gonna say how many people are there so you're saying we but we me just me just me doing a hundred in revenue a month or something like that just me at the company i'm doing like customer service have a really good idea of what the problems are at the company doing the operation so i'm talking to manufacture all the time doing facebook ads to understand like product market fit so so let's talk money for a second this podcast is called my first million yeah it's called my first million because since you know when i was grown up i wanted to have a million bucks yeah who doesn't who doesn't exactly i was not you know in silicon valley there's a lot of people that whole thing to do is say i'm here to change the world i'm down with change in the world for sure but let's be clear if i'm starting a business i'm trying to make money definitely i'm not afraid to say that so my whole startup career was around how do i build a business that makes money for me for my investors from my employees and in order to do so we're gonna have to make an amazing product that customers love otherwise why would they give us their money and so i like to think that i like to give give my listeners an understanding because a lot of the people who are listeners this podcast right now they're commuting to work they work at a ninety five job they have aspirations of either leaving that job and going and starting a startup up or they're doing a startup but it's not quite taking off you know they hear you say we're only at a hundred thousand a month in revenue and they're like oh my god i wish i could get to a hundred thousand a month in revenue so let's talk money for a second before you started the business what was you know were you already doing well financially were you were you comfortable where were you at before let's start with that question sure i was an attorney in new york for a couple years and during that time i basically paid off my law school student loans one of my law school classmates and i left our jobs you know back in twenty twelve to start an commerce business we sold that business for a seven figure sum and like we hadn't raised any money so i would say i was comfortable certainly yep but like you know wasn't a you know wasn't gonna be able to say okay you know what i'm gonna retire for the rest of my life i i was in a position where i was like okay bought myself a couple years of not having to worry about rent and not worry i have to having to worry about you know food or vacations but i am bought myself you know fifty years of not having to right and so now you get to this hundred thousand a month of revenue yeah and it's taken the business about how long at this point it's taken about eleven ten or eleven months ten eleven months great and what does that mean for a deodorant business so you you you know you make a hundred thousand but margin wise what were you do you know what were you able to take home at the end of that sure were you break were you better than that how were you doing that time so we were selling a hundred thousand dollars of deodorant in a month you know the deodorant was costing us a lot of money at the time because we didn't really have any economies of scale was the only employee and i wasn't taking a salary but i'd say on a hundred thousand dollars in business i'm guessing because i don't really remember i'd say the company probably made about eight thousand dollars in net profit right selling a hundred thousand dollars of deodorant and union and brother are very business savvy you've invested in i don't know eighty plus businesses something like something something like that you've started multiple businesses so what was your mindset around this did you think man this is gonna be a big business were you like this is just kind of a fun project i guess how were you thinking about it when it was at that stage because hundred k a month is good revenue but you're only taking them eight k maybe the it's not clear at that time and there's not a whole bunch of other examples you could go look at it other big different businesses that were startups so how did you think about this business definitely i i think the first like four months of the business i was like look let's see if let's launch this business bored i i i don't have a job let's see what happens when i launch the business pretty early on i thought that there could be product market fit and i was like you know what we're seeing good return on investment when we buy ads on facebook not necessarily on google at the time and even on pinterest we're seeing a good return on investment the problems that we have are we have a low repeat purchase rate good product but kinda mediocre and like you know a decent review average something like four stars right and so i was like look if we can improve our product we really have something i saw product market fit with the product but i also saw that there was a larger opportunity if we could just make our product better and why not hire people i think a lot of people like to rush to hire people i'm anti yeah hiring people i i want to maximize these sort of earnings per capita in my company yeah definitely and like how did you resist that what was your thought process around that because you're doing it as a one man show sure one we like you know in silicon valley a bunch of people raise money we also raised money to be clear we raised about fifty thousand dollars in november of twenty fifteen so like a few months after we started and then another two hundred fifty thousand dollars in about april of twenty six eighteen and this was friends and family or this was these were both outside investors that i had just met like you know i had somebody introduced me to them and both of them invested and you know so we had about three hundred thousand dollars in the bank account plus the thousand dollars i kicked so probably three thousand three hundred one thousand dollars and so we're like you know we've got some cash but not a ton of cash i i didn't hire anyone for a couple reasons one was super busy trying to run the business like if you're doing marketing operations and customer service that's a full time job on saturdays i would spend the entire day basically i'd go to workshop cafe and crank out a bunch of customer service like inquiries so people got responded to within twenty four hours so one was really busy and then two i was afraid that the business was wasn't gonna survive my longer i didn't wanna hire someone and then fire that person three months later because the business was collapsing and four i wasn't sure could to afford them sure we had three hundred thousand dollars in the bank account but we had eight thousand dollars in net profit if i hire someone between employment taxes their salary and benefits certainly giving up that eight thousand dollars and so i was like don't know how long we're gonna be able to afford this person the future of the business doesn't have like we don't have a ton of profit right now so i know how long i'll be able to afford you and what was your schedule like so you're saying saturday saturdays is customer service day how you when you are the one doing operations marketing and customer service plus everything else that goes into all the little things that go into a business how were you organizing your time and your day are you like a i work eighteen hours a day kinda guy or tell us about like kind of your schedule yeah i was like i was waking up and going to work yeah i mean i'd would work until like you know seven eight pm early on in the business probably the first four or five months i was doing all the packaging as well the shipping as well out of my apartment and so like i'd go home at seven pm turn on netflix and while i was watching netflix i'd be packing boxes and shipping them out right and so you were lower michael scott you were dwight on sale that's right yeah you were daryl in the warehouse right yeah you were the whole office yeah toby being like you know that's a terrible company that's a long days at the beginning we get to june we've got a higher repeat per like you know we've we got a higher repeat purchase right better reviews you know in june of twenty sixteen so about eleven months into the business we hire our first employee and she's helping in doing customer service and i'm like great this is i i need so much help here because like customer service is endless and i can't like reply like you know it's just taking up so much of my time so she comes on board we do two hundred fifty k in revenue that month so we've basically doubled the business between may and june and the customer service inquiries have gotten to be even more than she could she and i can handle together i thought i was done with customer service we doubled the business and it turns out she and i are both doing customer service all day we hired a third customer sir we hired another person or third the third person to join the team and he's doing customer service and like great this is wonderful now i can really stop doing it and by like you know by november twenty sixteen we're doing a million dollars a month we go from a hundred k in like may to a million in november and now we've got a bunch of customer service people including the you know just crazy customer service like we have these things called power hours where we're like everybody does customer service and it's not entirely their fault like a lot of it was we were not able to keep up in terms of production with the demand that we had because we didn't expect to ten x the business over the course of five months and so our manufacturers is running behind if you buy the deodorant on a wednesday it probably gets made friday and shipped to you you know the the following wednesday we're doing like we don't know what's going on business is growing really quickly but we can't keep up with it and i certainly can't like i i'm like well i have to do customer service i have to make sure that we're i'm trying to produce more deodorant i'm trying to run our advertising and you know i i have no idea what what our business will look like a year from now so what caused the business to grow from that hundred k a month to a million a month yeah that's a huge jump was it just spending more on ads did you guys obviously the formula was getting better so obviously the product is getting better but is it just is it just like that it's a million little things getting better or was there a breakthrough or a point of emphasis that really was highlighted there's some things one word mouth is growing a ton like you know it's it's small it's hard to have word math when you're doing fifty k a month it's a lot easier to have word math when you're doing two hundred fifty k five hundred a month so that's growing a ton two we're spending more on ads because we understand product market fit and we understand that we're profitable when we spend money on ads so we're spending more money on ads and then three we have a higher repeat purchase rate which was the most important thing it's like this discounting yeah exactly this is a huge snowball effect i remember in like so in january twenty seventeen we're doing just over a million dollars a month and as like by december of twenty seventeen i wanna do a million dollars in repeat purchase revenue a month and we hit that million dollars in like march so it sounds like focusing on repeat purchase was a key insight that obviously if you're in d businesses that's that's kind of known as a good standard but if you're new you know that's something to hone in on how did you know that at the start it's a mentor tell you hey rep repurchase is the thing to to key in on i i think for like it depends on the product you're if i was selling casper mattresses i would be concerned about new customer acquisition because how many mattresses so this is someone gonna buy you know i bet casper doing a really good job with re repeat purchase rate but like when you're selling a consumable bite like deodorant the whole point is that people are brand loyal and once they find a deodorant rent they're gonna stick with it for a really long time i used ax deodorant from like you know probably twelve years old till i was thirty years old right eighteen years and so for me i was like look we have to find look if we're producing a deodorant we need to make sure that people love it and they don't just churn and go back to their dub their degrees of the world and why were you able to charge twelve dollars for deodorant is it still twelve dollars by the way it's still twelve dollars it's twelve dollars at walmart twelve dollars at target twelve dollars at our own site and really the way the way we did it is i work backwards like early on the a deodorant cost us about six dollars to make it cost us three dollars and some change to ship and then it cost us like another dollar fifty for random expenses like the box and like a you know a card in there and a bunch of other expenses so we were looking at an all in cost of like eleven dollars and some change and so i was like look i can't lose money on every deal and i make i'm not brand less so i have to charge twelve dollars otherwise we're gonna lose money on every single order and so that's really where it came from and a normal deodorant at you know acts or old spice or whatever they're not i i mean what's the i i almost don't even think about it i pick it up off the shelf typically is it's yeah three bucks i yeah what is it three to four dollars is like a traditional price anti like a traditional price entity so when you were going into this more you know if i was your friend yeah at that time i would have been like hey but you sure you're gonna be able to four the price deodorant like are we sure that's a good idea yeah i guess really what happened is by the time people started asking that question and was it i was like we're doing a dollars a month so i think i think we're okay okay but i do remember like we had this one question from an investor at some point we tried to raise more money and you know the investor was like the entire natural deodorant industry is something like thirty million dollars a year so why would anyone be interested in investing in a category that only has thirty million dollar a year run rates and i was like if the natural deodorant industry is thirty million dollars a year where the entire natural deal in we're doing thirty million dollars a year at this point and so i think from from our perspective we were like look there's a lot of external factors that say we should not be doing this yeah twelve dollar deodorant is really expensive the entire natural dealer in industry when we launched was tom's maine which was thirty million dollars and we're just like i think this is a product that people want and need and like you know let them tell us that we're doing something wrong and we'll try this anyway and that's how we're worked out like you know by the time people were telling us it's a thirty million dollar total addressable market we were doing that much revenue and so you you've said the phrase customer service a bunch yeah people are playing the drinking game at home taking a shot every time you say customer service they're dead and so a lot of people like you know we just got acquired by amazon amazon has this phrase you know cup customer obsessed is what jeff bezos says a lot of people say that but i think you guys are doing something specifically that your actions back up your words i see awesome some little things like you know you know first of the stories you told about reaching out to customers few days later saying what could we be doing better sending them different formulas to try out working with them but also right when you sign up you get it in front of email from you guys like talk about some of the things you guys have done on the customer service or customer obsessed side sure i guess like one of the the goals that or one of the values we really have is to try and build a human business like we want you to know that when you communicate with us there's a human being on this side of the business and it's not some corporate entity and you're not gonna like get one of those you know comcast like responses where people are like i don't care about this let me transfer you to some other customer service represented and like they'll deal with it and they'll transfer well when you contact us you a real human being who sits in our office response and then we try and build a really human element in a few ways one is when you order from us we send you this over the top order confirmation email and or over the top shipping confirmation email when you order from us we say hey we're popping bottles of champagne and this is fantastic and when you when we ship the order we say hey look we're writing your name over the golden gate bridge we're putting a sign in in our parking lot that says world's best customer with your name and photo on it and and it's really over the top to to meant to be playful and so so so you know that the brand that you're purchasing from sort of subscribe to your values as well which is we don't take this too seriously but at the same time we're really we take very seriously yeah yeah like this is deodorant and so like we know that this isn't like product that you're gonna is gonna make a huge impact in your life this isn't like having a kid but at the same time it's important that you use a deodorant with the works and you you know you're buying from a brand that really resonates with you so you've hit the scale that really matters now you're doing a million dollars a month yeah this point you know any non believer at this point has to sort of be thinking okay there's something real here and the company size at this time was still pretty small right how many people were at native at this time there's probably about five employees wow and and so you're you're you've got this business on your hands and you ultimately decided to to sell what was the thinking around that why why decide to sell when things are sort of when the going is good and i'm gonna ask you how you sold it because as i've learned selling a company is both art and science and i'm curious to hear how all went down but why why decide to sell in the first place what happen is that like somebody came knocking on our door in about february of twenty seventeen indicating that they wanted to purchase the business and we're like look i never heard of them and i'm like hey you know we're growing i don't know who you are i think this is like you know this isn't serious and it turned out that they were like you know this was a privately health company doing a billion dollars in revenue and it was very serious and so that really kick started of the process they started knocking on the door and like the knock became loud enough that we couldn't ignore any longer and that's when the process got kicked off it turned out that they were a lot less serious than i anticipated like i went out to meet with them and you know they're like okay great send us all of your you know financials and your information i sent it out in like june of twenty seventeen they don't even reply back for like ninety days after like they're just radio silent i follow up with them i'm like hey is this still going on if it's not no problem just give me a heads up because you know at this point you know we've started a process and we're talking to a bunch of other their parties i'm not gonna say that i just say if you're not interested anymore no problem just let me know but just radio silence like it being ghost from an x or like you know a tinder date it's what's happening and were they you think they were just picking your brains to get the the numbers from you and then they were like great thank you very much or what or were they were just bureaucratic internally i think they were just like i i think there was like a little bit of a brain drain going on and i think that it was also just like you know they have their own business and they're like you know maybe this is too small we're a billion dollar business maybe the oh you know the right person internally was like we don't really care about this business i think it was a bunch of factors but at some point like you know we started going our own way and we're like okay because you knocked on the door so loud we started our own process and we've got all these other suit ended up coming back like you know a few months before we sold the or like a month before we sold the business and they're like okay yeah we're interested again and i was like no i'm not going through this again we're really far along in the process with a bunch of other guys and you guys don't have the credibility to continue doing this right and so you're you're selling the business do you feel like you know how to do this process definitely not this is like you know like there are so many different emotions that happened all of the time when you're trying to sell a business i was really thankful that like you know my brother was there with me he just sold his business he had hired a banker and sort of gone through the transaction and do what to expect so we start this process ourselves you know we create a one page document that's like a teaser we send it out to a bunch of potential acquire it doesn't even have our name on it they say yes or are you interested like they're like yeah we're interested in this business they're like no we don't care about the deodorant category get out of here the guys were interested sign an nda and we send them a book let's like you know probably a hundred twenty pages long telling them all the information about our business this is what our financials look like the so many people we have this is where our business is growing the banker put that together or you put that to team the banker the banker and right and our team put that together so a bunch of people have this book and then what happens is that they were they send us letters of interest where they're basically like yeah we are interested in this business if they are if they're not they just go away but if they are interested in the business having looked at our financials they say we're interested in this business we think that we would purchase this business between you know ten million and twenty million dollars or something to that effect and then what you do is you say you know what these are the biz these are the guys who i think are really serious about this like if some guys offering you ten million to twenty million dollars and you're doing forty million in revenue probably don't with the conversation so you know we we take a bunch of these and i think there's twelve suit at time maybe fourteen and so we say okay everyone come to our office in san francisco and have a conversation with boys and so i'm like the bachelor you're you're this was the bat with the roses and you're you're invite them all to the party yeah i'm not sure if they have the roses or i have the roses i still don't know but yeah we invite them all to the party and they're here and they're like you know i i talked to them and like you know businesses send out like some businesses will send out one guy who's like the head of the north america and p and g send out like we you know we we were sitting in my brother's we're swat in my brother's office he has a large conference room that can probably see it like eighteen people p and g sends like twenty five people and i'm just like there's this is standing room only here we didn't expect this and don't expect me to pick up the tab for lunch right and so so we go through this process with a bunch of these guys and then what we say is like look here's all look if you're still interested in this business here's all of the data that here's all the diligence that you need in the business here's all of our contracts now we're a two and a half year old business we barely have any contracts right you know we have probably three material contracts no change of control provisions like the whole like in there there's very little data in the data room yeah and we say go through all the data here's the draft merger agreement mark it up give us an offer and you should be ready to sign that you should be ready to close that offer the day you give it to us and you know look that's really aggressive incredibly aggressive we're basically like look we've got we've got this awesome business you want it there's a bunch of you guys there's one of us right were those guys in that room are paid to like do a ninety day diligence process yeah exactly what am i doing here yeah that's exactly of a job here and so we're super aggressive about it during that process a couple of the guys drop off for one reason or the other a couple guys realized hey look we're not gonna be aggressive enough like we think they're gonna be better strategic fix for this business and it's not worth our time to put in an offer a couple guys just get scared at the price you know i remember one potential acquire was looking at one of our competitors and they're like your competitors selling for five dollars a target how are you like if and at this point the entire business is online you know we sell deodorant and only deodorant we sell it only through our own website and we sell it only in the united states and so one of the things that we sell is like the sizzle right we're like look if you you know how to sell in you know p and do know how to sell to target if so imagine how native would do a target do you know how to make other products with the word native on them help us do that and we can make this a bigger business do you know how to sell in canada great this is gonna be a bigger business so we sell that sizzle that's strong yeah that is really strong and so like a couple guys are like you know what your competitors are selling for five dollars a target you're not gonna be able to sell next to those guys so we're out or we drop our up price by half and then push comes to shove and p and g hasn't done a deal in like ten years this is the first acquisition they're making in ten years so our bankers is like look i have no idea how these guys operate like i know how you know unilever operates and i know how these private equity firms operate but p and g nobody's seen them in the world in ten years yeah so i a pop of viagra just to do a deal like this yeah exactly not used to this yeah exactly like i don't even know how to like get a reference on p and g to see if they're serious because no one has seen them in the market and at this point had you put out a price yourself like this is our target no are you're letting everybody can we're letting come in with beds and did you what did you internally what did you internally think about this you know you are you dreaming about a certain number how are you internally think out the price great question i i'm not sure like you know there are there are times where i'm like okay like the month a month closes and i'm just like we generated you know four million in revenue this this month add another zero to that price buddy add two more zeros and then there'll be like one bad day where i'm like you know what we had this like hiccup because of operations and like you know something happened and and now i'm like take out take anything somebody come in and give me anything and like you know it's it's like a roller coaster and the roller coaster isn't even week to week it's hour hour and like you know during diligence people are asking for random there was one company that asked for every email that we'd had ever sent out a copy of it the open rate the click food rate and the revenue generated from that email and i'm like look at this point we have a million customers we send out millions of emails a month and you want this from the beginning of the time that we launched the business and they're like yeah that's just to make the first board meeting really productive and i was like the board is gonna go through emails because even i i bear like i i mean i look at that but i don't look at that on like a quarterly basis and so you know they're just like so so you're up at two am i'm preparing these things for them and there's was like a bunch of these acquire so there's a bunch of them some guy like the the guys who were most interested in the business ended up dropping out in the during the during the acquisition conversations and i was like i know why you did that and so you know all these things are happening and you're your it's like a roller coaster the the thought the company that you thought was gonna marry you like gets up to the altar and they're like we're out of here and you're just like oh my god who's gonna marry me now and i remember when we were going through the process just now because it's pretty fresh on my mind just a couple months ago there are these moments where you're having a conversation and certain things it's like they say something and you in your head you're like this is the moment i need to say something whatever i say right now is gonna really actually swing the way this whole process is going and there are these like key moments that are just happened over a coffee or on the phone or whatever do you remember any of those kind of conversations or key moments along the way yeah well there's two one was with everyone which was yeah an issue we had with our trademark and i'll get to that in a second and two i remember one guy who who was like the ceo of the company was like you know trying to judge my marketing ability and so he's like if you were if your brand was represented by a celebrity who would that person be and i was like i know that like i was this is one of those things where you think either i'm intelligent where i'm an idiot and i remember i hadn't even thought it where was like michelle obama and he's like okay you got it right wow he's like that's a good answer and i was like great but in reality we had a trademark issue until we sold the business this was a serious part like that delayed the transaction with everybody and that i think made it harder for us to sell a business we simply didn't own our trademark yeah until five days before we sold the business so we bought our trademark on like we sold the business on like november eighth on november third we purchased the trademark and that was the one thing that we still had to do in order to sell the business like p and was like we will not buy this business until you own your own trademark right which was completely fair of them and we were like negotiating with the person who owned the mark simultaneously yeah exactly in order to get i feel like a deal is not close to being done it's not real until the deal almost falls through that's like the test is that fall through yet it's not a real deal like i was talking to so michael birch was on this sitting and where you're sitting couple weeks ago and he sold be aol well for eight hundred and fifty million bucks and i was i didn't ask him this on the podcast but i've asked him this before i said you know was it smooth how did it go and he was like you know he was kinda like you know i just let the bankers kinda do the thing it was such a big transaction that there's all these lawyers all these bankers it's not pleasant but we almost got he like we got to the very end and then with bib which was a social network they started getting sued by the music companies at the eleventh hour okay not and the music company is new hey these guys are about to sell we have all the leverage in the world right now to just just go ahead and sue and they'll have to pay that they have to settle because they wanna close deal so you know they they go soon i think it's like a fifteen million dollars like settlement this like needed or whatever so michael goes to the investors the vcs and he's like hey i might have got the numbers wrong but it's something like ten fifteen million bucks he goes to the vcs he's like hey look to close this deal we really need to just settle this this issue and then you know we can go sell this company these guys are not gonna go away unless we do this and they were like yeah you know you're right you really gotta settle with them and he's like that we got settle you're like no i think you're gonna settle it so he ended up out basically out of his own share had to like settle with these companies in order to settle the lawsuits to get the deal to close and of course he holds it against those vcs like you know to this day definitely but these are the crazy stories that happened at the end of the deal or you know right when you think you you have it that's really terrible because like i never felt it wasn't a we with my investors like they were all like super happy and super excited about getting the deal done and you know if someone had come to if one of our investors in been like i don't love this and i'm gonna try and vote know and fuck this up i i would have like been devastated right and like felt like there was a knife in my back right so i don't know who those investors are that i michael but he i hope he should mention their name everywhere he goes yeah so so this is actually that that mindset said your brother told me about this he says he's like yeah my brother boys you know he's he's great he does a great job he's like but if you flip the the the temper switch he's like he has this like retribution streak yeah it's like yes if you wrong me i will publicly write the wrong for the next fifty years i'm devoted to it like give you an example of it yeah sure i'll give you an example right now there's this company called they said no to us because i was hey i wanna launch this refill deodorant early on when we are launching the business like we're launching this refill deodorant and they're like no this is terrible get out of year and like you in the last six months i don't even remember what but they invested in a refill deodorant company and i'm like well i see that you're doing a refill deodorant and now touches are idea you've you reached out no i didn't even say anything i was like this like stands by itself like you know you know that you're doing this and i know that you're doing this right but like you know do what you gotta do but you could've have had the you had the opportunity four years ago i also heard the sort of once you get to pro and gamble well obviously they have a sort of much tighter you know view of of of risk tolerance around twitter and some of some of your tweets how's that fit for you since since joining you know the mothers ship basically what happened was sent us this letter and so i tweeted it and i was like if you're wondering when i decided to destroy your business it was when you sent me this letter like before i was like you know you guys are a nat and i don't care about your tiny business and i'll let you exist and now it's personal and i like you know my life's mission is to make sure that you regret sending this letter every morning you should wake up and you should be like fuck i sent that letter and now my life is fuck someone called someone a p and g and they're like you have to take down these tweets and i was like why should we take down these tweets we should show how competitive we are when people come after us you know we we like go after them ten times harder you know like donald trump is always like we're building this wall ten feet higher that's basically when i was like you come after ross we're building this wall ten feet higher and where where did they come where did that strategy or mindset come is it like at an early age were you doing this with your brother like competitiveness with him or where the i think it came from him i think he's just does a better job of like heidi it yeah he's just more charismatic than i am so he says it and everyone's like oh you know what point you know solomon like funny and like this is good and good humor and when i say people like mo is vicious he's just more charismatic so it comes off nicer but he's got it himself for sure i love it okay so company finally does the the offer does come through pro was serious take it from there how did it end how did it feel and where are you guys at now yeah sure so one i i think one of the issues with these types of companies is always about like or what with a deal is like deal certainty how comfortable are you that the other guys are gonna close or try and do something at the eleventh hour because like you know if you say no to all these other companies and then your deal doesn't get cons you come back and you're like hey do you wanna do a deal they're like what's wrong why did the first acquire or not end up by you i've got the leverage here damaged goods yeah exactly and so there was a lot of deal certainty with p and g like they were fantastic partners throughout this all they were like you know they came out to san francisco we met with them we went to dinner with them they made the offer they came back again before the deal signed and they're like this is how it's gonna be post acquisition like this is how you're gonna report to us this is how we're thinking about the business how do you feel about it and i was like wow you guys aren't trying to like hide anything or be at like you guys are just genuinely nice midwestern people who are honest and like mean what you say right and so that was that gave me a lot of comfort going into the deal and that was wonderful and as soon as we bought the trademark i basically knew the deal was i mean there was only five more days but i knew the deal was gonna close since then you know we've grown the business a ton we've launched into target into walmart where like the number one selling the natural deodorant and target the number one selling natural deodorant in walmart native coconut vanilla is the best selling deodorant sku at target over the last fifty two weeks and we haven't even been there for fifty two weeks one one question on this the sort of i mean what's the it's not flavors what's the sense sense yeah you had these like i i saw something like a pumpkin spice latte scent yeah definitely is this like is this just like you're marketing genius or what is it's super fun because basically we're like look why are we taking this stuff too seriously and like you know you can use a scent for a season you don't have to go through the entire deodorant and stick before you can get rid of it in the same way that you're not like if you open up a diet coke because you wanna like treat yourself you don't have to drink the whole thing right or you don't have to have an entire like you know snickers king size bars so we're like look why don't we launch these really fun sense they work and they're effective they're good for p r and hopefully you find out about the deodorant through net native pumpkin spice latte and then you're like this is a great deodorant and i don't wanna smell like pumpkin spice latte in april maybe i should buy the you know coconut vanilla scent this is what i love about businesses and start is if you're pro and gamble you're not afraid of unilever you should be really afraid of the mo at his dining table thinking up pumpkin sized latte sense and getting p r and really getting this thing off the ground like it's it's the you know one or two people in a bedroom definitely actually the threats to these like giant multi billion dollar companies because you have creativity and you have nothing to lose yeah exactly fresh perspective yeah and like all the things you've told me so far just fall into those buckets and if you i'm listening to this i'm taking one thing away as like do not be afraid and do do not sort of conform to the sort of practices of the industry didn't know anything about deodorant you went in with basically no money no staff no nothing and you figured it out and i like what do you think is the message for you know the next you who maybe doesn't have this sort of confidence today what is your message to that person who's thinking about an idea like this yeah it's really look stop listening to other people and start listening to yourself i remember when we were growing the business people were like look you're not gonna be able to sell this until you launch a second product outside of deodorant that really is a home run again so people so you can prove this is a a repeatable model other people were like hey you need to do influencer advertising this brand is not gonna have any legs and no one's gonna care without influencer advertising other people like you need to launch pop up stores like you know the all birds and ways of the world that's the only way to do this other people were like you haven't fund raised what are you doing this isn't a real business until you've got some cat like you know millions of dollars in your balance sheet and i was like you are all probably right and i have no like you know i don't have the time for any of this kind of stuff we have a business that's working and so like give your advice to somebody else like i i know what's working at my company and so i'm gonna keep doing that i i don't want any of this advice like i i appreciate the advice i'm not gonna take any of it right and like it's really hard to sort of be like hey look these other people that have a lot more money than i do and then have a lot more experience than i do i'm are gonna give me advice and i'm gonna reject it and i'm like okay with that you have to have a lot of like independence and be okay with what's going like okay with like living and dying on your own intelligence and for me like what what gave me a lot of confidence was you know things were working early on and so when people were giving me this advice as like look what's working like what's working for us is working we're gonna double down on that instead of doing anything that you suggest right and it's hard like you know for us we had that great safety net of like a success already or like momentum and so it's it's if you don't have that trust your gut nobody's gonna be able to like come into your business talk to you for twenty minutes and give you an amazing idea that you haven't thought of people would be like if you thought about influencer advertising and i'm like i only live and breathe this business every day like you know from a morning tonight what a genius idea tell me more about this i was yeah i thought about that but we just did a million dollars a month and we're we're gonna try and do two million dollars a month next month and and so i'm focused on that don't really have the time to like contact influencers on instagram and so you know you just gotta trust your gut and like listen to yourself other people's advice can help you like you know get through the rough patches and i think our investors did a great job of that but ultimately like it's up to you and like you're like live and die by your own merits i love it and what was it like when the deal closed day of money hits the bank this is my first million yeah people wanna know what is it what changed what did it feel like what did you do did you start ball out of control like tell us you start ball out of control sure yeah well let me tell you the story of one of our investors i'm telling all of our investors were selling the business it's a couple days before we actually close the deal our first investors is this chinese guy named way go doesn't speak a ton of english and the nicest guy in the world i i text him and i'm like hey i a chat with you do you have do you have a few moments today and he's like is this urgent and i like yeah kind of i need you to sign documents and like the next twenty four hours and so he's like okay great call so i call him i was we turned your fifty k to a million dollars and he's like fuck this is awesome you know every he's like all these people in china told me i didn't understand american consumers i'm gonna go back to them and show them this deal fuck them and so you know i tell him you know i need to sign these docs in the next twenty four hours he's super excited at the end of the call he's like you i i asked you if this was urgent via a text message earlier because my wife just gave birth to my first kid but this is the best news i've gotten all day it's so made i'll never forget him saying that anyway we closed the deal you know money hits the bank like we have raised a ton of money at that point we've raised about five hundred thousand dollars so have the vast majority like you know ninety seven percent of the company controlled by by me and like my family's in town to help celebrate which is really fun we go to this like thai restaurant for dinner which is really fun but like what's shocking is like how little life has changed like you know i still live in the same apartment i still have no car i still rent you know like very little of my life has changed despite the the financial windfall and and like one of the things i realized afterwards because you know all these people like oh being rich is not that great and i'm like no fuck you yeah you just say that because you have money you can't appreciate it you dumb media i'll be able to spend it really well and then you're like you know what like the journey of like the friendships i made with all the employees that i have and like a bunch of like most of the team is still there you know like when we were building native and we did you know the month that we sold the business we did like a million dollars in net profit which was insane a million dollars in net profit and i was like you know if a bus hits me on the way to work i'm still gonna get to work because i love this job like there were so many great things that were happening with the business and was that journey that was really amazing and like the thing that i really appreciated and even today i mean i'm still i'm still running native on a day to day basis it's like the people that work there and how devoted they are to the business that's amazing like getting them like seeing a bunch of people sit down and like this a problem how are we gonna solve is how do we delight customers do we admit like you know we had this contest internally to make another email funny and very human and i was like wow these people like care understand the business and wanna make a the like you know this company better i have no idea how they got that way i have no idea how they were motivated to do that and they're that way and it's really fun to see that and like that meant so much more than the money and that's still surprising to this like even when i say today i'm like this guy's an idiot it's myself saying it but it did yeah i try i trust you when you say because there's a lot of people that say it that i'm like okay you don't have to say the politically correct thing around me it's cool to just hey money is amazing yeah i do this isn't and this this change but when you're saying it like i believe you i believe what you just said because i think you're wired like me and that you thought it would be x and it is good but man why is a lot actually has made a bigger impact on yeah it just makes me happier like being in the team makes me happier and like you know now when i go to restaurants like one of the the best thing is i'm just like i'll order whatever i want right i don't care if this entree is fourteen dollars or twenty two dollars i'm like i don't care i'm taking the twenty two dollar one because i want shrimp tonight and like that's definitely something i do like you know i'll i i try to spend a lot more time with my family so i like we'll go and fly and visit my family more often because i'm less worried about where the next paycheck is gonna come from and i'm less worried about the cost of air air yeah so it's not like nothing has changed but it's not like there's a lamborghini sitting in my garage or i own a car it's just like things are like easier when it comes to just doing what you wanna do but at the same time you realize what you wanna do is build those businesses or that's like an amazing amazing high if you were twenty one today starting from scratch it's you know you have the intelligence you have today you have the knowledge about the world you have today but you didn't have the resources and you have all the you know time and ex exuberance of a twenty one year old if you're twenty one today what business would you wanna go start what what space would you wanna go into that's a great question and and i think that that can be answer answered in a bunch of different ways like if i had no resources i would say start to drop shipping thing find something that on alibaba that you can purchase and sell more in the united states on amazon or some something else and arbitrage that difference i've seen so many people do that and so many people do that well and that's a great way to get your feet wet into e commerce and understand what's going on without having any personal capital at risk and if you're more ambitious and you're like look i can quit a job i i can quit my job and wanna do something i can tell you for me i could never start a business and i can never start a new business until quit my old one i would say look look commerce is amazing you don't need a developer everything is really cheap out of the gate figure out product market fit and be obsessed with your consumer and you will find something that works like you know even if you have to like go through a bunch of products and you're like if you know what i tried to sell them shampoo or i tried to sell them the toothpaste and that didn't work out i'm trying to sell something like you know deodorant go for it like the be obsessed with consumers and and that like the the for the biggest problem that i think direct to consumer businesses have is that they like the founders disconnect themselves with customer service then you're like you know you're just like these cp giants where you're like i don't have a i don't have a direct line of communication with people who use my product every day we have that direct line a thousand people email us every day and we're like hey look this is what they're thinking today it gives us incredible insight into what we should be making and how to fix our product so i think e commerce is amazing i would do that again i love e commerce if you don't have any resources and don't have any technical knowledge you can still do e commerce the one feedback i'd give after you chose that if you chose that category is do not disconnect yourself with the consumer love it and if i'm listening to and i'm like this guy awesome i wanna talk to this guy i wanna send him my ideas i wanna send him my by my company right now how should they get in touch with you and really who should get in touch with you what's the who do you wanna hear from sure look if you're in commerce and you're like you know you've got some legs under you and you're thinking about raising money or looking for an adviser or just wanna bounce ideas off of please reach out to me like you know i love when people have gotten skin in the game i think the hardest for me to is to have conversations with people who are still i used to be a lawyer who are still lawyers and they're like i i'm thinking about doing this i'm like look if you're thinking about doing this quit your job like if you wanna do this quit your job that's the biggest telltale sign that you're in if you're not in like don't like don't go around asking everybody don't i do this should do this should i do this should i do this do it or don't do it that's your own call and like that depends on your personal financial situation how old you are on how much energy you have and all bunch of things but if you're in and you're like starting a business and it's got traction and you're like hey how do i start scaling this how do i get from that hundred k to a million dollars hap happy to answer any questions happy to talk to you you can find me on linkedin certainly on at mo ali on twitter love talking ecommerce you know you and i are in this room on a saturday i had a bunch of e commerce calls earlier today this this is what i like to do on the weekends i love it alright man this is fantastic thank you so much for coming on thanks for having me of