How to win in ecom in 2025 (from a $200M/yr marketer)

i'm glad you guys invited me here because you're slum it down with like the e comm millionaires again this is like a make a wish type of episode for us you know i feel like got rude wear i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a road less travel never there's really two things that i need to talk to you about two reasons you're here number one i cannot believe that you sell hundreds of millions of dollars of this stupid little wallet this is unbelievable to be it's been blowing my mind ever since i found that out and now you're here finally to give us some answers and two i think you're very opinionated when it comes to e com you don't hold back you don't pull punches and so we like that we like spicy guess and i think you're you're gonna be able to have both of those things for us i think you you should smack sean right now for con it's stupid little wallet to do that stupid little wall i'm just trying to get him fired up i told he gets he gets fiery he gets feisty so i wanted to you know start the up a little bit you you better play nice all docs your your e commerce brand yes true he know he's got he's got some he knows too much he's got some compromise mod dude i've been a i've been a rich wallet owner since two thousand and sixteen or seventeen you know rich sponsored the hustle we'll do it thank you for the support and you guys were super early for newsletter sponsorships like we probably run like a pretty big sponsorship like ecosystem now we sponsor like a ton of newsletters like you know youtubers obviously you guys were like one of the first people selling that ad space so yeah and you know what i learned about your guys industry well just any marketer who's savvy is people like you and sean you guys know how to find early interesting stuff and you take all of the risks and you and you just you understand the arbitrage like the under priced opportunity and so we had a lot of smart people who would buy these ads with us and i'm like i can't believe they're doing this is so unproven and then i realize that that's like the theme of a smart marketer which is throw dollars at a variety of things and then exhaust it once everyone else comes and finds it yeah it's at arbitrage right like everything's attention so if i'm giving facebook at this point fifteen dollars per thousand views and if i can get a better price off of newsletters or influencer or youtube like it's all just an attention economy and it's so funny to watch that like pendulum swing back linear tv like the tv your parents probably watch is so cheap to run ads on because nobody's buying it so like you know i'll probably like the cpm of linear tv a dollar like oh wow it's like because there's all these channels right there's been like you know thousands of channels that have come out that like have eight hundred people who watch them so like you just buy like big blocks of random ad space that are just very mail mail targeted and like literally like could dollar or reach two thousand people do you do what our best performing ad channel is our marketing channel for my brand postcards but you would not believe it this postcards it's not super scalable like you can't just like spend to infinity on it but you know you put a dollar in you'll get eight or nine dollars out of revenue it's amazing that's great to use post pilot post file yeah nice so okay so sean we should start at the start so what's cool about y'all stories is you sell a a simple product it wasn't like some some mark zuckerberg you know innovation or anything like that and you've scaled it up you've built it brick by brick but you said you started in the server in like a i sign of sort of a sweaty services business you didn't start the company and you didn't start off in the product game so can we just do your story for a little bit and then i wanna brainstorm other d ideas with you afterwards but first let's do let's do your story sure yeah you got that right the shows my first million so i made my first million dollars off of an ad agency so you know facebook ads came out in twenty twelve that was like when it was probably like an open beta anybody can join and i learned how to do facebook ads i worked at an agency with my cmo o'connor and the agency sucked like you know it was two hundred two hundred people working there probably five hundred clients the you were an employee yeah yeah i was just an employee and then i was like oh i should do this i could do a better job of this the i didn't agency worked out the average client was around for four months so imagine that sales cycle like it takes sixty days to onboard them they're they get thirty days worth of work and they're like this sucks and then thirty days to off board the average client was four months right and i'm like imagine if i just did this but i kept them for a year of like i'll make so much money right i started ad agency i have ten clients so you you're you're saying this like it's simple so you you're working at a ad agency how old are you roughly at this time i was twenty two you're twenty two years old you're not like a marketing expert yet right you're like you know you're learning on the job i would assume yeah yeah but like it was it's kinda like tiktok shop today like nobody's an expert right like it's it's a brand new thing that came out like i was we're probably two and a half years in facebook ads people still thought instagram followers were the most important metric and they're like wanting to run campaigns to get followers right and was your agency super bullish on facebook as a channel or it was kind of like this new thing that you know you got really because it was new but the was the whole agency like hey this is gonna be a really big deal yeah it was like a cookie cutter d c agency like in the heyday day this is probably like twenty fifteen right so facebook what facebook and email was the services we were providing like there was no other services maybe there was one guy do in google ads right but it was really all in on facebook as like this brand new channel and if i could go back in time i would've have been even deeper into facebook like the biggest challenge with rich then mean we're skipping a couple of years in the future but like we try to diversify too fast like i was doing newsletter sponsorship and like they worked i should've have put all of my dollars in facebook back then up until like twenty twenty i would just been better off putting these much money to that as possible but and rich was one of your clients were they an early client yeah so i had ten so i'm at an agency it sucks i think i do a better job me and my cmo connor we ended up starting an agency together we take ten clients with us eight of them you have never heard of okay like they've just you know gone extinct one of them was ridge and then one of them was actually mud water which has actually gone on to crush it like we did their google ads or at some point like in twenty sixteen or whatever but yeah so we end up taking rage over father son best friend they start this business they get for like five million dollars a year in sales and they are you know like the dad was a special ed teacher like you know daniel was gonna go to go be an accountant and this thing just kinda caught fire and he really didn't wanna be an accountant so like their expectations for the brand where they got the five million dollars a year they're like this is the best thing that's ever happened right and me and connor being hell young and i'm like i think we can get to fifteen million dollars a i think we can get this thing the thirty million dollars a year i remember telling connor i'm like i think we can do a hundred million dollars a year selling this wallet and he looks me in the face and he's like there was no fucking way in hell we're gonna do that right this was like twenty seventeen but they didn't really wanna run it all that much anymore right like they didn't wanna manage people so i'm like cool we'll do everything else so my agency kinda gets built around running ridge wallet we do their customer service we do their product import transportation we do all of their marketing we do their web dev and then i'm charging them like two hundred thousand dollars a month like all of the money is coming from rich wallet they end up being like sixty percent of all agency billable for my for my tiny agency and a certain point they're like hey we should just merge right so me and counterfeit an equity stake everyone of my agency just goes in house to ridge i end up selling off the agency to one of the people who was running it and that was probably twenty eighteen and since then rich has gone from you know thirty million dollars a year to over two hundred that's amazing what i what i love about that story is that it sounds like when you were running the agency like almost like nobody would in a business school would recommend hey you're running this marketing agency and then for one client you're gonna start doing customer service ill logistics support all all these other things it sounds like wrong to do that like how one customer is gonna make up sixty percent of your billable from a business school perspective that would be like a bad move but da said something wants on the podcast he goes with my first business he goes i i got i got mixed up later he goes just because i was ignorant doesn't mean i was wrong meaning i didn't know the right way to do it but my instincts actually were leading me in the right direction it just wasn't you know i didn't have like some sophisticated game plan and maybe it wasn't typical but it was my instincts were correct and it sounds like your instincts were correct that you should just keep leaning into the ridge thing even though it was like maybe you'd not what a normal age agent normal marketing agency ever would have done most clients suck like if you guys have ever done client work like most clients fight with you they don't pay you like there's always trying to fire you right and bridges a business was ran by really cool guys who didn't want to take any like range away from us they were very happy with the five million dollar of your business and they're like we could always go back to shipping the orders ourselves right like i mean the the guys are like you know buddhist like raised raised buddhist their whole eyes i think that's part of it but they were very much like hey this is a good thing these guys are grown this business let's give them more responsibility and you know you can't really exit agency businesses for all that much right one reason why we went all that rage did the merger is like an agency probably worth maybe one x client contracts and like maybe at the peak it was two x client contracts right so like if your clients you know if you have a guaranteed million dollars in revenue you might be able to sell it for a million or two where ridge at the time we're like fucking ten billion dollar bit your business right here we're gonna grow this thing the fucking moon so it just made sense to put all our chips in that basket what was the metric that you saw that gave you the aha moment where you were like alright they're doing five million now but this could be thirty this could be a hundred was there one or two metrics or was it just a guess what what was that research process like it just it just seemed like they could always put another dollar into facebook and it could work right like the limiting factor wasn't like marketing or awareness it was like the operations of the business right we end up like we had a year where we didn't have any wallets because we couldn't keep them in stock so like we went from fifteen million to eighteen million one year and that was just because we couldn't make enough of the fucking product and i'm like you know so often demand is the thing that stops these brands like he can only get to so big of an a ham and that wasn't the case here you know we we did like a wearable and it was so hard to get people to buy the wearable like the c on facebook was four hundred dollars back then okay it was like so fucking hard to get people to buy these wearables where the wallet it was like a six dollar act like we could just put up a new ad and they were just static images and they were just selling so there was the metric man that's like an interesting process because a lot of people myself included will say focus focus focus get it right make it great it's gonna take a decade plus but your story is more so like i tried this i tried this tried this none of it worked this thing was clearly the winner i should go all in on this is that what your recommendation is well my recommendation as a person trying to make it is you should make the best decision at the time so whatever the facts are when the facts change make a different decision right strong beliefs held held so like i'm like i'm at an agency i could've have just like did that grind and be like i'm gonna be a vp at this agency when i'm twenty six i'll make like two hundred grand a year but i was like no these people suck i think the best decision for me is to just do what they're doing better right and then from the agency to rage i'm like running an agency business i'm like running an agency sucks the rich thing seems to be going better so i should just do that instead i should find a way to to encourage myself inside of this business and then at i ran it was just like i mean for so long we did not launch any other products for eight years it was just selling more of the wallet because that's what was working as soon as this started to get a little hard then we pivoted everything else which is funny because i would have thought early on i would have the a a paralysis of analysis would have been like well there's not that many wallet like you're like if you told me two hundred million dollars a year in revenue i would say well you've you've sold every man in america a wallet like there are no more wallet buyers you know what i mean that's like what of my uneducated self limiting belief a little bit would've have been on that if you said two hundred million in a year i'm like well there are no wall there are norm no more people who need a wallet it did it's a weird big tam like the reason why like we in you know in retrospect other the reasons why will it worked it's a ten billion dollar a year tam okay and like most of that is luxury brands l sells like four billion dollars a year in men's wallets like curing they own gucci they sell a ton of men's wallets but then tapestry which owns coach coach does a billion dollar a year at men's sales so that's men's accessories no men are buying those products they're all gifts that are given to them and nobody's ever excited about getting those products so the reason why i like i i'm very public that i think rich can get to a billion dollars in revenue is because tapestry has a men's business doing a billion dollars year in revenue with nobody loyal or passionate about that so i'm just gonna make whatever they make in all of our cool colors in our cool materials and you know i think it's been so sexy to be talking about tech and ai these past ten years right or you know tech for ten years ai for ten months but i was at like the all in summit and i'm looking at those guys and like the products they're talking about existence inside their phones right like they exist in inside some service somewhere but they're all wearing and fucking cool suits and watches and leather belts and i'm like okay i'll just sell them all that shit right like i'm just gonna sell like all the like the most practical thing ever because also smart people don't enter the space right the reason why visual i was able to be so successful is because we're the only people running facebook ads for wallets like then there's been a bunch of other like people who've started up like and i've tried they've all end up going out of business because it's really difficult to get right right like there is no repeat business you can't like believe that the lt will come save you later it's very much like can you tactically acquire customers profit every single day hey hey brown sean white sean got that immigrant energy that i love he's got you know what i mean like he's got the what do you call the korean restaurant i called i called the a a korean a korean convenience store owner energy you know it's just like there's not like too too much think overthinking it it was like well you guys are all wearing this i'll just sell that right know what like yeah and i think you'll keep wearing this so you you know mu has these great quotes where he's like his his main things is like instead of trying to be brilliant just avoids stupidity or he'll be like you know the best thing in the world is stupid competition and we just have not much and stupid competition it sounds like that's part of what in retrospect made ridge work was you you were like hey look we took the simple idea and there's not a lot of other really smart you know d marketers that were doing this and so we were able to to make hay yeah totally man i mean and and to this day the best d marketers are working on stuff like you know ag one right like they're selling supplements and it's because it's a better business like undoubtedly if there's an lt tied to your business like it's going to be better it's gonna be more valuable it's gonna trade at a higher multiple but the other thing is like the best marketers have have more or less left the industry right like in twenty twenty one running an e com brand was incredibly cool it has gotten less cool every single year so there's less people doing it there's less voices there's less people talking about it and it's because it's fucking hard okay i i'm un joking call like the the blue collar work it's like you know everyone wants to be shipping cool ai products or everybody wants to be shipping you know something that isn't physical box access to people's doors of products you actually have to like make everyone wants to build you know the services of whatever so anyway yeah over the past four years it's gotten really un cool to do what i do do do do you guys on on two hundred million dollars in revenue are you able to good cash flow and profit or you know i know so many friends who have these companies and their numbers are huge but they cash is always an issue are you able to manage this well and or at that scale do you still struggle i think the reason why you guys asked me to be here is to talk about the fact that you can in fact make a profit running commerce brands so rich never raised any money we have no debt so every dollar in this business every dollar in my balance sheet his profit that has been reinvest i've been able to make millions of dollars a year for the past couple of years running this business so yeah it can definitely be done man like i i i bought a house in la directly because of selling wallets on the internet give us a sense of the timeline so you said kind of like i don't know it was twenty sixteen ish right when you when you guys merge or took over the brand but can you just give us kind of like a year one five five million when you when you started working with them that it went to ten that i went to twenty two then it you know give us a timeline yeah and i'm fucking horrible at timelines so i'll i'll i'll give it my best it's basically been it's like a fifty percent c since i started working with the business so i think they did a kickstarter in twenty thirteen the first year they do like a million of written revenue in twenty fifteen they probably do two or three when i meet them twenty sixteen they do like five million bucks so i think it went from five to ten to fifteen to eighteen and that's like the hardest year of the business when went from fifteen to eighteen that was like we had no inventory with this massive fucking tax bill that sucked that was probably twenty eighteen or nineteen when that happened twenty twenty we do fifty million dollars so i might i that must have been twenty eighteen it it must have been thirty so eighteen to thirty to fifty and then we then fifty this the covid year so one for fifty to a hundred and then it's been like yeah i mean last year was a i'll just say a multi hundred million dollar year so so let me let me let me let me recap that for the listener so you started in fifteen i didn't hear what you said but in until sixteen five million and then each year for that was five million ten fifteen eighteen thirty fifty a hundred with last year being multi hundred that's incredible growth yeah yeah something like that so it's been super fine man the you know and sam you brought up have i sold every wallet in america that was like one of your concerns right so like i said it's a massive tam right and i always say that like we're a great uncle gift like you guys are gonna go to christmas or you guys are gonna go to fucking a there or whatever and you have to buy some guy in your life of present and you don't know his size right the ridge wall it's a perfect price point you can get one on sales today for like seventy six bucks and it is size and like every guy in your life you'd be like hey look it has your favorite sports team on it or it has carbon fiber whatever else right it's a perfect uncle gift and most of our products are probably sold as gifts right some woman in their life buying it for some guy in their life and the wallets are about half of revenue right now the other half of revenues is all the other stuff we've launched so the biggest unlock we've ever had was in twenty twenty two we started selling men's wedding bands and once again this is a category where people thought it was so fucking dumb to sell men's wedding bands they're like it is a commodity good like who the hell is buying this the first year we do eight figures it is the highest margin fastest growing part of my company is selling men's wedding bands on the internet so let's let's talk about this because we're in this group chat that you you have which is like a bunch of bunch of d brands i don't i know what the cutoff is i think i'm like below whatever the cutoff was supposed to but you let me in which was nice to you you're in like the charisma higher yeah exactly i'm the personality here so so i you you talked about like going into new categories and like the wedding band was obviously a smash success you've said the wearable thing maybe it wasn't as big of a success if you had this kind of interesting way of looking at it because i just thought ridge wallets it's that kind of like the this sort of carbon fiber metal wallet company and you were talking about like mont blanc if you were talking about these other almost like luxury accessory brands and that was the vision you had for the company when did that vision kick in so like when did you reframe what the company is because i think entrepreneurs we hear stories where somebody already has the vision and they already have the right frame and it sounds beautiful and big and and really appealing but at the beginning they don't always have that you know mark zuckerberg there's a video of him on a couch somewhere and somebody's like are you can expand colleges he's like nah that wouldn't be cool and now he's i got satellites above india giving people internet so they can use facebook like you know your vision expands as you grow when did your the vision kind of change when did you reframe it and secondly how do you think about going into new categories yeah well i'm a very paranoid person so like in twenty eighteen i'm like this is gonna end we have to fucking find some other shit to sell so we got into backpacks and phone cases all this stuff pretty early in twenty eighteen and we the first year we did like four million dollars in backpacks sales or maybe was three million it was like a big chunk of revenue and we canceled that program because i was too stupid to know that was like actually a good amount of backpacks i was like i'm like the wall is doing twenty million dollars how can we can't do twenty million dollars in backpack in retrospect we've since relaunch backpacks so i was just too stupid right we were always looking for new products to sell mostly because i was worried that i was gonna sell every wallet to every man in america but as you learn more about the industry like the very common thing is very large hold ko holding lots of accessory brands like l is just an accessory brand like everything inside their portfolio just sell accessories mostly to women but there occasionally pop ups of like very strong men's accessory brands mont blanc is owned by rich multi own cartier like that is the strongest men's accessory brand and they do five hundred million dollars year you think it can be pens pens were like eighteen percent of revenue it's mostly just like small leather goods right and it's across the world people buy each other gifts like wallets and backpacks and belts and everything else so it's there's a playbook here it's like you have to find a group of customers who like you you have to continue to make products that they like fill it into them and i am more ruthless with product expansion than i think a lot of brands are and i think more people should just try they're really worried about hurting brand and i'm like your customers never fucking think about you like you're lucky if somebody is mad launched something like you know i always go to like bi is one of my favorite brands like they make lighter and they make pens and they make razors right and we buy all of those products independently and they're best i didn't even think of the i didn't even think yeah but you say that i'm like oh it's same yeah yeah and they're the best in class in all three of those if you want a disposable razor or a cheap pen or a lighter they that's the only one they they own those markets and it's just because the guy had a plastic factory and he's like he's it's it's a french company and they they're actually they they gotten into tattoo removal now right like they're making like they just bought a bunch of tattoo companies because they're like yeah whatever takes plastic we're just gonna do those things right and it doesn't violate anything in your brain because you just like that's just the way it's always been so i think it's more elastic than like than a lot of people want to admit and brands die it being too rigid by that like all birds should have got into fucking bedding or like all these different type of things but they didn't so now they're just a fucking dead shoe company right like you should just be so ruthless with that product expansion you're a very charismatic guy you you're you have a lot of interesting parts of your personality that i enjoy what attributes would you say are most responsible for the rigid success you think one it's a very trust forward organization it's a very transparent organization when i say trust forward six of us own it you know three of them are father son best friend like literally would die for each other and then me and my cmo o'connor i i lived with him for fucking five years so like the guy we i was talking last night there was a time when we were wearing the agency where we did not have a thousand dollars like we would have to take his dad gave him a car and it was like a nineteen ninety seven honda civic that smelled and like paint was peeling windows didn't work we would take it to meetings we would have to park it behind buildings so people didn't see us get out of this fucking junky car and you know tying it to that it's like not being not being scared to go back to zero right like i'm from like a very poor bad area where kids died of fentanyl all overdoses and like i lived in a flop house with like fucking like there was like fourteen guys living in the bunk beds when i moved to la and so like dude not scared to go back there so just more more willing to take risk things were never that bad also being willing to eat shit on my bro i if i have to fucking be a waiter i we'll figure it out right yeah so i yeah that that fort like not being like so ego tied to whatever the fuck you're doing if i if i have to pack boxes i'm gonna pack boxes right what of the ways people get e comm wrong so we've you talk about all birds right it was a a product that was hot and now the stock is you know dead there's you know a bunch of other kind of famous example of that and then there's companies like yours which is keep scaling profit you know never took a dollar a debt never took a dollar of investment and made it work what are the kind give us like your your version of the do's and don'ts and maybe just start with the don'ts like the dumb shit that people do the bad decisions that people make or the the common traps you see people fall into because i'm sure you you know you're that's your network is e com so you see the full spectrum people who totally flop people who grind away for years and get nothing out of it and people who excel and succeed yeah so you can't you can't out muscle lat tam so like understand what you're selling and how with the market actually is i see amazing operators waste time with horrible opportunities right like like the tam is what the tam is and if you're like the number one fucking garlic compressed seller like that's kind of a meme in the community like dude i'm like in your executing ruthless to be the number one garlic garlic breast seller that is worse than being the twelfth best cr gummy right because that market is exponentially growing there's lt tied to it like so many people just waste energy and time on these horrible fucking product categories so you can't you can't beat a tam you're not better than the trend so bone broth there was companies that exploded got the eighty million dollars in revenue it was like dude which this is the new way people are gonna consume calories bone broth that is now at a thirty year low because that's not the cool thing anymore right with keto stuff yeah exactly so there's a guy from iq bars named well he's incredibly smart he talks about his trend surface area so it's like look people start with your lux surface area he's like i make products to have as much trend surface area as possible so if keto hot i'll be keto if gluten freeze hot i'll be gluten free if it's sugar that's cool or non sugar like whatever i'll i'll make those products to just hit whatever the trend is and i'll just change my packaging so i'm always top a trend and you're not better than the trend right so that's the what trying to make is you can ride it up but it as soon as it crashes you'll crash with it and then my my third one the most controversial one is that lt isn't real like lifetime value only works if you're alive so most brands die waiting for lt right and what you mean by that is you gotta be profitable early on on customer you acquired if you acquire the customer for two hundred dollars and he only made you know twenty dollars and you're saying oh i the lt tv it'll all pay off that's kind of what you're talking about right versus the way you guys do it is you're trying to be profitable either first purchase or are you guys profitable first purchase or is it like you know a month or two later what where are you guys at do i have to be profitable in the first purchase you think people are coming back to buy our second wallet in a month like i'm like dude the the lt tv from wallet customers is like maybe in ninety days i get ten percent so like it's very much i have to be i have to turn not not not a contribution margin per like actual true paying for all my fixed cost every time i saw a wallet to somebody can we play a game called the change my opinion and this is for both of you guys i have a bone to pick with your industry i i think sean heard me with the spiel before what what frustrate me sometimes not exactly you guys but i'm gonna use you as an example but of people who they all they worry about is like the c and the lt tv and the the tam of these industries or and they don't spend any time actually thinking is this product awesome is this the best you know like it is this truly solving a problem and it bothers me sometimes that it's more of an arbitrage not exactly thinking about can i create a widget that makes a customer's life better and is of high quality i wish that more people in this industry sort of talked about that a bit more do you think that's a fair criticism or what where am i wrong on this do know i mean i think it's a fair criticism my industry has been washed out though so like the people you're talking about probably have all laughed it's that there's so few people left an comm like like sean brought up like the group chat maybe two people respond over single day and one of them me tab oh like it's it's like we're at we're at like a a multi a multi year low of interest in the industry so like yeah all all those people have left the people who are still here in shipping dude i bring a pe class you guys wanna talk about like amazing yeah yeah so like i'm very tweet about them all the time and like they inspired me because you said they'd like worked for three years finding the perfect pan okay so when i met danny it was twenty twenty they they didn't have a website he says they did but like you couldn't check out on the fucking website okay they they were fucking selling pans at trade shows and like county fairs cooking up eggs themselves right in costco road roadshow so not even in costco they had to pay to show up at costco and fucking cook up these eggs and they from twenty twenty they'll do i mean it's documented at this point over a half billion dollars a year like they they got to hundreds and hundreds of millions dollars in annual turnover with a hundred million plus in profit danny will fucking shoot me for saying and all this stuff but like i think it's all pretty pretty rare public you know go go joined the brand they have fox as an investor now pre all that they were doing nine figures in eb a year okay didn't gordon ramsay like write a huge check he didn't just like sort of join the brand he like invested a a pretty sizable amount or what was he part of around or was it him personally investing in it that's all public there's like there's like i thing he came in with fox on some on something and like you know because fa it's like a three way deal fox wants to give him money to make shows and he wants to get more equity in ex class it's like a big three way gotcha dude i have like twelve hex cloud pants in my awesome john they're great the you know i don't know if they're the best pants that i've tried a hundred pants but they're way better than the pants i had four and to the point where i bought a second set of them because i was like these are great i'd i'm happy with these pads yeah and they put years into that product development like they actually spit like they care about their customers what it comes at who's respecting your customers if you're just like that's why i don't like info products like if you don't respect your customers if you're just strike trying to arm them or like you know we have a customer name so our customers everyday dad we call them ed and i'm like almost every meeting i'm like are we respecting ed are we delivering value to ed right everyone has an ed in their life think about like your guy's brothers or your dads he's just like a guy who he likes widgets and like he loves fishing and like he loves nfl like that's fucking ed and i'm like look ed has ed has paid for everything in my entire life we need to take care of ed we wanna make sure ed gets like the best coolest shit possible that we give them great value and great deals and that's what har did and like and we're talking about like i think this industry a bad rap because so many people have entered it and so few people have left with any amount of money or like people who did leave with money like it was like a greater full theory they were just tricking somebody to give them money and then they bailed out but then there's companies like hex cloud wear there'll be a fifty year brand they'll be a generational brand and they're fucking crushing it so it's possible they're buying super bowl ads like i mean this is you know a they were bootstrap up until like two years ago like a bootstrap brand getting that done it's fucking amazing yeah i i think sam what you said is true that marketing skill is the core competency for most of the winners in this space most there's a key there's a couple who just really nailed product or community right and then they just they they built slowly brick by brick over over the over a decade but for the most part the people you'll hear about and the people you'll meet they're great because they are great at doing facebook ads and google ads or now tiktok content and so that's true but at the same time you're like oh i hate that says c to lt tv thing was like guess what when you sit down with your team you're like do we raise lt tv right like there's some natural gravity like sean's saying like you buy a wallet at every seven years you're not really gonna change that but like for my product you do buy it more way more often you know in the first six months we double our double the amount that they they've they paid us on the first order right so it's really it's a it's it's it's a movable number right we can actually affect that and then you're like alright well how do we increase lt tv it's like yeah you could spam them with emails you could spam them with text messages but guess what the better way to do it is to make an amazing product that they're gonna want to buy again and like lower the return rate how do you lower the return rate to get more profit right it's like make a better quality product and so i think that with you that for anybody who's actually gonna try to win you will have to make an amazing product otherwise you won't be able to do the the add arbitrage you're trying to do because how else could you increase the lt tv if everyone hates your product or it's not doing anything for them and so you know i think the the people who stick around and actually win in the long run are the ones who who do which you yeah i think there was a good answers answer to the to the question i think that like you know when i see someone making like boost your testosterone like thing or i'm like dude i don't know if any of this works or if they're just really good at making a label that's appealing and and so i like start to lose confidence in the industry as a whole oh going what actually and that's actually i'm actually curious if you guys have any of these like d brands where you're like this product is amazing so it's actually really good to hear that hex cloud as one of them do you guys have any other favorites well going back to the supplement side a lot of it is like i mean lot of this work is being done for like the the c manufacturers right like there's c packers that actually do all the formulation so a lot of times people are just showing up and buys itself off the shelf so if you're getting any sort of supplement like it's probably the same tilt white label a hundred times and that's just like the way the industry works so you know i put hard goods in a special category and like we talk about d brands i mean all of my favorite fashion brands are small and independently owned right like does that count like this is buck mason these pants or james purse right like i just got a sued from billy reid like these are all small independently owned companies right that are that are running they have shopify websites is that kind of d right it's it's very much like there's there's a a black box of bad wrap products and i think a lot of supplements that come from c commands right or anything to do in the health of wellness this space like that is like typically where there's a bunch of shit but if you buy wall wallet it you're you're gonna get what is on the package you know what i mean like or one of our phone cases or whatever it's like a fucking phone case man like it's pretty good what who who else is crushing it what are some d brands that we wouldn't know or we wouldn't really realize how how well they're doing just because we're not in the space we're not paying attention yeah the other reason you guys called me here to talk about the rub okay the womb is fucking crushing it the womb okay i so what are what are the womb so yeah we are we are three young adult men we're not the core customer right it is a crochet product so it is like you make little characters and they have licensing and like there's little education it's like basically like either it's you know young people doing it to have less screen time or it's you're doing with your kids so they have less screen time and that's awesome yeah do when i met them they might be they might have been doing ten million dollars a year like they in two years they've gone from ten to probably a hundred and fifty million dollars in revenue like no no capital raised they are still and i really i like them and i respect them they will not fucking launch subscription boxes they're like yeah we don't we don't think it's that important i'm like jesus fucking christ like if i could shoot these people i would because they won't do subscription it's like the perfect product like it is this educational it's fun it's connecting with your family like it's this movement against screen time which is like a big trend that they can take advantage of there's every month they can have new characters they could just show up in your door or you do them there's a little community aspect it's the single best brand and execution that i've ever seen like this will be a billion dollar exit because they're so fucking good at it they've never raised any goddamn damn money just like it's two people just putting it together in north carolina how did they even think of this like well how did this skip on the right were they big crochet what what what is the origin story of this yeah so i think it's a it's a husband her life team i think she was just crochet and she's like yeah i would love to have little guides and there was like an etsy community of people like selling crochet guides and she's like she would buy them and then she'd be like okay i'm gonna make my own and then she would you know release them and then it's like maybe i should just sell the my my little crochet kits and bam fucking explodes dude so like if you're listening to this and you're thinking like okay i want i'm i'm not washed out i wanna try e commerce i highly recommend getting into services first okay like you should learn how to make money on the internet via services and if the show's called my first million you you'll make your first million dollars delivering good value to people like me or like google's whoever else then find a trend that's very fast emerging right like i think no screen time i think cr team those are the two biggest ones to the next two or three years like if you can do a no screen time cr team crochet kit something fucking you'll figure it out right dude i i've spent so much money on legos lately for that no street time trend what are other no street time i thought like i feel like the micro plastics is another another trend right like an air quality yeah dude yeah so like just glass everything glass bottles glass containers what just like imagine if you could just buy a backpack and they're like we guarantee there's no plastic in it fucking awesome wrap it in paper shipped to people then that's another turn of things gonna be fast emerging yeah had no screen time just more physical tactical toys right like bringing back the fidget spinner but as like a focus tool right like i think there's a bunch of shit you could do in there but anyway those are fast emerging trends right now protein was a trend that's basically probably dead right pre protein was collagen there's always these just like pockets of success you'll find and that's the beauty of the space it's like you know what it is right now in that space what's the what's the early boob milk coke what's that called collage yeah yeah oh my god i've getting so many ads for q yeah you know the other one will be like i think raw honey i it it had like a small moment i'm sure it's gonna come back right there's like a bunch of new zealand honey companies and if you if you were a founder where would you kinda look for this do are you are you a proponent of look in your own life what what are you doing or what is your wife doing that seems unusual but actually there's a passionate community are you like ice scour etsy and reddit it is that where you would look how would you do this if you didn't know which trend to start with right so you should look in your own life because you probably don't have the skills to actually go out there and like like you know or it in i'm assuming you have no resources to actually pick a trend and double down and actually deliver on those promises right so you should find something in your own life that you actually know and are passionate about if you're more seasoned professional i think you can find those things right and really what it would be is i think red is dead i think etsy dead like that's ai s basically at this point the ins notification of the internet has happened to those two websites i would look at literally what's happening inside of erwin like i would just moved to la and go to erwin on every single day because they those are the best people are catching trends like they were anti backs in fucking nineteen ninety seven right like it's like well they are very very early on those things and if you're if you're not gonna do that then it's like you just you have to follow the girl is on tiktok right the the other one i bring up is pilates like pilates was a thing in two thousand it's having a massive resurgence right now and like once again we're three young men how are we gonna fucking make a pilates brand but pilates for guys probably could be another trend just needs a new name yeah totally well lap applause i think is what the actual name is oh no agree something like that my my my virus knows but yoga yoga is did very much account word trend right and like this yoga was just a not like a s for health and wellness and like you know non just jack dudes weight listing i think that's actually changing and it'll be something else like pilates or or something else what are some other going up and going down give me like a a topic or a trend and tell me is this a buyer sell moment well look this is not a hot take this is not scott gallo fucking but all all big box department stores like it's very very much like we just saw joins fabric go down we just saw container store go down we just saw party city like that's gonna accelerate like there's we are over commercial real estate there's too many big box stores like even target is having a really fucking hard time and my biggest wholesaler is best buy i crush it in best buy but all of that shit is probably the the fu isn't real enough it should be even more real like nordstrom macy's like i think small independent brick and mortar shops really do work like if you're in la you go to century city like but the i was walking around bloom dale and you know the like ten years ago it was or even twenty years ago probably it was like the like the the number one place to buy women's fashion like women contemporary fashion it was the coolest thing ever i'm walking around they got blouse that are eight hundred dollars and it's dead on a saturday like nobody's fucking shopping there at the that the best mall in la so i the i think the flood isn't even you should we should we should be even more scared that there's gonna be more collapses and any any sort of commercial real estate it's like ten thousand square feet plus that is like selling physical goods the other one is better better for you candy like there's like vcs have really backed this like better for you artificial sugar like you go to a fucking target like there's all of these like weird artificial sugar brands i think it it's gonna come out for that cause cancer and rf is gonna be pretty against it so anyway i'm probably not launching anything in there probably probably launching a real sugar and that's a very hot tape that could add age really bad that like real sugar is gonna make a massive resurgence what do you think about like you know these like other people who would do the same model you did services to products so for example i think the guys behind perez which is that i think it's a i don't know what it is like a mushroom drink or it's like a adapt ketogenic drink basically it's like out it gives you a high but it's not alcohol it's like it's a whim drink or something their website says bread is micro dose cannabis and mushrooms in a can yeah we okay great so it's a we drink those guys were agency people right i begged to be the first check and brass there's screenshots where they said they're were working on it and i'm like let me be the first check because aaron is incredibly smart he was the first person to figure out how to work with meta to have controlled substances be advertised so like he that's like his specialty like if you had a cannabis company you had to go through him and and his agency called we are lucid to actually do the cannabis advertising on meta right he found a compliant way to do it so he's incredibly smart makes an amazing operator rent a great agency that's the best model the other person is zach from homestead he a company called hollow socks like i don't know how much shy we have but to unpack history of review commerce e commerce one point o selling random shit on the internet okay like whatever pets dot com e commerce two point o was marketplaces it was ebay versus amazon for everything else e commerce three point o is where we consider d t one point o which was like the first brands coming online the all birds whatever else then you get d c two point o which was the covid hot the peak every everything exploding right we are now in d c three point o which is small service providers pivoting the brands with very lean teams and create gum hollow socks b the three best examples create gum has a team of eight people i think we'll do forty million dollars this year right hollow socks is a team of five people they'll do thirty million dollars this year selling socks most of meta ads right and then b they're public with their numbers follow erin on linkedin and i think they did five million dollars last month in revenue okay in beverage in a controlled substance that's fucking insane like that company worth three hundred billion dollars today right and i think their team's is incredibly small maybe maybe twenty people at this point so yeah that is that is the best bull case for e commerce right now service operators who seen like the verizon and fall of all these different brands have learned from them have spent their money to get good at ads right launching targeted hyper specific brands and the three i named are the best sean you should go go to drink bros dot com do you see their website that's the prettiest website i've ever seen in my life yeah that's usually not a good the prettiest websites are not usually the ones that that worked the best i hear you and i am on board with that this is one of the exceptions look at but i you know i think what what happens is you see the front the front of the house is not always where the traffic is going so you know the front of the house is the it's kind of the hero it's the brand it's the aspirational but you run your ads and maybe you're running straight to a pdp or to a tiktok shop or different things like that i think they're very heavy into tiktok right like the their model is the the tiktok blueprint which we just did a episode with with rob from yeah rob the bank about like the the tiktok blueprint that a bunch of the brands are using right now and i think b is doing that where it's organic it's it's kind the tiktok affiliate slash organic model where you're getting really cheap cpm because tiktok videos can just pop off and you you know you you're you're putting out thousands of pieces of content a month but and it's driving sales unlike the way you know i've been doing it or you've been doing it sean which is like a lot of you know facebook google ads you know you put a dollar in it's attributed exactly how much that that ad generated in revenue and you just sort of optimized from there the tiktok game is a little bit different it's a bit of a brand pray game for the most part yeah so i just sent you guys this is from aaron from b they did four point six million in revenue in month twenty one january this is their lincoln post so this is all public information that they share tiktok shop was thirty seven grand amazon revenue was three hundred and forty two i'm not gonna read this for the audience maybe it'll just show it but did their fucking kill it rest is awesome well they post their p and l basically every month on not it's not our actual p and l but like you know sort of a of marketing p and l on on twitter and linkedin it's great so so we could read this so total net revenue four point five million let's see that's in you said month twenty one now yeah yeah dude it's like then their ads they spend a million dollars on facebook four hundred thousand on google on tiktok ads they spent zero but i know that they must be spending on on the affiliate part of tiktok because i five i'm on tiktok i see bread stuff all the time and it's always an affiliate link you know swipe up and you can sort of buy it from there eleven in four hundred seventy two thousand it really seems like the one of the keys of this business like and this is not always the case but it's picking the right idea the right idea and the right angle it it it seems like there's no other way to explain how something can get to four million dollars in monthly revenue in twenty one months yeah i mean and and the reason they were able to be right is because they're both agency operators right like they the right people to launch a product like this and also it's so hard the reason why they're willingly sharing their p and l is they nothing to hide and they they don't think you can beat them right and i think anybody listening to this can't beat them because are they shutting down their agency or they just gonna keep trying to do both like why would you run your agency once this happens yeah i mean you end up just like you know selling it off or hiring operators i mean i mean nick of shack which was the partner in b i mean he had you know an events business he agency business he had an email business i think he just find partners to take that over and you just put more time into this but i mean early on i was like bull bet on these fucking guys because they're the best sam i want you to google nick shack ford tattoo and tell me if you wanna compete with this guy oh my god his whole body is covered yeah from the neck down to his toe every inch of his body is covered in a tattoo he looks like a like it looks at the guy from president break yeah it looks good japanese murder like you know how they do like the yakuza they do like the whole that's insane including his sick i mean he actually got it dime man he said it was so painful oh my god it looks horrible i mean it looks great but i don't wanna do it looks painful yeah that's what i mean that's insane what do you think rich is worth right now oh man i mean the the the market for a brand like us is at an all time low and like the like look well what's the all time load number we'd probably a market clearance price is probably three hundred million like i could probably clear that at the market with our growth and everything it's really hard to sell my business right now i'm like i'm not trying to sell my business right now right like i think we have like by the end of the decade we'll be doing like five million or six hundred million dollars a year in annual revenue really driven by this big tech rollout so like we're really big and best buy already we're gonna be an apple we're gonna be in verizon still in power banks phone cases cables we already sell our wallets it's in a lot of those places so that's like the next evolution of the brand is just more product expansion it's hard for me to sell my brand when solo stove is in a public company and i think they're worth may be a hundred million on the public market right like there's a they peaked the two point one billion dollars and now they're probably the market cap is a hundred million and they have like four hundred plus million in revenue they own chu ease like it's very hard for my brand do go to market when if you sq we kinda look like them and they are they they just need to be taken private there's a lot of take private things to happen and interest rates are still too high to take a lot of stuff private so we're just waiting waiting for all that what would you wanna sell if you weren't to rich if you had a sell rich today what would you what other product i mean you're not the guy who would stop what other product would you wanna sell yeah my goal for rich eventually i'm not the long term chef of this brand like if it's gonna go public or whatever or most likely get up one of the roll ups like in our industry that's next that's the x exit path there's ten strategic that buying brands like ours i would like to net a hundred million dollars and then i would like to start a portfolio of brands and services basically like you know everyone wants to have a their old little pe their old little family office type thing so i would launch a bunch of we little e commerce brands that i think are gonna be trend relevant and higher service providers to to run that as businesses i love that you know what you want you know you've mapped this out of like what your ideal setup is i love that i love people who call their shot do you you talk about trends like but but you know bone bone broth taught then it's not keto taught then it's not and so like why go after a trend if it's gonna ultimately you know do what trends do most trends don't last forever so is that like building your sand castle you know building your castle on quick sand or something like that like why why go after a trend when trends have this like shelf life are you trying to time and exit or are you trying to you're gonna pop trends what what's the plan if you're gonna build on top of a trend yeah did going back to will from iq bar trend surface area like you create a product in a trend because that's the the best way to grow is in a growing market you can be average in a growing market and grow very very fast right i was an average operator when facebook ads were growing and that's why i am my business grew now i can be a good operator because i have to be right but when a market's growing very fast you could just be average and then once once you get some sort of success it's it's pivoting so like if i was in the bone broth business i would have told them like hey we have to do fucking protein focused bone broth or we're bone bars like i i i'm that guy coming in here trying to like disrupt whatever fucking business i'm in i'm like we yeah if i was at bone bar i'd be like look that's fine we should do that we're gonna do bone bars and we're gonna get whatever some jack gotta talk about how they're great that have been the bars business then it'd be like we gotta do bone supplements whoever the only guy's doing bone whatever marrow pills like that type should i be pitching to them so the i love that that's your answer because it's like that's the attitude you have to have to win in that game my takeaway is band what a horrible game to play like know i was just doing a podcast yesterday with a guy and he goes you don't wanna be in the fresh produce business he's like you know you know he's like you wanna be youtube not a youtuber right just as a simple example he's like you you take the best youtuber and they're in the fresh produce business they have to keep running as fast as they can on that treadmill and if treadmill gets faster and faster every year and if they stop they fall behind and there's a thousand other people on that treadmill and so same thing like if you're on a trend and a trend you almost by definition it's gonna sort of peter out and then the new trends will emerge that just seems like a really hard way to win in business when there's other styles of businesses that don't have that problem right i think but but but sean i think you're both could be right i think the right answer though is to watch whichever whichever path you take should fit your skill set and interest and you should commit to it and be that you know we had mo on mo holly from native deodorant owner and we said like why don't you do something easier he goes because i'm a merchant this is what i do and i think that stuff is silly dude dale it's not silly i actually disagree i think committing to a path is significantly better than not and if sean frank is committing to this trend thing than he yeah it's exhausting for you because that's to a better path is that's that's that's not true what be how much better pack of it be he's got a ten year old company that's doing two hundred billion dollars in revenue that's like a good path yeah i i'm not saying what he's doing is bad i'm saying he's the he's a outlier winner and even he's like yeah there's a company that's like us that does four hundred million a year is probably and it's worth a hundred million on the public markets right or you know we have to continually hop you know from one category to the next and he's in a better one it's more enduring but let's say you're on the bone broth type of type of thing where it's a well this trend and the wellness trends or the diet trends they change very very very rapidly right it's like it that's a hard game to play compared to like you know look at the other look at the possible set of businesses you could go into that's that's definitely on the hard side dude like e comm is definitely on the hard side and e com on top of a trend is it is the hard version of the hard version oh dude look i i understand completely but the reason why i'm in it is because it's permission less when i was twenty two nobody would let me build fucking nvidia servers or whatever like you know a a more robust infrastructure led business right like if i was gonna provide i don't know fucking routing cable services some random shit like that like maybe now i you know i i can get into that but e commerce is permission list and that's why i like it an agency they're permission list it's like the reason why we hold on shopify is because nobody would give us a nordstrom po right like there's there's a a level there's a lot of things sas permission list communities are permission list and there's a lot of things that are permission newsletters are permission was whatever there's a lot of things that are permission list the agency one is actually more permission less than e com because for e com you have to buy inventory right there's a there is a capital requirement the agency wanted is different right that's just i'm gonna hustle my skills and i'll get cash flow then what you did was use that cash flow to then you know invest and continue to grow the brand right but for most people they they get i know a lot of people that got excited about e com and didn't realize like how scaling works with e com where yeah it's the it like it people sq and think it's saas and it's not it's like it's like your big your problems get harder the bigger you get right like it's bigger pos it's more management it's everything else where you know if you're saas it's like you know if it's if it's if it's ten zeros or a thousand zeros being processed through your thing that the fuck cares hey sure sean you you've gotten more you're you're a great follow on twitter because you're hilarious but you're this perfect combination of being hilarious but also i think you're right like because you've been there done that but has being as opinionated as you have been in willingness to call people out and this willingness to like say what you think has that ever held you back and do you regret doing that or do you think that like going all in on being a strong personality has benefited you i mean the only tangible negatives of being a public personality in the internet is is if and when you get sued because you will be sued right everyone gets sued and it's the cost of doing business they will read your tweets in deposition so just like that is the reality right i think a lot of people like don't want like fan you're like or what like what did you be by saying you wanna shoot the wobble family yeah do it no like i mean i was i got to deposed why i told someone i was gonna drop a nuclear bomb on them but they read that i don't rather explain like i don't have access to nuclear weapons sucks bill you should you should be yourself an authentic and my twitter has sold like three hundred thousand dollars worth of wallets so definitely it's it's a net positive and your podcast right so your personality and being public about what you guys how well you guys are doing with rich and being funny and opinionated led to you guys doing this e comm podcast and the e comm podcast pays you a bunch of money right like you guys are doing really really well off that so that's paid off in in a different way right you wanna talk about that yeah yeah so i only have like four minutes i gotta go to a call and them a real job maybe something think you guys don't know anything about but what we're talking about i think naps after this yeah so look the reason why i got public on the internet is because in twenty twenty two all of my friends moved across the whole world because of covid and i didn't hang out anybody and it sucks for everybody twenty twenty one twenty twenty two like i used to have a community of people who talking about e commerce and then they've all moved so i was just by myself and i'm like let me just get on twitter and start talking about e commerce and through that i made a bunch of great friends because it's a very lonely thing running a big business like you know my my best runs from high school one of them goes to like crime scenes and cleans up like when somebody kills themselves or whatever and the other one does garage doors so like imagine trying to tell them being like yeah man like you know i spent eight million dollars on meta but i probably should have spent like their they i'm gonna shut the fuck up so you want when you wanna find friends who you know can can you know have some sort of sympathy for what you're building so gone on twitter found those people they're all like you know jason from max clouds on there mike back from simple model he like two hundred million dollars selling fucking water bottles matt from po case we started a podcast yeah do dude what they call it's called operators so it's a it's a niche e commerce podcast we have spin offs we have marketing operators do that thing it'll build at least two million dollars to sponsors but it might be like four million dollars to sponsors and it's just us talking about e commerce probably one tenth the listeners leadership i mean the way last maybe one one hunt relationship you guys get but because it's so niche it's like way more of an actual like like community right and know i think people wanna be you guys because you guys are like an entertainment show right you guys are like a big show you know massive reach entertaining people but if you're listening to this and you're an expert or something do an incredibly niche youtube channel because you like the the sponsor integrations are just so much deeper like our sponsors fulfill the erp right and like you guys don't know what that is but if you're in new commerce merchant you need an erp and the annual contracts are a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year and we've probably sold a hundred of them right so it's like they'll give us six hundred thousand dollars a year because we're the only marketing channel for them right anyway yeah so we do a podcast broadcast i think that's great advice alright we'll we'll let you we know you gotta go go sell wallets and rings and other other great things we're so give shout out your twitter shout out your your url where where do want people to go okay go to ridge dot com slash sean and buy a wallet like that's the best way to support me right now in this time never stop selling guys we appreciate you man thanks for joining this alright that's the pod i feel like i could rude world i know i could be what i want to support from at all in it like a days off on a go less travel never looking back