354: 0 To 1 Million In 6 Months Selling Overlanding Gear With Andrew Youderian

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You’re listening to the My Wife, Quitter, Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into the strategies they use to grow their businesses. Today, I have my friend Andrew Udarian back on the show. And if you don’t remember Andrew, he runs the e-commerce fuel community of seven and eight figure entrepreneurs. Now for the longest time, I’ve made fun of Andrew for running a community of successful e-commerce sellers without having a store himself. But just when I planned on roasting him in this episode, he goes and runs overlander.com and completely redeems himself.

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So in this episode, you’ll learn how Andrew grew overlander.com to a $1 million run rate within six months. But before we begin, I wanna thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. Postscript is my SMS or text messaging provider that I use for e-commerce and it’s crushing it for me. I never thought that people would want marketing text messages, but it works. In fact, my tiny SMS list is performing on par with my email list, which is easily 10x bigger. Anyway, Postscript specializes in text message marketing for e-commerce and you can segment your audience just like email.

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It’s an inexpensive solution, converts like crazy, and you can try it for free over at postscript.io slash Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Klaviyo, who is also a sponsor of the show. Are you working around the clock to build the business you’ve always imagined? Do you want to communicate with your fast growing list of customers in a personalized way, but in a way that gives you time to work on the rest of your business? Do you ever wonder how the companies you admire, the ones that redefine their categories, do it? Companies like Living Proof and Chubbies.

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Well, they do it by building relationships with their customers from the very beginning, while also evolving in real time as their customers needs change. Now these companies connect quickly with their customers, collect their information, and start creating personalized experiences and offers that inspire rapid purchase, often within minutes of uploading their customer data. Now Klaviyo empowers you to own the most important thing for any business, the relationship between you and your customers and the experiences you deliver from the first email to the last promotion.

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To learn more about how Klaviyo can help you with your own growth, visit klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. And then finally, I wanted to mention a brand new podcast that I recently released with my partner Tony. And unlike this podcast, where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the profitable audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way.

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So be sure to check out the profitable audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

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Welcome to the MyWifeQuarterJob podcast. Today, I have my good buddy, Andrew Udaring, back on the show for, believe, the fifth time. Andrew is the founder of the incredible e-commerce fuel forum and community, and he is also the brainchild of ECF Capital, where he invests in e-commerce companies as well. Anyway, I haven’t had Andrew back in a while because, well, he’s been e-commerce-less for the past several years, and I started to wonder if he had any e-commerce skills left in the tank until now.

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Andrew just completed a six month project where he launched overlander.com and he grew to nearly a one million dollar run rate within that time frame. And today we are going to learn how he did it. So with that, Andrew, how you doing, man? I’m doing well. Thanks for having me on, man. I like how you slipped that you know, that just little subtle dig in the intro. Game on. You know, we were just saying before we hopped on the mic, I showed weakness and gave you a couple.

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compliments and a couple like confidence boosters on some of your work. And I was like, what am I doing? I’m getting preparing for like airtime here. And of course out of the gates, Steve hits first. So well played Steve. Just when I thought you had no skills left, you go and you totally redeem yourself. But no, it’s fun to be back. Thanks for having me on buddy. Yeah. So did I get the numbers right? You grew to almost a $1 million run rate within like five months. Is that right? Yeah. We launched the process. We kicked it off like first day of anything. We had no brand or, or

04:04
We just had kind of a concept, high level concept started July 1st. We launched the day before Thanksgiving, kind of came in skidding, but got it launched. And we, by the end of the year, so kind of that trailing just slightly over a month, we were just shy of that million dollar runway. So crazy. Can you explain to people what overlanding is actually? I don’t even know, but it’s right up your alley. know. Yeah. So overlanding is, I think there’s a lot of definitions about it, but I think it’s probably it’s the

04:36
vehicle-based exploration in remote or international areas is probably a way to best think about it. So if you’ve seen, there’s a lot of people who would argue over this definition that are kind of in the, you know, deep within the niche. yeah, if you’ve seen pickup trucks with like rooftop campers or rooftop tents rather, big, big, know, big tires, light bars, those kinds of stuff, those are kind of oftentimes overlanding rigs. So it’s, we have Jeeps and things that just go to, you know, rock crawling is like, if you have just a really, a very beefed up

05:05
rig that’s designed just for off-road stuff, the craziest off-road stuff you could ever encounter. That’s not really overlanding. It’s more about trying to explore kind of remote wild and international destinations with your vehicle. Would you consider your West Falia like an overlanding vehicle or no? Yeah, I think it would be it’s again, some people in the niche would maybe take issue with this. I’m going to forward this to them right after. I just come out of this whole world for six months, know, so it’s I gotta be careful.

05:32
I would say yes, just because we’ve it’s I’ve done a lot of modifications to it, you know, for off-grid living solar, you know, kind of increased improved suspension and lift ground clearance. It’s a four by four vehicle. So yeah, I would say so, although it’s probably not one of the more kind of traditional overland. I’m going to post on the overlanding forms after this. You daring claims to be the ultimate overlander.

05:55
in his Westphalia. you can also do it like you can also do it in a Subaru, right? Like, you know, or it’s more about I think it’s less about one thing overlanders love is they love geeking out on their their vehicles and their build kits almost as much maybe as traveling, sadly, myself very much guilty here. But I mean, you can you can overland in a Subaru. It’s more about, you know, getting out exploring and traveling and seeing places than building, you know, the sickest race.

06:20
So how did you come across this project? Cause it was from scratch, like you said, and then that run rates just incredible for such a short period of time. Yeah, normally I don’t end up doing kind of consulting projects. I haven’t done one, I think, since starting the business, but it was a collaboration between two people. One, Drew Sinaki, who’s a good friend of ours, who’s the CEO of Auto, anything they had wanted to get into the overlanding space. And then I went to college with a couple of good folks over in Bozeman, Clay and Rochelle Croft, and they’ve built over

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the last 10 years, this really great overlanding YouTube series called Expedition Overland. And so they were partnering up to launch this. Expedition Overland was bringing the audience and also bringing the kind of the creative and the expertise and a lot of the vendor relationships. Auto Anything was going to do a lot of the logistics and the customer service and the shipping and things like that. they were joining forces and they needed somebody to…

07:17
kind of run point on getting the project off the ground. so, yeah, originally just kind of was joking with Drew about it as just kind of a joke, but then he kind of came after me hard and pitched me on it. And I thought, you know, like both these people, I like the space. I’m really tired of Steve giving me a hard time for not actually having an e-commerce project in the works for the last couple of years. I mean, just to get him off my back would probably be worth it alone. so was this considered like one gigantic influencer project kind of? No. So the, the part, I mean, the big roles for me was

07:46
My responsibility was developing the brand. what was, how were we positioned? You know, what would our, was the brand identity, know, logos, colors, unique selling propositions, voice, things like that. Picking out, you know, kind of helping define the catalog and what we were going to sell. Kicking off a private label, a series of private label products. So we ended up, we haven’t got them on the site yet, but they’re, they should be in pre-production or almost very close to that at this point. Probably, you know, about 10 different private label products, helping with kind of the marketing phases.

08:16
and marketing strategy with to kind of help the auto anything team kind of get that launched. And those were those are the big kind of silos that I was and then also the website development. So working with ended up had the chance to work with Kurt over ether cycle to build out the website. So those were kind of my five levels of responsibility. Actually, you know, the site kind of reminded me of right channel. Yeah, it’s it’s it’s you know, it’s almost like it was architected by the same person. It’s crazy.

08:43
Hey, can we talk about product sourcing real quick? how did you get so many products up? I mean, there’s a ton of products up there. How’d you get it up there in such a short period of time? Yeah. How many are there first of all? I think we ended up with like 12. It was probably 1500 to 2000 skews. Right, that’s crazy. Yeah, it is crazy. one of the, you know, we wouldn’t get into this, but.

09:07
Yeah, I mean, definitely there’s a lot of stuff on there. I’d still love to beef up in terms of the product listings and the, the, some I’m not even talking about that. I mean, just getting the sources and the suppliers for that. Yeah, it was, you know, some of it was nice because AutoBuddy thing had existing relationships with maybe half of the vendors. And then the other half we kind of had to had to go out and kind of court, which was sometimes super easy because of existing relationships with the Expedition Overland team. And sometimes it was having to call them up and pitch them and convince them. And so, yeah, but it was,

09:36
It was, uh, and it wasn’t just me doing it. was doing a lot of the vendor identification and the product selection, but then there was also people over on the auto anything team that were able to pick up the ball and run with those relationships. I how do you decide what to carry in this space? Or do you just say, Hey, we may as well carry as much as we can. No, that wasn’t so it was part of shaping like a big push. The brand was thinking about how do you, how do you stand out in this space? And the vision for it was a couple of things. One, be a place where you can go to really.

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long, know, can the intermediate vision is be a place where you can go to get most of the quality items you’d want in the overlanding space. So like a backcountry.com for overlanding, because overlanding the market right now, there’s a lot of little niches like these people do storage really well, these people do bumpers really well, these people do suspension really well, but there’s no destination where you can get a lot of most of what you need from one spot. So that was a part of it. The other big part of it was to focus on quality items. From a perspective of, if I go to the site,

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and I buy anything on the site, I know it’s not going to be garbage. So a pre-vetted process was a big part of the brand selling proposition. And so a lot of the stuff that we have is stuff that Expedition Overland has actually used over the last decade and really can speak to well. Like, hey, we’ve used this in, you know, super long expedition trips. We know it’s fantastic. You can count on it. And we actually put a little star, a little Expedition Overland approved badge on that stuff. surface it to the top. So.

11:03
it’s kind of an automated process. So every category you land on, the stuff that they use and like the most automatically rises to the top based on kind of a filtering algorithm in Shopify that we put in there, or Kurt put in there rather. So, and then everything else, even if it’s not though something that that team has used and maybe it’s something that I just saw, I thought looked like it was interesting and I put on, I decided we want to put on the site, it still meets a certain quality threshold. There are certain brands in the space that I’m not gonna throw under the bus, but just they’re not great. Like they’re cheap, they’re not super well designed, they’re…

11:32
They’re kind of ginsy, right? And that’s the kind of stuff that we just aren’t going to put on the site. that was the filter. Those two things were kind of the filters that we used on building out the product line. So the value prop basically is a curated set of products endorsed by, I forgot who the influencers are, but basically you’re not going to get any sort of junk if you go on there. You have that guarantee in there. Yeah. The tagline for the whole site is proven gear you can trust. Right. Nice. Nice. Okay. And then, are most of these products drop shipped or do you guys carry any inventory at all?

12:02
Yeah, combination of both definitely more drop shipping, but there are some items that the auto anything is is is stocking and shipping as well. Okay, so you keep mentioning auto anything. So auto anything is Drew Sinaki’s company. Yes. And are the resources kind of shared then like he has warehouses for certain things? Yep. Yeah. So they have a warehouse three PL that they use. And it’s a very managing kind of supply chain or fulfillment, all that kind of stuff. So yes, it’s and there’s kind of a there’s a big

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there’s a kind of a split of responsibilities between what both parties do, know, Drew’s Company, Auto, anything, and Expedition Overland. But yeah, they both have kind of their roles and some of that is, you know, like marketing is overlapped. They’re both trying to help on marketing. But yeah. Can you comment on the decision whether to drop ship a certain item versus carrying inventory on a certain item versus even private labeling? You mentioned that in the beginning. Yeah. So, I’m going to private label first. So we looked at the items that the items we want to private label are ones that are

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fairly universal. If you want to be able to build out your own line of suspension for vehicles, that is tough. Because, you know, even in a limited universe of overlanding vehicles, let’s say there’s only 20 vehicles there as opposed to the hundreds or thousands that exist in the automotive universe, that’s 20 vehicles over 20 years, 400 different variants potentially, maybe let’s call it 50 if the body styles don’t change as much.

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But that’s just a lot of skews you have to build out in different unique products based on how things work. So compare that with like a rooftop tent that you can mount on a vehicle that maybe you have a few different configuration of mounting bars, but more or less it’s vehicle agnostic. Those are the kind of products that we try to gravitate towards on the private label side. So that was how we determined, and then just also stuff that people can use on a regular basis. And it is not insanely technical.

13:57
We didn’t want to get into suspension because suspension is insane. Like there’s no way, unless you spend a ton of time in R &D and suspension, you’re going to make something that’s going to rival what people have out there. that’s how we kind of thought for private label. private label is for more broad based items, basically. Yes, definitely. then all super less, know, that are less complex as well.

14:20
For dropship versus inventory, sometimes it would depend on the vendor. Sometimes the vendors would say, we just don’t dropship. So if you want to sell our stuff, you got to stock it. So that’s a no-brainer. just go that route. you comment on what the minimums are? these are expensive items, right? For the most part. Yeah, they are. It depends on the range. I mean, we sell cook sets that cost 30 or 40 bucks all the way up to suspension kits that cost $4,000. So yeah, they kind of run the gamut.

14:48
But in terms of how much they make you buy in terms of minimums, it usually, I mean, is it under like hundred units or? Yeah, we could definitely, there’s definitely some orders that we were able to buy for well under a hundred units, you maybe even, and the more, the higher, I found this the higher price point, the lower the minimums tend to be too. So I didn’t personally wasn’t involved with buying any, and I don’t even know if we’re buying any suspension stuff either, because again, that’s high price point.

15:16
most of the things we had to buy, most of the brands we stocked were on the lower side of that price threshold. Because I think, and I found this in my experience selling higher end electronics in the past as well, the higher price point and the more, the wider the skew base, the more likely a supplier is to let you drop ship. Because it doesn’t like, going back to the suspension thing, how would you expect any dealer to carry 50 skews at

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or $3,000 a pop unless they’re enormous, you national distributor. Like that’s just a tall ask because you’re getting into the hundreds of thousands of dollars just to carry one product line. either that or you specialize in a specific vehicle or something on your site, right? Exactly. Yeah. I’m just kind of curious and maybe you weren’t involved in this, but how do you know how much to carry of each thing? I mean, we’re talking like thousands of skews here. So, and each one has to be scrutinized. How do you make that initial order? Yeah. So we, you know, we definitely

16:14
again, so we’re drop shipping more stuff to begin with versus stocking. so that was that made that made it easier. But I will say a couple things. One, it helped a little bit with my industry expertise. I don’t have nearly as much as like expedition overland guys, but I’ve done it enough to have a rough idea of maybe what’s going to resonate more with the audience. So early on, it was partially guessing like saying, Hey, you know, we’re gonna, you know, order these three or four

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coffee kits or mess kits. think this one probably based on my own experience of camping and overlanding has a better fit. So let’s order more of these. Part of it was I would go on amazon.com and I would see what products had the most reviews and seemed the most popular and had the highest sales rank. And that can give you a sense too of like, Hey, okay, this one’s probably going to be more popular within the line. Let’s maybe double, know, double or triple the amount that we order here versus the other ones. And then also part of it’s just guessing. Like it’s, you don’t know when you’re ordering for the first time, you’re

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you’re taking a guess. And when we got to the point where we were considering some reorders, it was nice because you had a sales history, but part of it also is just taking your best guess. also, airing more towards getting data versus trying to make the most money upfront. when I was talking to our buyer, the guidance I gave was like, hey, let’s air on the side of caution early on. I would rather, even if there’s price bakes that aren’t, you

17:38
the price banks are huge, that’s one thing, but if they’re not enormous, let’s just plan on reordering again in a month and get a sense of how this is working versus placing a huge order and being stuck with a hundred of these items that we can’t sell because we were wrong. What about pricing? Are you guys kind of like on the higher end in terms of pricing or are you priced like everyone else? No, kind of. It’s reselling existing items at this point online and I think it’s hard if you have a

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a really premium price, I feel like price parity, especially for for selling existing items is is kind of table stakes for for a lot of niches. And also a lot of the products that we do have minimum advertised pricing guidelines in place. So which actually is nice if you’re trying to compete on quality, having that map pricing if it’s enforced well is a good thing because then you don’t have to it’s not a race to the bottom. So usually we’re in line, I’d say with with most places. Okay.

18:34
All right, so the main value prop really is the influencer aspect of it and the curation. Yeah, main value prop is the curation, the influencer aspect, and also the guarantee. One thing we have is a 60-day trail-tested guarantee. So kind of like REI, if you’re familiar with them, they’re really good about taking stuff back. so same thing, like if you order something, it doesn’t meet your expectations. And even if you use it, you know,

19:02
we’ll take it back for 60 days. And so it’s a little bit of a risky gamut or bet rather, but the thought process that went in behind it is like from personal experience, people pour unholy amounts of money into these types of vehicles, like just insane amounts. And if you can become a source where when you buy from us that you know the stuff is gonna be good and we’ll stand behind it, you maybe you lose $500, you know, on an air compressor that

19:31
technically nothing was wrong with, but people didn’t like it. But if you can gain that trust and that trust to the end consumer, I mean, the chance for lifetime values in the, you know, 10, 20, $30,000 over the of five years is… mean, it’s people spend… I mean, it would be, I think for people not listening, Steve, I mean, what do you think a decked out, if you took a brand new Jeep and decked it out with a lot of overlanding stuff, you could spend $50,000 on the Jeep. You could easily spend…

20:01
$30,000 just on the overlanding upgrades. So you spend more on your Westphalia alone, right? Not quite, it’s, mean, it’s a, people get, it’s like a lot of things. People spend more money than you would, than you would expect.

20:21
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20:49
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21:19
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L dot com. Now back to the show. No, yeah. So I just, just to be clear that you’re drop shipping a lot of these items and what are their guarantees? Are they 30 days? And obviously it can’t be used, right? If you return it to the manufacturer. Yeah. And to be honest, that’s, that’s a good question. And that’s not something I, that is not something that I think it varies. I think most places, they don’t have the same level of guarantee.

21:49
So there’s definitely gonna be times where we bring things back, we can’t sell them and that’s gonna be part of, to be honest, kind of, part of my role was to come in, build the concept, architect things, get it launched off the ground, get the ball just moving and then hand it off to somebody shortly after launch. I kind of stepped away about a month after the launch. Right, for the logistics. Yeah, I understand. But Auto Anything, from what I understand, had an infrastructure for some of these things already.

22:15
Yes, yeah, they did. So I think the taking the stuff back on the 60 day time period is probably, I don’t think they had that in place. And I’ve chatted with kind of the new leader over there that took the reins from me. And were talking through some options. But I think yeah, I think potentially doing kind of, you know, used gear sales one off, or contests or giveaways or you know, there’s a lot of options you can do with it. But yeah, it’s gonna, there’ll be some creativity required for some of those things coming back for sure. Okay, let’s shift gears and talk about sales.

22:43
How does one get that insane run rate in such a short period of time? So it’s I mean a big a huge part of it was Having access to auto anything’s at least from the from the beginning their email list So they’ve got you know, they’ve got an enormous email list and the hundreds of thousands and so we were able to go through and pick We were able go through and pick all of the you know vehicles that were very relevant and target those people

23:11
So there’s a lot of immediate crossover there. you just start? This is just I’m just thinking myself how I did this. Can you just start emailing as Overlander? That was so we this is something that I didn’t think through as much as we should have. What we did early on, yes, but what we did is we co branded it. So we sent it from the auto anything address and said, hey, auto anything is proud to present this new brand overlander.com. And so we did that, but it came from auto anything. But we were able to do that for two or three times.

23:41
But after that, it gets harder to do that over and over. We had to start moving more to an overlander list. And we lost a lot of those because I think we were starting to, the email team at Auto Anything was starting to talk with Klaviyo. And you can’t do that, no. So we can’t just move the email addresses over. so that was a part that kind of slowed down our growth after our initial launches because we thought we were going to have access to 100,000s of contacts. But we ended up with a much smaller list.

24:09
Why couldn’t you continue to email as auto anything? Like what were you seeing that caused you to believe that you couldn’t do that anymore? Well, I guess we could, but I mean, to really build an identity, you kind of want to have it be its own site as opposed to always piggybacking off something else. There’s also a fairly, you know, the auto anything email calendar is pretty packed. there was a bandwidth issue. So it was really nice to kind of for that initial push out of the gates, but, yeah, it was.

24:36
it was a little tricky to, it was not quite as seamless as taking all the addresses and emailing them over for the new brand. So how do you move such a large quantity of people over to a different domain? Do you have them opt in again? Yeah. And you know what, to be honest with you, that was something we were kind of in the middle of when I stepped away. I don’t, part of it was looking at, yeah, you have them opt in again or have something very clear where they say, hey, click this link or sign up.

25:04
to be able to reenter your email address or run contests. So we were kind of in the middle of trying to figure that out. We definitely had some opt-ins. We had a list we were building from the opt-in page. We had a contest that we ran when we launched it that was generating a lot of emails. We’re a good number for at least for a new site. So it was hard. We had some ways to do it, but it was, yeah, it was tricky. Yeah, I’m just trying to think. I mean, you can’t like send them to a form again, right? You’ll probably lose like the majority of your people.

25:33
You will. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s it was slower going building that dedicated list than we had hoped. Okay. Yeah, I didn’t I didn’t answer your questions. The way we were doing it or thinking about doing it, kind of a mix of both. Having people click links in an email that was very clear, like, hey, you’re signing up for this list was one having people re opt in was another one having a contest that we gave away kind of like a overlanding trip in Montana was another way. Sales, of course, were one that piggybacked off of the

26:01
emails to the larger lists. But yeah, it’s a lot harder than just, you know, kind of piggybacking off an existing list. So that was a good source of sales. mean, was that a large percentage, would you say? I would say, yeah, I would say probably, I’m just guessing here, probably not as on track with the analytics as I should have been, but I would guess probably 30 to 40 % of the sales were from email, but that’s just a guess. So kind of like on par with what a typical store gets from their email.

26:31
I think that because we had such a large list to blast from the beginning, I don’t think the typical store gets 30, 40 % from their email. If I hear somebody doing 30 to 40 % of their revenue from their email, to me, that’s an outlier. And I think the only reason we were able to do that is because we had such a large list and we were starting from zero. Do you get 30 to 40 % of your sales from email from Bumble? Yeah, actually it’s 30 for me. then think Mike, back when he was running Color, it got like 50%. Wow, well, that’s Mike and Jen.

26:59
Oh wait, did I say that out loud? I’m What was I going to ask you next? What about the influencer side? What were you most involved in actually on the project in terms of getting sales? Yeah, so it was kind of a little bit of everything on the marketing side. The influencer side was harder than I thought. It just took longer than I thought. There was a couple of people I reached out to and it just was trying What about the main influencer?

27:25
Oh, I see what you’re saying. Yeah. So they were they were great. That part was not harder than I thought. They there’s a number of things we did with them. They have an email list already and a great presence in the space. So they sent out multiple emails to their lists. They were really active on social. They promoted a contest that that I put together that was kind of like a become a team member for a day. And so I mean, they these guys have been they have a great following a lot of people follow them. And I was like, Well, how could we incentivize people to sign up?

27:54
for our contest. So was like, well, if these people could fly out to Montana and hang out with these guys for a day on a real overlanding trip, like actually join the team for a day or two, like that would be pretty sick, I think in a lot of people’s minds. Oh yeah. Okay. I was about to say, I hope the contest wasn’t to hang out with you for a little bit. No, no, no, not to hang out with me. No, that would have generated zero, zero interest. So yeah, was, so they, we put this contest together and there’s, we used gleam.io to run it. Nice. Yeah. And so like the way you, the ways you enter our

28:23
you know, visit their YouTube channel, go to Instic, check out their Instagram, sign up for, know, make a purchase, subscribe to the email list, all this kind of stuff. And so get some good traction that way. The big ones were their email list, the contest, and then social media were really the big three ways that they helped promote and launch and push the brand. I’m thinking about this more from like in the future, maybe it makes sense to partner with some influencers. Do they actually have equity in this company? They do, right? So I’m not going to speak to there just between

28:53
Okay, they definitely have a partnership where they’re they they both have a, you know, their partners in this. so I don’t feel like can speak to the other I don’t need the numbers. I was just kind of curious, like if I’m to go all out and promote with my email and all that stuff, I got better have a piece of the company is what I was thinking. They definitely have a they definitely are aligned in interest in terms of Yeah, they both share the upside. I can say that. So okay, I mean, this is actually a really interesting model then, right? If I want to launch a store, it might make sense to just go up to like,

29:21
famous influencer to say, I’ll handle all the ecom stuff. You take a piece of the company, you just help promote. It’s interesting. Yeah, I mean, I think you think about the future of ecommerce and how, you people talk a more about communities these days talk a lot more about, you know, these, you know, the big companies, three or four companies with a big stranglehold on on traffic and, and attention and eyeballs. And yeah, I mean, they’re, they’re almost like tiny little micro platforms with huge amounts of trust and authority.

29:51
Right? Yeah. So yeah, I mean, think it depends on your structure and depends on you got to make sure you have a good working relationship. And it’s always one thing that I have learned from this project, from the ECF capital deal we did from just from, you know, other things in the past, or just this last six months is that anytime you start having multiple parties come together on a business, you just need to think a lot more carefully about incentives and how people are compensated and

30:18
It just gets more complicated. You gotta give a lot more time and thought to it. But if you can set up a structure that works well for everyone and there’s a good working relationship and like people bring unique things to the table, yeah, it can work well. So yeah, maybe I’ll have Sanaki come on and talk about actually how to align those incentives. That sounds really interesting. Yeah. What would you, what were you saying? That was a struggle with other influencer marketing. Oh, it just, it just takes, you know, so there’s a lot that I was trying to do, especially on the home stretch to get this thing launched. And the, just reminded me of how

30:48
I was trying to do the influencer outreach apart from our main influencer, we just kind of similar influencers, trying to do that manually. And there was two or three people that I took a run at to try to do that. One of them kind of worked out, but it took longer than I thought. The other one we got halfway down the road and then things fell apart because they realized that some of their other sponsors weren’t happy with it. it just, it took longer than I thought and I was trying to do it manually. And so it just, was more of a, you it didn’t go as faster as.

31:16
wasn’t quite as productive as I mean, is there a more automated way of doing it? I always think of influencer and stuff is pretty manual in general. Yeah. And that’s what I was trying to think. And I know there’s some platforms where you can go and like pick, you know, pick a bunch of influencers and, and post your offer and people can bid on it and stuff. And I have no personal experience with that. And so maybe it does work really well, but I just for a small niche market like this, where you want to get good results and you want to have a personal relationship. Like I would personally rather have

31:43
three to four really strong long-term relationships with very on-point influencers in a niche, then have like 20 people tweet something, or post a couple of Instagram posts for something and then to collect $400 and then that’s the end. I just feel like that, I don’t know. You know this too. I model is pretty much dead actually. Most influencer relationships now are a little bit more long-term. Think about us, right? The sponsors for our podcasts.

32:11
Both of our sponsors are long-term prospects that like I would continue to promote Regardless, you know just because I’m a big believer of the product I mean that I think that’s just where things are are going towards No, I think so too like, you know, Clavio the sponsor even a long time sponsor of the ECF podcast and the event and stuff I mean, it’s that was something that Yeah, I mean that took a couple years to really cement that relationship and you know, they’ve been sponsors for you know Three or four years now. So it’s I don’t know when I look back at my business

32:40
career and history online, the real big wins, both both it’s not in the volume, it’s in like two or three or four really deep relationships. So yeah, no, totally. mean, Clavio, Postscript, Emerge Council on my end. mean, I’ve been with those guys for multiple years now, and I feel a tremendous amount of loyalty to these companies as well. Yeah, agreed. So I’m just curious, did the Overlander guys, did they have any contacts? I mean, I imagine they’re they know a lot of people.

33:10
Influencers also. Oh, yeah, they were they were I mean they were great and so I probably again I probably did not tap them as much as I should have on the influencer side Just again because I was trying to do do the marketing. It seems like you had like a huge broad range of responsibilities There’s a lot right? No, I mean to the point where did you have a huge staff under you or we had yeah I mean between and I was so I kind of dropped in and was coordinating with There was a lot of people in the auto anything

33:39
side that we’re doing stuff. mean, all in all, people that were working on this project that I was, yeah, I would say probably wasn’t directly managing, but they were involved. And I was trying to either work with their team leads or manage directly, probably 20 plus people at, you know, when you counted everybody. So, yeah. So you were like the glue that held everything together in a way. Is that accurate? Like the

34:04
kind of non-sticky duct tape that tried to keep everything together. So you’re like Draymond Green on the Warriors. No, no, I don’t want to be related with any kind of relation, any kind of analogies between your Warriors, man. Well, OK, let’s switch gears again a little bit. I want to know what you learned and if anyone wanted to just have some sort of partnership with an influencer and start an e-commerce store this way and kind of ramp it up. What did you have to deal with and what did you learn from this project?

34:33
So I’ll hit a lot of the kind of high level things that I learned and then we can dive into any of these more if you want. I did a whole episode maybe be kind of to link up to do that kind of goes into these. Yeah, we’ll link that up. people really want to, you know, are up for the kind of in-depth story. But I think the things I learned were, I think it’s amazing what you can get done in five months when you have to like Steve, you and I have been doing this a while. You kind of get into a cadence, you get into a rhythm and when…

34:57
you have a limited time frame to execute on something and there’s a level of like, okay, we really have to ruthlessly prioritize. We have to get this launched by this time. A lot of people are depending on it. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It has to be decent. Like it’s amazing what you can get done. So that was cool. I think of you as a perfectionist, is that accurate? Yes. Okay. So this must have been really hard for you. was very, it was that aspect was very challenging for me. Yes. What were some of the things you dropped on the floor? The, know, looking at the site when we launched the quality of the listings.

35:25
was not where I had hoped it would be. And that has to do with a number of things that don’t just have to get into, but like you’re selling existing products. It’s really important to have some kind of informational ad, like really good, rich media, great descriptions, details about that overcome objections to people buying with this fit. How will it fit? What vehicles is it great for? And there was some of them, some of the products, especially the ones that we worked with our influencer partner on exhibition overland were really great. They had custom media photography, stuff like that.

35:55
but a lot of them were not where I’d hoped to be. we just, there’s no way we were going to do that for 2000 products in five months with coming up for the brand from scratch. So, so I was going to ask you then, so you took all of your own photography and everything, right? No. So for some of the products we did for a small section of products that were in that kind of upper echelon of recommended products, we used a lot of photography from the influencer, a lot. would say the majority of products have. Oh, that’s what I meant. It’s not the manufacturer’s photography. It, it, well on a lot of products it is. Okay.

36:24
How do you decide which ones to really focus and hone in on versus just using the manufacturer’s photos? Yeah, it’s, mean, it depends on what the kind of going back to that curated approach, the stuff that the influencer had used in the past, like those expedition endorsed product, XO endorsed products, the ones that we were, know, we knew were popular were industry staples, and that they had a lot of experience with. Those were the ones that we kind of dedicated the time.

36:55
to get photography, shoot photography, shoot videos, things like that for. Does the 80-20 rule apply here? Like, did you mostly sell those influencer products? Yeah, I would say it definitely, it helps out there. Another part, yes, I would say generally, yes. I would say this holiday season was a little bit of an anomaly too though, because we had huge supply chain issues. This is another thing I learned is like, okay, doesn’t matter if people want your product, like if you can’t sell it, like it was challenging about Black Friday, because we were putting together some of the big mailers for like Black Friday, Cyber Monday.

37:25
there’s a lot of stuff we wanted to sell that just we couldn’t because the vendors didn’t have it. So we had to go through and like rejigger the products that were on sale a couple of times. And then also there was map pricing on a lot of items too that we couldn’t undercut. So to be honest, like that Black Friday sales email was tricky for both of those reasons. So let me ask you about like being in stock and that sort of thing. Is it all tied electronically like through EDI? In a perfect world. Okay. There were

37:54
That was another part of the process too, is getting this thing launched up and running quickly. The systems were, Auto Anything has some existing systems for being able to manage what’s in stock, what’s out of stock. But we also had some stuff we had to work through, especially launching a new brand on a new platform and tying it into their systems in terms of showing stuff when it was available, when it wasn’t. So we definitely had some kind of road bumps that we had to figure out there the first week or two of launch and had to manually track things more. my goodness, for thousands of SKUs.

38:24
Yeah, there’s some challenges in there. So I’m just curious, what’s the procedure? Like you get a bunch of orders and they’re out of stock. You had to manually contact each one of those people, right? It was for the, especially for the first couple of weeks when we launched where we didn’t have as good a visibility into it as we thought and the systems weren’t kind of where we’d hoped they’d be. Yes, we did. We had someone who was a running point on customer service who was awesome. he was kind of doing a double check manually, reaching out to everyone if it was out of stock to talk.

38:53
get some better, some better stuff launched within a couple of weeks that gave better information pre purchase about how long it would take to get something, especially if it was backwarded for those first couple of weeks. The one thing too, like we talked about a million dollar run rate. It’s and it was, or almost that we didn’t quite hit it, but almost there. The other thing too is like, you’ll give it the other thing that’s nice is, you know, when you’re selling higher end products, a lot of times it’s, you if you’re selling

39:22
Selling $80,000 of Sporks, titanium Sporks, that’s one thing. You got to move a lot of product. when you’re selling $1,000 bumpers or $500 air compressors, it’s not as, when you have a higher AOV, it’s easier to hit that, which is nice. Sure. Sure, I guess. But the expectations are a lot higher also, I would imagine. That’s true. Yeah, there’s a higher threshold to purchase when you’re dropping $1,000 versus $30 for something less expensive.

39:50
So let me ask you this question. Obviously, I don’t know the entire situation here, but given that the 80-20 rule held firm and you said earlier that the majority of the products were influencer products, why did you feel like it was necessary to launch all those extra products? That’s a good question. You know, if we had gone back, that’s a good question. I think if you’re trying to position yourself as the back country of overlanding,

40:18
which was part of what we wanted to do and part of the high level vision. We actually had the guy who ended up coming up with, I worked with him on the logo concept, which is one of the things I’m most proud of, of the whole project. It’s a cool bear and it really has a cool distinct mark. He actually helped do the backcountry logo. If you’re trying to do that, you have to, and you launched with just, let’s say 50 products that have a lot of depth.

40:45
And that’s a great start, it doesn’t kind of, you don’t come out of the gates projecting what you want to project, which is the brand image of you can get a lot of a large selection of products here. Um, so I think that was a part of it. We wanted to be able to come out with a, it didn’t have to be the world’s hugest offering, but it needed to be a somewhat robust offering across all parts of the catalog. And so I think that was one of the reasons why we wanted to have a larger product line from watch. Is this kind of like right channel where you kind of sell them something and then there’s a lot of upsells and accessories that go along with it?

41:13
I would say there’s yeah, there’s some fairness in that for sure. I think the lifetime value possibilities for Overlander is much higher than with Right Channel Radios. Right Channel Radios, people would come back and buy, but if you buy a CB radio, unless you’re like a mining company in Nevada or something, the chances of you needing another one, maybe you’ll need a new one in 10 years when yours breaks, maybe you buy another Jeep. But the lifetime value on a CB radio is much less than on an Overlander. But yeah, I mean, the number of accessories, Steve.

41:42
We gotta get you a rig man, cause I know that you have been Yeah, I’m sure my wife would love if you. Well, we’ve had this like behind the scenes. for those that don’t know, I came over in my van to Steve’s house. I played a song for his wife to try on my guitar, to try in my van with her there to try to convince her. So Jen, if you were listening, I hope that that song has stuck with you. Steve is a good man. He’s a good husband. He’s a good father. You should let him have.

42:09
let him have his adventure. And the whole time Jen was probably like, uh, Andrew, could you move this van to a different neighborhood? Not, not park in front of the house. I saw your neighbors come over and they were like looking in and, actually I should have just camped out there and like, you know, start, I could have, I should have had a lot more fun embarrassing you in front of your neighbors. I don’t know what the correct term with it for this is. It might be cognitive bias, but after, I didn’t think that anyone had these vans before, but once I rode in yours and we went on that road trip,

42:39
I started seeing them all over the place. I think because I’m paying attention to it now, but they’re really popular. Yeah. I mean, well, you live in California. California is like ground zero for these types of vehicles, especially the VW kind of van. it’s the you are you’re in the epicenter of it. So you probably get more of them than most people. So we talked about email retention sourcing. Did you guys run ads and that sort of thing? Were your margins high enough to run ads? They probably would, I would imagine.

43:09
They were on some items, but long-term the ad spend.

43:16
in and of itself was not enough to be able to kind of keep the brand going. it’s at least without kind of proving out that lifetime value, I think a little bit more. yes, did short and long answer is yes, we did run ads, but we were also trying to focus on a lot of other things as well. Okay. So and then we keep talking about lifetime value. Did you already get an idea in that short time frame what that could be? No, impossible. And like in five weeks, it’s really hard to know. So I think I think that’s something that will probably play out over the course of a year or two. Just

43:45
knowing from personal experience, like, if I think about vendors, I have purchased stuff from for my rig, I have probably placed, I can think of one vendor, well, let’s say across two vendors that sell specialty items for my vehicle. mean, I’ve probably placed 20 orders with them over the course of a five year period that are probably there, you in the, you know, they’re over $10,000 for all you know, so it’s so yeah.

44:13
personal experience, I know it’s there, we just five weeks is a short time to be able to get through it. So, but I had three or four more quick lessons if we have time to go through and I’ll just again, I’ll give you a high level and then you can dive into them or not as you see fit. I think it amazed me how having good creative, how much having good creative helps with building a brand. So being able to steal the…

44:38
steals around, we’re being able to leverage the assets, the digital assets of exhibition overland that they’ve built over a decade of overlanding, landing on the website, creating the crop, the category pages, the video assets, the photography, it just brings so much depth and authority and, and to a brand that I have, I’ve never had that access to do before. So I thought that was super cool. And I think in the future, if I build a brand, I will at a minimum, invest heavily into that, that facet up front.

45:06
It kind of reminded me of that one video where you have like on right channel where you drove over and then you put this antenna on just on steroids You know what I’m talking about? Yeah, I know exactly what you’re talking about. You know, what’s really funny. Guess who shot that video for a symposium? I have no idea. Was it the expedition overland? It was the expedition overland guys like that was like seven years ago and they were doing this and so we hired them to do that then so it’s the exact same people. Ah, okay. Makes sense. It kind of looks similar like that first front splash. Yeah, it does. So

45:36
Anyway, creative, super helpful. Outsourcing good writing is possible. Like I don’t know about you, Steve, but I’ve always struggled and been very skeptical about any time that I’ve tried to outsource writing more almost always it’s ended in tears. And this is, why did I think I could outsource good quality writing? And I actually found I didn’t find one of the team members at auto anything had had some writers that did a really good job. So that gave me hope that like, hey, it’s possible to outsource stuff and have a decent level of quality. You just sometimes have to dig through a lot of

46:05
have to dig a lot. So that was cool. Were these writers, I mean, these writers would, I would imagine be a lot more difficult to find. It’s so niche, right? Oh, yeah, it’s super niche. But okay, no, one of them. One of them traveled like was overlanded in Botswana and knew knew about overlanding was a great writer and had a, you know, tied in like historical quotes and did a great job. So I thought that was cool. And then finally, this is my last one. And then I’ll kind of turn it back to you. But I think

46:32
anytime, Steve, you’ve done this too, like, I’ve probably been responsible for, I would guess at this point, seven or eight major either site redesigns or migrations in my career. And every time you get to this point, we’re like, you, you get close to launch either your launch deadline, or you’re at a point where like, you’re getting past it. And you have to decide, like, should we push this live? Or should we make it a little bit better, a little bit better. And I think like you every it always, you always

47:01
always makes sense to launch just a little bit earlier than you think. Because if you wait until you feel ready, you’re going to push it out, you know, three, four, five, six, seven, eight weeks takes longer. And it’s obviously you don’t want to put something crappy out into the world. But you learn so much from getting it live. That’s just the start, you can start marketing it, you learn a lot of it’s a great way to start testing and tweaking some of the small bugs. And if you wait until it’s ready completely, it’s just, you know, your timeline is just going to get stretched so much further out. And I have found to

47:29
A lot of times I’ll have a punch list of post-launch fixes. I realize once the site gets live, I often don’t go back and actually fix a lot of them because in ultimately they’re not that important. So I don’t know if you found this too, but I think launching as soon as you meaningfully can and start marketing and interacting with customers like err on the side of launching a little early versus a little late. Yeah, it’s funny. We have kind of opposite personalities. You’re more of a perfectionist than I am. I’m all about just launching. Maybe it’s because we’re

47:59
I was in engineering and you just launched something and then you fix it. So that’s always been my mentality. Like for example, this course that I launched with Tony a year ago, we launched, I wanted to launch with nothing. And she’s like, no, no, no, no, wait, let’s at least get a couple of modules in there. And I was like, no, let’s just do it. And so we compromised and we launched with just a couple of modules. Oh, that’s see. Yeah. We are very different personalities. I am much more like everything buttoned up. Let’s make sure like it’s good. Like I, so that was, you alluded to this earlier, but that was

48:28
It was a good thing for me because I think I tend to err on the side of perfectionism, which is good if you’re a watchmaker. It’s probably not great if you’re trying to launch a project with 20 people. I think as an engineer, you expect to launch with bugs always. So as long as it’s working. But you’re like your background is like in chip engineering. Like if you have make a little error in one of those chips, doesn’t it hose everything up? Like you kind of have to be a perfectionist. Is that why you’re not in the chip space anymore?

48:57
Actually, the real question, Andrew, is why you aren’t still working at Overlander and why the contract was such a short one. Drew and I, we were talking about it afterwards. was like, yeah, you know, it was just a safer way of proposing it. And we didn’t give, we wouldn’t want to give Andrew any equity, you know, because weren’t sure it was going to be a long-term thing. Andrew goes up to one for about two seconds and strikes back.

49:20
I just pulled that one out of my butt too. Well, you know, I think you did a great job. The site looks amazing. Actually, it’s like right channel on steroids, I want to say just because all the videos and everything that you had on there. well, thanks. Big shout out to Kurt and Paul over EtherCycle for designing it and putting a lot of work into that. also for just again, it’s mostly the creative assets from Clay and Rachelle and the team over at Exhibition Overland. if I mean, if that’s what I think.

49:49
gives us that, like I was talking about earlier, it just makes such a huge, huge difference versus trying to have to, you know, not have those professional assets. So thank you, I appreciate it. But I mean, it’s those two teams that are responsible for almost all of it. I did want to ask you this one question. And I was kind of curious about the entire time. Like, what made you take this project? Because you have all these successful businesses. And this one wasn’t for any equity. It wasn’t a long term contract. Like, what made this project attractive for you?

50:18
Yeah, I’ve been asked that a lot of times. So it was it was not for the money. And especially, you know, after the fact, I it was just the answer. The big big question or the big answer is like two, threefold. One, I liked the people involved known and you know, been great friends with Drew for a long time. I wanted to I thought growth was the biggest growth and learning were the biggest reasons.

50:44
I wanted to, I’ve never done something like this with this big of a team. I wanted to see how I could do, how I liked it, how I could grow, what I could learn. I liked the space. I also wanted to see what it was like launching a brand in a space that I really am passionate about deeply. know, and so it’s, know, CB radios and Trilling Motors had zero interest. I was very much a mercenary in those niches. I was like, is there opportunity here? Yes, let’s sell them. Great. And this is very different. So I want to see how that, you know, how I liked, how that changed things.

51:12
Can I ask you a question real quick before you go on? How much was the passion part of it really important? Because I’m not passionate about my products. And did it add a completely different dimension to this? You know what’s interesting is for the first couple weeks it was cool and after that it became just like any other project. And I don’t say that in a way to disparage the project at all. it did help, I will say this, it did help with the learning curve quite a bit. when I’m thinking about products and do we, is this a good fit for the site? Is it not?

51:39
that was much more evident to me. Whereas when I was like launching, you know, CB radio, I was like, I don’t even know what this thing does. Is this thing great? I just, the learning curve was much steeper. But that being said, once you kind of get into the weeds of it, the fact that you’re selling, you know, cool overlanding gear when stuff gets hard, doesn’t really make a difference. You know, it’s still, it’s, so it helped in the first early couple of weeks with the learning curve, but, long, I would say it made less of a difference than I thought.

52:09
Yeah, I thought you would have done it for like some free gear. I can picture your West Folly now with like big tires and like a camper on top of it or something. I don’t know. Yeah, I mean, it’s I’m sure I haven’t actually it’s funny. I haven’t really ordered anything meaningful from the site. I’m sure I will in the future and definitely have some discounts there, which is nice. But but mostly it’s about growth, you know, learning, getting in, you know, like you said, like you said earlier, you’re giving me a hard time about not having an e-commerce project for a while. And it’s true. And a big part of that is been focused on, you know,

52:39
running the community and some of ECF capital stuff, which you can’t do everything well. ultimately I have to, sometimes you gotta decide not to do things. It’s hard to do everything well, but I also did wanna get my hands dirty again with e-commerce from a growth perspective. And also I like the people involved. So the other thing too is like ECF live, we didn’t have an ECF live this year. So I had a little more bandwidth to play with. So yeah, it was kind of all of those reasons. The short answer is growth, trying to learn to grow and be able to get better.

53:07
The short answer is you did this so I couldn’t make fun of you anymore. Well, like I said earlier, that’s a big one. Although I don’t lay awake at night too much about all your jabs, Steve. mean, occasionally, but not too often. Hey, so cool. I’m going to link up. I know you have like a series on this, uh, on your podcast too. So if anyone’s interested in learning more about, guess, the psychological and the more in-depth nuts and bolts of this, uh, I will link up, uh, your episodes that you.

53:36
put out on Overlander. Cool. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. And we should, we’ll have to do another van trip at some point. That was for people who don’t know, did a, Steve came out to Montana and we did a, I don’t know, was it three day, four day kind of like exploratory van trip around Yellowstone and the area there and visited some very, some beautiful high altitude kind of sand golf courses, which was really nice. was, uh, was, it was we’ll have to do that again.

54:04
Definitely, definitely. Well, hey, thanks for coming on and sharing your experiences and congratulations on no longer being e-commerce-less. Thanks, Steve. I appreciate it. All right. Take care.

54:19
Hope you enjoy that episode. Now if you’re a seven or eight figure e-commerce store owner, you should check out e-commerce fuel, the bedded community for experienced store owners. It’s a great community and you can get fast, knowledgeable answers to your most pressing business questions. So go to ecommercefuel.com to learn more. For more information about this episode, go to mywifecoupterjob.com slash episode 354. And once again, I wanna thank Clabio, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign.

54:48
Basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIYO. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIYO. I also want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is next big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-C-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve.

55:19
Now I talk about how I these tools on my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own ecommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send the course right away. Thanks for listening.