Steve: You’re listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrapped business owners and delve deeply into the strategies they use to grow their businesses. Today. I with friends Pat Flynn and Caleb Wojcik on the show. And I’ve known both of these guys for many years and Pat’s been on the podcast several times himself. But this time we’re going to talk about their brand new physical product convention the switch pod. How did they get the idea and how did they create this awesome handheld tripod.

but before we begin I want to give a quick shout-out to privy who is a sponsor of the show previous the But before I begin I want to give a quick shout-out Privy who’s a sponsor of the show. Privy is a tool that I use to build my email list for both my blog and my online store and right now I’m using Privy Display a cool Wheel of Fortune pop-up basically user gives your email for a chance to win valuable prizes in our store and customers love the gamification aspect of this and when implemented this form email signups increased by a hundred thirty one percent. Now, you can also use Privy to reduce car abandoned with cart saver pop-ups and abandoned cart email sequences as well one super low price that is much cheaper than using a full-blown email marketing solution. So bottom line Privy allows me to turn visitors into email subscribers and recover lost sales so head on over to privy.com/steve and try it for free if you decide you need to the more advanced features use coupon code MWQHJ for fifteen percent off once again that’s privy.com/steve. Now on to the show

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Intro: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast we will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle so can spend more time with your family focus on doing the things that you love. Here’s your host Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. Today, I’m really happy to have my friends Pat Flynn and Caleb Wojcik on the show. Now Pat’s about on the podcast a number of times and I’ve known Caleb for many years. And the reason why I’m having both of these two on today is to talk about their incredibly awesome invention the switch pod, and I’m actually at my desk right now and it’s sitting right there. It’s the main handheld tripod that I’m using for all my videos today. In today’s episode, we are going to break down every aspect of their invention from how they got the idea. How they manufactured it and how they managed to exceed their Kickstarter goal in just a single day. And with that, welcome show Caleb and how you guys doing today?

Caleb: Doing great. Thanks for having me.

Pat: Dude. Awesome. It’s great to be back. And so we’re talking about a physical product now because..

Steve: Yes

Pat: It’s weird. It’s different.

Steve: That’s actually my first question. So you guys are both very successful in the digital product realm like, why physical product? It’s a lot more work?

Caleb: You kind of start with that. I so, I make videos for a living for clients and for myself and I have so much gear. I’ve so much equipment on sitting in my garage right now, which is just my studio and there’s tripods and cameras and everything everywhere. And I’m the type of person just gets annoyed by stuff. Like why doesn’t this do this thing the way that I want it to, and I think it was just kind of Pat and I in the same place at the same time having the same frustration seeing other people dealing with it the kind of led to our first physical product together.

Pat: Yeah. I mean for me, I mean I’ve been in a digital space for a decade and I would have never I never thought I would have even entered the space the piggybacking off of what Caleb was saying was just there was a very very apparent need there for both of ourselves personally. And where this idea came from is actually, we were at an event it was a video event called Vid Summit and we just noticed everybody with those bendy tripods and..

Steve: Is it called gorilla or something like that?

Pat: Yeah, GorillaPod and we noticed everybody using them in ways that they weren’t really built for. A lot of vloggers, Thanks to the inspiration from people like Casey Neistat and Peter McKinnon. They were taking these gorillas pods putting the legs together and bending them in a way to allow for the camera to be a little bit further away from you so you can get a wider angle. I mean that’s not what they were meant for and it was interesting because when we were there, we noticed everybody like when they want to put it down they would either just lay it down on the table and the camera would be touching the table which is not ever good for the camera. Or they’d struggle opening the legs and they try to put the legs back together and it’s kind of clunky in the hands and we were just like this is insane. There’s got to be a better way, and then right at that moment our good friend Richie Norton who owns a company called Prouduct they help entrepreneurs take their physical product ideas and actually turn them into real things.

He helped John Lee Dumas create the Freedom Journal for example, and we’re just like Richie. Do we have this idea? Like, what do you think? He’s like, let’s do it. And we’re like, like actually do it. And for me, I was like, I don’t want to get involved with this because this is this is going to be a load of work. I love digital stuff because I can change something overnight and then it’s shipped and you know, I don’t have to worry about you know overhead or inventory or anything like that. But again, the need was there and I saw it in person. I think that’s what inspired us and Caleb was the first one to really come up with the idea of like the legs of a tripod coming together to be a grip and like what if they just swung out and you could turn it into tripod mode super fast and like from there. We just started asking questions and talking to people and that’s really how it all started.

Steve: So you met Rich at its Summit is that where it all came together?

Caleb: Even before that Richie was on Pat’s podcast. I don’t know what happened before that. But Richie got on to Pat’s podcast talk about physical products and he and Derral Eves who is the Founder of Vid Summit, the event invited Pat to come there and since I do stuff with patterns videos I Came as well.

Steve: And have you guys ever created anything physical before or it’s just all digital up until this point?

Pat: I mean for me it was all digital except for like at a workshop. I would have a little booklet printed out and then it was only like, you know, 425 attendees, but I’d I had no idea what manufacturing was like I had no idea what the process was like in terms of prototyping and let alone how to sell this thing. Just we just knew that we could potentially come up with product. Now, I had written a book called Will It Fly and I wanted to incorporate that process with the Will It Fly process which is what I used to teach people how to create businesses, which is like Taken Iterative Approach like don’t just build the product and then just start selling it right? I think it was Seth Godin who said don’t find customers for your products find products for your customers and we want to take that approach of like okay, let’s take it in a baby steps and will only keep going if we get a green light every single time.

Steve: Yeah, let’s talk about the process because it’s one thing to just come up with something that you want to sell. Like I come up these ideas all the time and making it as a completely different ballgame. Okay, so let’s start from the beginning so you know you was I want to create something. What was the first step?

Pat: Hey Caleb, do you remember what we did first?

Caleb: You know, the first thing we did was we drew really crude drawings of what this tripod could look like not crude in like inappropriate way..

Steve: Hahaha

Caleb: But just like not in a talented way. I mean, Pat has an architecture background, but Pat, I think he did most of that on a computer, right? So

Pat: yeah

Caleb: Your little better drawing than me so

Steve: You mean like a CAD drawing or just a photoshop kind?

Caleb: No, it was just kind of like white boards at accursed and sketches and things like that and the very next step from there was we talked to an engineer, his name is Cole Chamberlain and he works with prouduct and he took all of our drawings as well as just our ideas of what does this thing need? What is it not need what shape is it in all that kind of stuff. And I think that was maybe a half-hour phone call and he came back with started to do CAD drawings and things like that and making 3D printed prototypes and sending them to us and that was like months long of just slow steady. Trying different things. We still had no idea where it was going to go at that point.

Pat: Yeah. I mean one of the first things we got sent back to us after talking to Cole was like just a piece of plastic or even what kind of look like cardboard a little bit but just in a specific shape and he was like, do you like the shape or like maybe it’s a little longer maybe we can make this curved Edge more straight and then he’s like, okay like and then he got that feedback from us and then he sent us a 3D printed model which actually worked like it, the legs open and close and then I remember opening and Like spring started popping out and I was like, this is ridiculous. But I mean it like I could see it now I could visualize it and we even like put our cameras on it to test what it would be like we shared it with a couple people we got feedback immediately.

And that’s really what the whole process was like it was like, you know starting point get a prototype talk about it with people get feedback make another prototype with those little changes and then talk about it with people again, and I mean I think over the course of two years, right Caleb? We came up with I don’t know how many prototypes but with each one, We got feedback from literally our customer our future customer. We went to video conferences. We went to VidCon. We went to vid Summit again the next year with whatever prototype we had and they weren’t perfect in the whole purpose was we just wanted people to tell us what they liked or didn’t like about it. And the beauty of this was even in the Prototype phase. We had people go. Oh my gosh, like I need this right now we even had other people go. This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen I would never use this.

And you can you can imagine at a point where you’re offering your beautiful idea to somebody and somebody says that that that might like deter you from to keep going but no that’s that I knew from my online business years, but that’s a good sign because then you can go. Okay tell me why you don’t like it and now we can better Define who this is not for and also, who is it actually for. so we can hone in on who our Market is and all that. So we really honed in on the vlogger or the Travel Photographer that the travel videographer. Who’s on the go and this thing became over time this super lightweight minimal very easy quick open easy-to-use not bendy legs because most people who use the gorilla pod don’t need it to wrap around trees and it just you know as much as we created. This was actually created mostly by the people who offered us feedback.

Steve: How did you find these people for feedback? I mean, I can understand going to a conference but where you just kind of like holding this thing out there and just asking random people or did you already have like a community built there?

Caleb: I mean it was in private for Initial idea was October 2017. And until June 2018. We kind of kept it under wraps. We didn’t share it on social media. We didn’t tell anybody that wasn’t our friend. So it was just if someone came to the studio to film a YouTube collaboration with Pat, we’d show them we’d show it to YouTuber friends of ours. I took it to a video conference called NAB in April of 2018 showed it to my friends that are..

Steve: Is this the plastic prototype? or is this like something close to finished?

Caleb: No, these are these are plastic.

Steve: Plastic? Okay

Caleb: They’re different shapes. Yeah, the parts are breaking off of them as we’re showing them to people, you know, super early. So it was it was Private until VidCon and that’s when we started sharing it publicly to whoever we could at the event by yeah carrying it around kind of swing it out to the side opening and closing it just in the hallways and people like me. What is that? Like, I want to check it out. So that was kind of the first time we publicly shared it

Steve: giving you an idea of, how many iterations you guys had to go through to kind of get to the product that I’m actually holding on my desk right now.

Caleb: If we versioned it. Like software and each physical thing we made was a new version somewhere between 12 and 15. I would say.

Steve: Okay.

Pat: Yeah

Caleb: Some changes major like shape changes material changes. That’s kind of early on then we kind of honed in on the shape. And from there. It was the minor things. Like does it have magnets in it? Does it need an extra hole here that sort of thing

Pat: And it was at VidCon when we shared it publicly we were able to do that. We got some I mean again, we didn’t know what we were doing. So whenever I I want to do something that I don’t know how to do. I just go find somebody who’s done it before me and you know, see what I can do to help them so I could get some some help back to and we got a lot of great advice from people who are like, okay, like you can share this privately with friends that you trust. But until you have a patent pending, you might want to keep it under wraps just in case and so it was right before VidCon that we got our patent-pending going. Thanks to Caleb and the research that he did with that.

And then we were like, okay, let’s just share it and I knew that that was an important moment because not only were we sharing it to get even more feedback In a public forum with people that we didn’t know, That was the other part about this a lot of us create products digital or physical and we share with our friends, or like what do you think about like, this is awesome like you got this and of course, they’re just wanting to be nice versus actual feedback from real people who you don’t even know you who don’t have a relationship with you.

So that was important but I also knew that sharing the story of it being created was going to be massively important for the marketing of this and that’s something that I have always done since day one was like Hey guys, let me take you in on our process. Let’s not keep this a secret. Let’s show you where we’re at and what we’re what we’re fumbling through and how we’re messing up. But what we’re trying to do to get better and over time. We started to notice people really rooting for us. It was it was really amazing to see that, you know, even leading into the kickstarter campaign earlier, February 2019.

I mean, I personally had a number of people who say hey Pat, I just bought the switch pod. I don’t even need it. I just really enjoyed following the story and and I knew that that was going to happen because when you get people involved in the process, they will invest. They feel like they’re a part of it and they want to root for you, which was really cool.

Steve: Can I get an idea of how much you guys spent it in the design process and kind of what the cost considerations were and actually fabricating them, the materials and the process and that sort of thing?

Caleb: Leading all the way up to the kickstarter Campaign, which was probably in total about fifteen fourteen or fifteen months and that time frame you can correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it was somewhere around 25 to 30 thousand dollars in total.

Steve: Okay.

Pat: Yeah, It wasn’t all up front. It was quite iteratively

Caleb: It was like a few thousand for the, yeah a few thousand for engineer work on it a few thousand person prototypes get made 50,000 more to do more engineering. So it’s kind of like slow and steady over that year or so. And then towards the end each prototype cost about $1500 and we ended up having four of those when we launched the kickstarter campaign. So as I significant chunk of our investment was just these one-off perfectly machine pieces of aluminum so that we could have them for taking photos making videos shipping them to influencers if they wanted them that survey.

Steve: and today is it created from a mold or

Caleb: yes.

Pat: Yeah.

Steve: Okay and how much did the mold cost to actually have that created?

Caleb: That was the initial funding goal for Kickstarter was $100,000 because that would have given us the money back. We invested okay and the mold cost so, you know about $70,000 was the mold and that doesn’t count making any of them at that point and then you have to pay for each one you make and getting it here and tariffs and all that.

Pat: Ugh tarriffs. Yeah.

Steve: We’ll get into that a little bit. So, Pat you were just talking about marking a little bit. Why did you both decide to do a Kickstarter of all things? Most people don’t know that a successful Kickstarter requires you to kind of drive your own traffic. So I just kind of curious what the thought process was there.

Pat: Yeah. I mean it was less about potentially getting a staff pick where then you know, the marketing starts to kind of propel on its own but we really like the idea of Kickstarter because we knew that Kickstarter is a great platform to not just test ideas and have people vote with their dollars. But again is allows you to becomes a trusted platform to share your story on and to get almost a community behind you at the same time because people can see that other people are pledging and they’re backing that becomes about the idea versus just like hey, I want to sell you something. It’s like the journey that got you there too. And what this could do for you.

We also knew that video equipment in particular performed very well on Kickstarter to a lot of people in the video space a very familiar with other products that have been pushed on Kickstarter and it’s done very well. Along the way, We also connected with some of those companies in the video space who did very well on Kickstarter and they provided a lot of great advice for us as well. But Kickstarter we knew would be a great place to just test this on a trusted platform. And potentially have it, you know not necessarily go viral, but get get some extra love if it was doing very well what you did if it became the number one camera, I think accessory or Camera and Video accessory for quite a while during the campaign because of the hope the velocity that it had but that that’s the primary reason.

And you know, we didn’t use Kickstarter like many other people use Kickstarter a lot of Products that come out have like 12 different pledge levels with t-shirts to give away or you know, hey if the At this larger pledge level you can you know get a flight come meet us and things like that. We just were like, you know what let’s make this simple. We’re not going to have multiple colors. We’re not going to have multiple sizes. Just one SKU one product. We’re going to make it the best product that can be over going to deliver it or going to deliver it hopefully on time and I think we did pretty good when it came down to it.

Steve: Yeah. I’m always a little worried about kickstarters because a lot of them don’t deliver in the end. I knew you guys send you were going to deliver. So I mean that added a bunch of extra credibility to it.

Pat: I still am owed things that I bought two years ago. And funny the funny thing about Kickstarters, you’re right there is a little apprehension because people have been burned before and there is no contract when you purchase something on Kickstarter that is required for the person that you bought from to give you the product. It’s almost kind of based on the honor System or trust and we wanted to make sure that we communicated with the backers and delivered for them on time and you know, we were able to after the kickstarter campaign ended at the end of February or early March get it into everybody’s Hands by early October which not having mold even created yet at that point. I think we did pretty good.

Steve: How did you guys decide on pricing for this?

Caleb: I mean you look at competitors you look at what other people are charging for similar things as well as profit Margin. You know how expensive is it going to be to make this thing and then ship it and retailers are going to want their cut it when it’s in stores and you’re selling it to them for a lower price. So a lot of different a lot of different considerations also going with where we are now, retail at $99 is kind of a sweet spot, you know, not too expensive. Still is double digits that sort of thing and then we Backed off from that for the campaign to give people a good deal if they were early backers.

Steve: So you probably had some margins in mind right? And I’m just kind of curious how that factored into kind of the design process.

Caleb: For margins factored in the design process?

Steve: Meaning like for example, like you use magnets or whatever certain components are more expensive. And so you want to keep it under a certain price point right without compromising the quality of the product.

Pat: Under a certain price point not compromising quality and also as few parts as possible, that was the other thing. We had a lot more parts and things that were involved earlier that we were just like, okay, let’s redesign this so we can make it easier to mold and easier to create and and easier to ship and support so there aren’t very Many components of it. There are some things inside the the sort of head area of the tripod that you see there that you know are kind of internal but there’s not much we removed a lot. So yeah, I think you know again piggybacking off a lot of people’s previous experience with going into Kickstarter.

We knew that if we could get the product to just the features that we really would need to solve the problem that we were we were solving then we could have higher profit margins for sure. I mean oftentimes with these kinds of products and I see this all the time in the digital spaces, especially with software. You get what’s called feature creep where you get that feedback and they go I want this. Okay. Well I had that. Oh, I want this and I’ll okay. I will add that too. And then you have like this, you know, like the remote that you get from AT&T U-verse. It has like a billion buttons on it and you only actually use 4, like we knew that we wanted to go with okay for like, analogously we want the remote that has on, off, Channel, volume, mute. Like that’s it.

Like how can we create that version of a tripod and I think we did a good job. So the They helped us with determining the price pointing and being comfortable with that as well because sometimes we go. Oh, let’s undercut everybody. But obviously the profit margins play a role in that but we also don’t want to be ridiculously expensive and go super premium. If we don’t need to, we ask questions to people who we were meeting like at VidCon like Caleb would just, I remember listening to our conversations that you would be having and you just put you would just go. Well, how much would you pay for something like this and we would literally just hear the range and the range was between eighty and a hundred fifty dollars, which was really interesting.

And we would ask why? that’s the best the most important question so that when we choose to decide to price it at that we can support it with things that our target audience actually wants versus stuff that we can just make up to make it seem like it’s worth that price. We can actually support it with real customers reactions and it was really cool to see it be in that price range. And you know again, we just have thankfully the advantage of being in a space where people often will pay for things that they don’t need. And you know,

Steve: Haha yeah.

Pat: If we could design something that people need and it’s awesome and it works and it’s durable then we knew it would be a winner.

Steve: So when you asked why I’m just kind of curious what answers you got like why would we do..

Caleb: They would say well the thing they’re holding cost that much and so is immediately comparison

Steve: Okay

Caleb: As well as, they felt the quality of it. So at VidCon we did have the first aluminum prototype and it was metal and sturdy and strong made people put their cameras on it and so they could get a feel for, Okay this isn’t some cheap plastic thing. And so that also kind of gives people the sense of quality to it.

Steve: I’m just kind of curious how much you Leverage The Spy audience or were these backers a lot of them people that you met through the video Community?

Pat: The SPI backers. I mean there were quite a few because again, I have some raving fans who will kind of buy anything I come out with which is really amazing and I’m just super thankful for that. But I do have a lot of people who follow me who are also entrepreneurs who do video and of course A lot of them. I wanted to support and they were just in the target market as well. So that that was quite, I think actually they didn’t actually, they were there but but it wasn’t the majority of the backers. It was it was Caleb’s audience for sure and Caleb has a lot of ties to people from all ranges and experiences in the video space that were very influential and definitely wanted to support because that’s his Niche. But I think the biggest pull for us Beyond just the product itself and I say that because the product is once you see it. You either go I would never buy that or you go I need this right now in my life. Right?

Caleb: Right.

Pat: It’s that polarizing and I love that about it because it kind of sells itself. I remember we were at NAB earlier in 2019, and we went to this conference in Vegas and Caleb and I were walking around with our switch pods and it hadn’t come out yet. It was just about to it had just launched on Kickstarter and two guys came up to us and I like is that the switch pod? I’ve been hearing all about this and we’re like, yeah like check it out and they’re like, how did you guys get access to this? We were like, we’re the inventors and that was one of the coolest feelings you remember that Caleb? Because like they didn’t know who we were and that to me my business has always been tied to me and now I was like who the product is really doing all the work

Caleb: Yeah. I feel like that’s when you know, it’s starting to take off when other people you don’t know or aren’t in your audience are assigned to talk about it and it happened fairly quickly for a few reasons. One of them was, I had some friends that have bigger YouTube audiences that teach Production or do camera gear reviews and things like that make videos and then we had another bigger influencer make a video and so right on day one. It was already bigger than us and our audiences.

Steve: I’m just kind of curious just kind of on the physical product side also on the manufacturing side. Did you guys actually visit the factory is everything assembled overseas or?

Caleb: So, I went visited the factory in August of this year. So about a month and a half before we got our inventory in the US just kind of the last minute Quality check as they had the line all set up about to do the run of ten thousand plus switch pods, I went to the factory. But before that product of the people we’ve been working with to develop it over the last two years. They had been to the factories multiple times

Steve: Okay, and in terms of managing quality, what were some pitfalls that you guys have experienced and I imagine these are inspected on the line and at the end as well, right?

Caleb: Yes, and I also missed one of your previous questions. Yes, they’re fully assembled in a factory in China and then they’re shipped in the packaging that we ship it to people to customers through our warehouse in the US. As far as quality, I mean like Pat said there’s only so many moving Parts but some of them are so important that if you mess it up it could ruin the product. So if the screw is too long at the top of the tripod, which we learned through developing it for two years either a camera won’t fit or will fit and that sort of thing. So, It was just those last-minute things to make sure everything was good. I could hold it in my hand. Make sure it was functioning properly. And to be honest. There was one thing that if I wouldn’t have gone or if the product team would have gone and caught something it could have been a major issue.

So yeah, I think if you are making something at least have them send you them so you can like give a final sign-off before they make a lot of them because it’s easier to make a product one off from, Okay, a CAD drawing to spec when you’re paying a lot of money and they’re precisely measuring everything but once you have molds and you’re making 10,000 of them and you have a lot of people on assembly line putting together, that’s where small little changes can happen and over a lot of units that can be a major headache.

Steve: You guys have any hiccups during production. I mean 10,000 units is a pretty good-sized production run.

Caleb: I think one of the benefits of how we did this is we trusted the people we are working with we trusted prouduct to find factories that would do the different parts to paint them to package them that sort of thing. So we trusted professionals do it. Pat and I would not have been able to go to China and find factories that made tripods like you know, Honestly, there’s no way and as far as issues though. We had also been working with them for about a year. So that factory was making our prototypes for like almost a year.

Steve: Got it. Okay.

Caleb: For shipping, so They knew the product as well as we did as well as our engineer did and when I was there in China, I showed them like hey, look at this. This this might not be working. Okay, 4 engineers that I never met before that live in China and work in this Factory went to work in the next day. I came back and I like okay we fixed it. This is what we’re going to do. And so that’s I think just the benefit of being okay to hire other people to do stuff for you.

Steve: Okay, let’s shift over to marketing a little bit. We talked about the kickstarter already, but the kickstarter is over now and so how do you generate Great sales now and kind of what is the marketing plan going forward?

Pat: Yeah, I mean, so before we skip over it there was a very important moment that happened and Caleb sort of touched on it a little bit and it was one of the big influencers out there in the video space who actually created a video for us and that was a really important component because that I mean his reach and is incredible and the thing is we didn’t pay this person to do this. He did it on his own but it was a, I want to I want to say it was strategic, but it was also just organic at the same time. I don’t want to say like, oh, I’m the only reason we built this relationship was so that this could happen but it was just a natural conclusion to the relationship that we had built and we had met this guy at a conference. I spoke at vid Summit 2018. This person was also a speaker and so we met each other at the VIP party afterwards and that’s one of my favorite reasons to speak is not just the time on stage.

It’s the time outside of the stage and the people that you get access to. Anyway, I was introduced to this person is his name is Peter McKinnon, and obviously it would have just been a dream for him to even like mention our product in a tweet let alone create a video for it and we were just very very sensitive to the fact that well we didn’t want him to ever feel like he was being taken advantage of so when we shared the switch body with him, you know back at this VIP party, you know, we did film that but we never use that footage and we were just like very thankful that he really liked it. He actually wanted to take it home, but it was our only prototype that we had we needed it to get the kickstarter campaign going and we were just like Peter we’re gonna get a prototype made for you were going to send it to you and we don’t want anything in return. We just want you to know. Enjoy it and use it. And we knew that if the product it would it would it was supposed to do he would really enjoy it and you know, hopefully one day he would create a video and put it in his like what’s In My Bag videos or something that I usually does and that would that would have been awesome, but we sent him one.

We put it in a really nice package. We wrote him a handwritten note and we sent a personalized video as well and just said Thank you and didn’t expect anything in return. But we asked if he wanted to sign up for an affiliate program in case you wanted to to promote it for us and just to give back to him if he did and you know. We sent him the video on wistia or is through wistia, which is a video hosting platform. The cool thing about wistia is you can sort of see how many views there are and it was a private video and when we saw one view on it, we’re like, oh my God, he watched it. What do you think he’s gonna do and then and then we didn’t hear anything back and then, you know six hours into campaign halfway to our goal already on our own $50,000.

He came out with this video. It just blew my mind. I was literally in tears watching it because I was like an eight minute video all about how we love this even said like these guys, Caleb and Pat they came up to me at this event. They didn’t pay me to say this. I just think this is the next big thing for vloggers and we were just like, oh my gosh, and then of course the sales just went through the roof. After that. We had reached our funding goal of $100,000 in 11 hours and 26 minutes, which it was a 60-day campaign. So we were just like wow, this is like Caleb said much bigger than us at this point. But then moving forward like you said the kickstarter campaign ended. Now a couple things continue to happen people continue to talk about it and search for it even in Google and they would The kickstarter campaign page and I think you know, even after the Sale, Caleb did some very strategic things to point people from the kickstarter page even after the sale to our Shopify page.

We already had it ready by the end of the campaign and I think Caleb I don’t know what the percentage is, but a majority of our sales at least early on after the campaign were still coming from people finding that Kickstarter campaign, right?

Caleb: Yeah, we still get traffic that people type in switch pod on Google and it goes to Kickstarter and then they click to Shopify and then they buy.

Steve: If you sell an Amazon or run any online business for that matter, you’re going to need a trademark to protect your intellectual property. Not only that but a trademark is absolutely necessary to register your brand on Amazon. Now, I used to think that any old trademark registration service would work and that could even try to register my own trademark by myself on the cheap, but I was dead wrong. Securing a trademark without a strategy in place usually results in either an outright rejection or a worthless unenforceable trademark. Now, that is why I work with Stephen Wagner and his team from Emerge counsel. They have a package service called total TM, which provides the same attention to detail and process that large law firms do at a fraction of the price. Now for me personally, I like Emerge Council because of their philosophy, their goal is to maximize IP protection while minimizing the price. So before you decide to register a trademark by yourself or file for other I could protection such as a copyright or a patent, check out Emerge counsel first and get a free consult. For more information go to emergecouncil.com and click on the Amazon sellers button and tell Steve that Steve sent you to receive a $100 discount on the total TM package for Amazon sellers. Once again, that’s emergecounsel.com over at emergecounsel.com now back to the show.

I know this has been a mention of switch pod with a bunch of other YouTubers. Have you done any manual Outreach or has been pretty much organic?

Caleb: Definitely manual Outreach.

Steve: Okay.

Caleb: Yeah, I mean we had think we probably had seven or eight people make videos during the campaign that actually had their hands on the switch pod.

Steve: Are these friends of yours. Like how did you get people to actually mention them?

Caleb: Yes, and so all but one of them Peter being the one of them were friends I had before we ever did this or friends that Pat had so like Sean Cannell and Justin Brown and people we had met at conferences and Levi Allen and other people that I knew that made videos about it. So that was like the campaign strategy. And then since then we’ve made a few more prototypes before we went to Mass production sent those to some friends of ours as well. But you know now it’s organic. So we ship them all in mid-october about a month or so ago, then it’s organic. Then it’s all these people that were back the project at bought it on Shopify and out there talking about it.

Pat: Yeah. I need the unboxing video. Like there are literally multiple unboxing videos that come out every week now from People who get it, which I think is first of all, we also put a lot of effort in designing the packaging. It’s very it’s a very nice experience. We wanted to be very apple-like and you know, you open the cover. It says like for, made for creators by creators. We wanted to have people feel like they were a part of this process too. And we wanted to honor them as creators and this is a tool to help them create more and it’s you know, we’re creators as well. The other thing is just you know, like I said the unboxing videos and just showing more and more people that more and more people are using it. There’s like a social proof element to this and Caleb and his wife Jen have been doing a great job of managing the Instagram Channel. If you go to our Instagram page, I don’t know how many followers we have.

Steve: You got like 5,000 or 6,000 something.

Pat: Yeah, and that’s just been we haven’t paid for any of that. And then when we see an unboxing video or somebody share their photo of the switch pod, we grab that we give him credit, but we post it and just kind of Honor them as a user and thank them for it and people have been really creative with how they’ve been using it as well and putting different components on it and different rigs. We have some holes on the side that Allow you to put like lights and other arms and extensions on it and we’re just super super stoked. We have not yet even paid for advertising.

And we know that once we get up on Amazon, which is kind of what we’re in the middle of right now. We can benefit from some PPC campaigns and things like that to hopefully you wrap this up and take it to the next level for sure.

Steve: Let me ask you this if you didn’t have these friends on YouTube. What would have been your strategy for outreach?

Pat: I think you know for me and I’ll let Caleb speak after, but I think it would still largely be influencer based marketing for me because that’s what I know I’m good at and I know how to manage those relationships in a way where people don’t feel like I’m like I can I can serve people and have them serve me back and that’s what’s helped me get to where I am digitally and I knew that could help me with with product, you know physical product stuff. So I would still go to I would pay for the ability to go to these conferences and share it and allow people to use it and even film with it. I’d be number one. And then number two, I think a you know, more strategic Facebook ad campaign that targets videographers or perhaps even a YouTube ad campaign.

I wouldn’t have minded to put a little bit of a bit of a budget into some ads because when you see this thing, it’s like oh my gosh. Yeah, so like, you know a video ad would perform very well. And again, these are things that we have in our pipeline. But right now we’re just kind of cruising and you know, we’re looking forward to the holidays and seeing what happens now because we know things pick up around This time a year and you’re just really excited. I know Caleb what would we have done differently if we didn’t have these relationships?

Caleb: That’s I think that’s hard for me to answer because I would just go back in time and meet people like you have to you have to network. You have to have people in your industry in your customer base that you can connect to it. You can get feedback from because not only in the marketing way, but if we weren’t people that made Videos and we did know people have made videos. We wouldn’t have made a good product because we would have known what they wanted and we wouldn’t have gotten feedback. We would have just work silently and thought that they needed something and so I think it was very important that we did have connections and we had been building them over the years.

And there’s also had a really long gestational period of you know, it took us a year to get to our final prototype, our 99% prototype and then another year from that till it was in people’s hands. So we had two years and even if we had zero Network at the start you find the events to go to you figure out the people you want to meet and you try to meet them in as organic way as possible. Not in a cold email, Here, Try my product.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah. That was the point. I was trying to get to the listeners out there because a lot of people come up to me and they go. Hey, so I got this product. How am I going to get people to promote it now? It’s always a process that where you have to kind of develop those relationships ahead of time. Without asking for anything in the beginning at all.

Pat: right, so, okay.

Steve: Alright.

Pat: So as I say you gotta dig dig your well before you get thirsty because if you’re digging your well, you’re already thirsty your kind of it’s not going to be a good situation.

Steve: So recording this right now Black Friday is next week to get some context. Do you guys have any plans?

Caleb: When is it coming out?

Pat: We had some plans and Amazon’s been a very interesting thing to get involved with because you know, we have our Shopify account and that’s performing very well. We also have our product in some retail stores already online including B&H Photo Adorama.

Steve: How did you get them to carry your products?

Caleb: Right now there’s five of them so I could talk through each of them individually. Number one, B&H. I’ve been at B&H affiliate for many years where they send me a product for 30 days. I can make a video. I use video links. I send it back that sort of thing. So I developed a relationship with my affiliate rep. Pat and I were in New York City just showing people switch pod and we tried to get a meeting with Buyer one thing led to another we ended up meeting, while we were there and they were interested. Adorama was organic actually, they reached out during the campaign. So someone at the team was just kind of keeping an eye on Kickstarter products and they had heard about it. What Have You, Focus Camera was similar to that just cold reach out moment, which is a company that makes smartphone lenses along with cases and other things.

They also have a shop where they sell a bunch of video photo gear. I had actually connected with them during the campaign. To get advice because I was using their Kickstarter campaign as kind of a framework to how to make the page how to show the offer pricing all that kind of stuff. And then the last one that we’re at right now is DVE store and we met them in person at Vid Summit this year and they wanted to order some and put some in stock. So kind of a case-by-case basis and yes, there are bigger stores and bigger opportunities in the future, Target, Best Buy, Walmart, What have you. And DME the other day is like how do we even do that? We don’t know. So we’ll figure it out as we go.

Steve: How does the arrangement work? Is it do you do they pre purchase a bunch of units or like what is the arrangement look like?

Caleb: Yeah, so they all buy it and then they have the inventory. So we’re not direct shipping for any retailers right now.

Steve: Okay.

Caleb: So they get it at a wholesale price because they handle returns shipping holding the inventory that sort of thing and they make their margins on that.

Steve: Can we talk about cash flow for a little bit looks like you guys are selling on a bunch of different channels? So Amazon your own store and then these retail outlets presumably to make these, you know tens of thousands of units. It’s a lot of money involved up front. So I have there been any issues on the cash flow front and what’s your plans for that?

Caleb: We’ve been keeping it tight.

Pat: Very tight.

Caleb: but it but in a strategic way. So we basically, after the kickstarter campaign you get a big payout Kickstarter takes their percentage. There’s a credit card fee percentage. There’s churn, you know, people that back the campaign that didn’t back it. And so the $415,000 public number you see is not what we got as well as a large chunk of that somewhere. I think around 40 to 50,000 is just for shipping out all of these switched pods to the 4,000 backers. So we had a big chunk of cash in our bank account. And we did the math of how many switch pods. Can we make get them to the US Pay tariffs ship them out to our backers and not run out of money and that was about ten thousandths Switch Pods and so we had only sold at that point a little less than 5,000 switch pods.

So we basically double bound we took our chips from one table, we walk to the higher limit. We set them all down and we can fling and we’ve made a couple decisions like that where Pat and I haven’t taken any money out of switch pod yet and we are trying to level this up to the point where for a physical product to really succeed in to be in a lot of stores you need inventory. If you don’t have inventory, you don’t make any money. So we’re making decisions to continually make sure we have inventory as well as if you get it all made At once, it’s cheaper because I need to ship it all over at once and you get better unit cause and that sort of thing. So we haven’t made another batch yet. We’re probably going to make another batch in the next few months, but that also comes down to timing and cash flow and retailers. Retailers take their net 30 whatever to pay you as so it’s a lot of it’s a lot of timing.

Steve: So you’re going through this first holiday season with basically that initial I guess you have 5,000 units left or how many years you have left and that’s what you’re living with do these Holidays.

Pat: Yeah.

Caleb: correct. Yeah, so that 10,000 included the 5,000 or so Kickstarter and then what we’ve sold since then so we still a few thousand. Yeah.

Steve: Okay.

Steve: I just want to let you know that tickets for the 2020 Seller Summit are on sale over at sellersummit.com. Now what is seller Summit? It is the conference that I hold every year that is specifically targeting e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online and unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level BS. Mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. And in fact, every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. The other thing I can assure you is that the Seller Summit will be small and intimate every year we cut off ticket sales at just a couple hundred people. So tickets will sell out fast, and in fact, we sell out every single year many months in advance now if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250K or 1 million dollars per year, we are also offering an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. Now, the Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. From May 6 to May 8. And right now, we are almost sold out of Mastermind tickets already and I will be raising the ticket price regularly starting the day after Cyber Monday for more information, go to sellerssummit.com. Once again, that’s SELLERSUMMIT.COM or just Google it. Now back to the show.

Steve: Yeah, and I’m sure it’s going to sell it over the holidays, which means I’m putting mine up on eBay baby. No, I’m just kidding.

Caleb: That was interesting. They were immediately on eBay as soon as..

Steve: Is that right? Haha

Caleb: Yeah, there was some on eBay for more than what you could buy it from our site when we were shipping from our site. So, I don’t know if people actually sold them or not, but he will do what they want to do.

Steve: So I kind of want to conclude this interview by just kind of talking about like the biggest pain points that you’ve had in getting your physical product off its feet compared to your experiences n the digital realm?

Pat: Yeah for me.

Caleb: I would say cost and patience but go ahead Pat.

Pat: Yeah for me is just patients. Like I like things to move fast. I, in the digital space can film a course and created and launched it and make money from it within a week and a half and or two weeks and and to have this take so long and every little iteration take so long. Every little change has to be very purposeful because was that means then the cad drawings have to change and then it has to get remolded or like all that stuff is to be factored in and then you know, even right now this just the patient’s of working with Amazon’s customer service team.

Steve: Yeah.

Pat: I just I’m just like pulling teeth and and pulling my hair out and having so much fun doing I think that’s what’s gotten me through this the fact that in this is what I do on SPI is I build new things and I share the process and and it doesn’t always go perfectly and I love that because it always becomes a lesson for other people so it has gotten me through is just the real life case study that I can then share to help others who maybe are trying to or thinking about doing something similar but that’s been the biggest challenge for me for sure is that has been the patience.

Caleb: For me. It’s been cost and profit margin because like that was saying digital course, you’re looking at what 95 percent 97 percent profit margin on that?

Pat: It’s ridiculous. Yes

Caleb: And physical product. You’re lucky you’re looking at 50 to 70 percent

Pat: maybe

Caleb: maybe

Steve: Well that’s gross. I mean, yeah, that’s gross too. But yeah, yeah. so which kind of leads me back to my original question, which I asked in the very beginning so digital versus physical. What are what are the main Pros that keep you guys going for this?

Caleb: I think it’s just fun like doing something physical is very fun. It’s very different. It’s challenged me to learn a lot of different things to learn again some of the stuff I learned when I studied Supply Chain management in college. So when we just decks and packaging and all these different things as well as it is open doors for Patton eyes Network that a digital thing just simply could not do. To get to meet certain people to be in stores to continually just learn different types of business that we can now share with people and and use whatever Ventures we have in the future. That’s been that’s been the best part is the fun the connections and it can also just be bigger. I think. Because of physical product, Typically I think can help more people. So they’re just more people involved than your ebook or your course or what have you.

Steve: Yeah

Pat: For me. It’s the look that a person has when they pop their camera on there and they use it like it’s like, you know when you’re in a Tesla and you somebody like just throttles it and then you have that like crazy smile. Oh my God, like that’s the moment like there’s a moment with physical things I think is very interesting. That it’s just not in existence in the digital world. Like I can’t give my online courses somebody and yes, they might be excited about it, but they’re not going to be able to use it or get value from it until they, you know, do it until they take action on it versus like I can hand somebody to switch pod and they just this is exactly what I need. They put it on there like yes, and they’re already using it like within 30 seconds.

It’s just it’s just so different and that to me is just been really special and I that’s what keeps me going and you know because any successful business online or offline, It’s about the customer and to be able to create something and to serve them quickly and to just two people throwing away their old tripods now because they got what they really wanted or what they really need is just like, so cool. It’s I love that feeling

Steve: So having done both myself. I find physical products more stable and less maintenance to a certain extent once everything’s out the door, whereas digital products. You constantly have to re-film or keep up to date with All those things whereas physical products that initial hurdle initial investment is really large. But once it’s out there it is generally easier to maintain.

Pat: so you’re saying we’re in a good spot now?

Steve: You are you guys have already met the largest hurdle or one of the largest hurdles, I would say and then you’ve got all these accessories that you can add on to it. I’m not sure if that’s in your future plans, but

Pat: Ah yeah

Steve: And sky’s the limit man.

Pat: This guys and I’m really excited and there’s definitely more upside here in the physical product space side as well. Not all digital is something that needs to always be maintained to I will fight back on that like a mind set course for example, like stuff about mindsets are going to change but if you’re creating a course about you know, social media, I mean you change that like every week so you’re right.

Steve: Yeah, and then you guys have an asset that is a lot more sellable now to than a post a digital course.

Pat: that is correct.

Steve: As well. So I’m excited for you guys. I really love the product. I saw that you stood on it at did I see you last so I tried standing on mine and it went fine and my kids actually climbed on me. As I was I was like whoa whoa whoa easy kids. I don’t know if he can handle all you guys as way but it actually did. It’s very sturdy product and it’s now my go-to tripod.

Pat: That’s awesome. Thank you, man.

Steve: I just want to close, where can people find this if they want to buy it?

Caleb: You can go to switchpod.co

Steve: Switchpod.Co and if it gets sold out in Ebay, is that where the

Pat: Find, Steve.

Steve: I’m just kidding guys, but excellent product. I’m looking forward to all the New accessory announcements and everything and best of luck to you, and if you guys ever need any help, this is my realm, so if you have any questions on Amazon what not feel free to hit me up.
Pat: Thanks, man. Appreciate that a lot.

Caleb: Thank you.

Steve: All right. Take care.

Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now if you’re in the market for a handheld tripod then go out right now and pick up the switch pod. I have one right in front of me right now. And it’s a great product I use for practically all my videos today. For more information about this episode. Go to mywifequitherjob.com/episode284.

And once again, I want to thank Kaviyo for sponsoring this episode, Kaviyo 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 or win back campaign. Basically, all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitherjob.com/klaviyo. Once again, That’s mywifequitherjob.com/klaviyo.

I also want to thank, Privy for sponsoring this episode. Privy is the email capture provider that I personally use the term visitors into email subscribers. They offer email capture exit intent and site targeting tools to make it super simple as well. And I like Privy because it is so powerful and you can basically trigger custom pop-ups for any parameter that is closely tied your eCommerce store. Now, if you want to give it a try it is free so head on over to privy.com/steve. Once again, that’s P-R-I-V-Y.com/steve.

Now I talked about how I use these tools in my blog and if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store heading over to mywifequitherjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini-course just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com

Steve: You’re listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrapped business owners and delve deeply into the strategies they use to grow their businesses. Now, today I’m with my buddy Ezra Firestone from Smart marketers, Zipify and Boom, back on the show. And this time we’re going to talk about some of the struggles he’s recently had with his e-commerce brand and how he is overcome them. It is a great episode that you should listen straight to the end.

But before we begin I want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Code Black Friday is right around the corner and for my e-commerce store email marketing is a heavy part of my holiday sales strategy. And in fact last year, it was close to 50% of My overall sales. And of course as you all know klaviyo is the email marketing tool that I use for Bumblebee Linens now Klaviyo is the growth marketing platform chosen by over 20,000 Brands generating more than three point seven billion dollars in Revenue in just the last year and with the holiday season right around the corner klaviyo has created the ultimate planning guide for crushing those holiday Revenue targets for marketing creative to segmentation strategy. These are proven tactics for more personalized marketing, especially in time for the holiday season. To get ahold of this guide, visit Klaviyo.com/mywife. Once again, Klaviyo.com/mywife.

I also want to give a shout-out to Privy who’s a sponsor of the show. Privy is a tool that I use to build my email list for both my blog and my online store and right now I’m using Privy Display a cool Wheel of Fortune pop-up basically user gives your email for a chance to win valuable prizes in our store and customers love the gamification aspect of this and when implemented this form email signups increased by a hundred thirty one percent. Now, you can also use Privy to reduce car abandoned with cart saver pop-ups and abandoned cart email sequences as well one super low price that is much cheaper than using a full-blown email marketing solution. So bottom line Privy allows me to turn visitors into email subscribers and recover lost sales so head on over to privy.com/steve and try it for free if you decide you need to the more advanced features use coupon code MWQHJ for fifteen percent off once again that’s privy.com/steve. Now on to the show

Intro: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast we will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle so can spend more time with your family focus on doing the things that you love. Here’s your host Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. Today, I’m really excited to have Ezra Firestone back on the show and in case you don’t know who he is Ezra runs a number of 7 and 8-figure e-commerce stores a Shopify SAS company called Zipify and an e-commerce education company over at Smartmarketer. Now, Ezra actually recently spoke in my conferences seller Summit about Facebook Chat Bots and as expected his talk was very well received but what’s funny is that Ezra and I have known each other for many years, but we’ve never really had an extended conversation. Until the speaker’s Mastermind for my event and after spending eight straight hours in a closed room with the guy. I started liking me even more and he is a wise man. Well beyond his years and he’s very personable as well. So today Ezra and I are going to talk about some of the challenges that he’s faced this past year with boom his e-commerce business and whatever else we plan on talking about today and with that welcome to show Ezra. How you doing today, man.

Ezra: My wife quit her job podcast. Hey man, super happy to be here and I just want to add to that that Hadn’t done one of those, you know speaker masterminds where you kind of get in you get together with a group of folks and you sit down for like you said, you know eight hours and you really just each person kind of goes through like what they’re struggling with and what’s going on and what they could use help with and it was like such a cool format. I’m really sold on that, you know going forward. I really liked it.

Steve: Yeah. I mean everyone was really open which I really loved and you know, one of the attendees there like she was tearing up and I think I feel like you know who I’m talking about, but I think we really helped her out a lot.

Ezra: Yeah. Yeah, we had a couple breakdowns man, there Was You know, I think when people get the space to actually kind of open up about what’s really going on. It can be cathartic and healing and it’s you know, there’s not a lot of safe spaces, especially in the business world where there’s so much sort of posturing was a cool thing you set up. So thanks for doing that.

Steve: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, even I found that that you have problems too. It’s amazing.

Ezra: 99 problems. Yeah, no probs we all I mean listen, I think that what’s interesting about like the struggles is in general when you’re experiencing sort of pain or struggle or discomfort. I mean at the very same time usually some things are going well too and it seems to be this sort of like being able to hold at the same time. Both things that are going well and things that aren’t and and how you navigate that intensity over time seems to be how well you do at business because I could tell you for sure. There’s always something that’s like not doing that great in one of my Brands, you know or something that’s scary or shopify’s gonna you know kick out the replacement checkouts or whatever the catastrophe or chaos is at the moment. It seems to be constant, you know, and so I really do think it’s about how you react to it.

Steve: Absolutely. It’s actually comforting to know that other entrepreneurs are facing similar issues. It just makes you feel better.

Ezra: Yeah, totally totally

Steve: Ezra, last time you’re on the podcast was four years ago

Ezra: What? 4 years what four years ago?

Steve: You’re one of my first guess. I was just kind of looking back at the lisitngs.

Ezra: Wow. I’d like to go back and see what we talked about then that’s kind of fun.

Steve: When I have no I didn’t listen to it. I just looked it up, but I know during our Mastermind we covered a number of different things. But can you just quickly catch the audience of about all your various businesses real quick. It’s really hard to keep track because you got so many.

Ezra: Yeah, you know, well, I think one of my most fun and sort of most popular success stories is really happened in the last four years, you know, 2010 to 2014. I was attempting to launch this brand Boom by Cindy Joseph and using content marketing and all kinds of stuff and 2014 was our real like first multi six-figure year and then 2015. We did 10x went from 300,000 to three million and then 2016. We went from 3 million to 17 million and then 17 18 19 are have now all been in that, you know, 20 million-ish range. And so that’s been a really big ride and also is kind of like my team over the last four years has gone from when I would have done that podcast with you. I probably had 16 members and now I have a hundred and three so there’s been like a lot Of expansion and my journey as an entrepreneur in that time has been going from the driver to the Navigator and I think that a lot of entrepreneurs get stuck in this sort of driver roll and It ultimately is what limits their growth where you know, if you’re on the road taking the turns you can’t be above the road looking at the mountains that are coming in the distance.

It’s very hard to both navigate and drive and where a lot of people get stuck. There’s a number of kind of sticking points that I’ve identified on my journey of growth in my company’s but one of them is technology right a lot of us do it yourself entrepreneurs who started from the ground with no money doing ourselves. We’re doing the Facebook in the klaviyo in the analytics and the Shopify like we’re really bogged down in the technological infrastructure of the business. So that’s one area that people get stuck and then one of the other lessons, I mean, I know this doesn’t directly answer your question, but now I’m off on a tangent is I think that so yeah a lot of stuffs been going on a lot of growth. I’ve got three main companies smart marketer. I do, you know blogging, educational courses on how to grow e-commerce businesses Zipify apps I build add-ons to Shopify stores that you know support you in your growth as a Shopify Merchant and then boom is a cosmetic retailer for women over 50, but what I was going to say was that one of the actually I totally lost my train of thought now, I’m sorry.

Steve: Ha ha ha ha

Ezra: I’ve no idea what

Steve: I was waiting for like the Revelation here.

Ezra: It was it was gonna be really good. Oh, I do remember now, which is you know, one of the things that everyone is so focused on is growth. Everybody wants to get bigger and grow and be it’s like there’s this sort of obsession with growth and I understand it on one level. But I also think that it’s a bit misguided and ultimately leads often to the demise of very good companies because you know with growth comes a whole lot of problems, you know, you have to fund more inventory. You’ve got more overhead. There’s more stress and pressure and intensity on you as the entrepreneur who’s the one who’s responsible for the whole operation and you know what I am trying to do. Is first and foremost enjoy my life and have fun and I want my team to enjoy their lives and have fun doing what they’re doing doesn’t mean we don’t work hard, but I want it to be enjoyable and you know, you don’t know how long you have which could lead into I know something you want to talk about a big traumatic experience. I had over the last 12 months, but you don’t know how long you have.

So if you’re not enjoying yourself making time for your hobbies making time for your social life making time for your relationships and intimate connections and you know, really enjoying and putting energy into your business in a sustainable way not 16 hours a day, then what’s the point and then I want to make really really good things that serve the world that are truly great products. And then third I want to be profitable and I frankly don’t care how big it gets and I don’t care how profitable I am. If I’m having a good time making good stuff and it’s making money and paying my team and paying my bills. I’m happy and I think that this fascination with growth is actually somewhat misguided and what you really should be looking at is how can I have a lot of fun make things that are truly good and then have that be profitable at any level is you’ve won the game, you know, a lot of people get really big and they’re Shackled to these operations that are slaving away at that make them miserable that took them away from their you know, it’s just like it can get out of hand.

Steve: I just came to this Revelation probably two years ago because trying to grow your company fast actually ruins marriages also. So my wife we were we’re setting these goals and we were stressing out over it because we weren’t hitting them and then we will get into fights over and over again. And so yeah, we kind of came to an agreement that we were just grow the company. Whatever happens happens grow gradually because fast growth really is painful. You’re right

Ezra: it is and it is.

Steve: And it’s much better since.

Ezra: like, sorry go ahead..

Steve: No, I was going to say the just our relations have been much better since we kind of came to that agreement regarding our e-commerce business.

Ezra: Yeah smart. I mean and it’s you know, it’s like there is this I call it Eternal vigilance, which is the skill set that I think is needed in order to run a business yourself that’s on the internet while where you are the entrepreneur who’s responsible for it. And also maintain a healthy balance between your outside life and your work because it’s available to you at all times. I like you go to the office and you leave the office and okay now that’s gone. Like no you’re the opportunity to continue the mental game of what can I do to improve my business is available to you at all times and if you’re not careful and you don’t actually set boundaries real clear boundaries and then show up to those on a daily basis the same way you have to show up to a diet or a workout program or a relationship then you’re gonna it’s just going to fill it’s going to be the backdrop of your entire life.

It’s going to fill every waking moment and a lot of people get caught in that trap and ultimately burn out or find themselves no longer interested because they just they treated it as a Sprint rather than a marathon. I think the ability to set work-life boundaries where it’s like okay from you know, 7:30 a.m. Or whenever I wake up to 10 a.m. I’m moving my body doing a meditation having breakfast with my family enjoying myself, whatever and then 10 a.m. I start work and then 5 p.m. I’m done and then at 5 p.m. I go on I engage in my social life and I do my hobbies. I spend time with my family. I set it down if you can’t pick it up and set it down deliberately and I’m not saying that there’s not times where you’re in launch mode and you’re just working for weeks at a time sure, but I just mean in general as a rule of thumb if you don’t have the ability to pick up and set down the operation in that way. It’s going to be very very hard for you over time is what I’ve learned.

Steve: But you can’t really do that effectively without a team. So when did you actually make that transition?

Ezra: Yeah, and I think I think you can set your energetic boundaries where you are creating space in your life for your personal life your social life your physical body things of that nature. I think you can do that. Even when you’re a solopreneur and my journey was I was basically a solopreneur where I was me doing it everything myself. I mean the whole thing and you know when you and I got started the game was American drop shippers and search engine optimization and like Yahoo stores, you know, there’s a little bit simpler of a game but That’s what it was, you know, and I played that myself from roundabout 2005 until I hired my first team member in 2009 to do customer support and then I basically still did everything myself and just had one team member all the way through 2012 when I sold that my Drop Shipping businesses

Steve: Was the wig bit company or something else?

Ezra: That was the wig bit Yeah. But yeah, then basically after in 2012 when I started blogging. And also selling services. I hired my cousin I said, hey man. Listen, I will pay you twelve bucks an hour to learn how to code and then once you know how to code I’ll pay you 20 bucks an hour and you can be a coder for me. And so as of 2012, I basically, you know from 2012 to 2014. I probably hired two or three people a year and then 2014 now, I’ve just kind of gone Buck Wild.

Steve: Yeah because you got your hands in a lot of pots so to speak so it would be impossible if you were doing the implementation right here.

Ezra: Yeah. I’m doing a lot of the Sort of ideation of reading the market and figuring out what’s going to be well-received of checking what people do and giving feedback. I don’t do a lot of actual and it’s are sometimes like what am I even doing around here? You know, but it’s just, you know, it’s important for someone to hold the container in the vision and you know be Crossing all the t’s and dotting the I sort of checking everything.

Steve: Yeah. So Switching gears a little bit. Can we talk about some of the challenges that you faced recently with boom in the last year’s of?

Ezra: Yeah. Yeah, I mean I Can get into that if you want so I could just go on a run unless you have a specific question.

Steve: Well, I’ll interrupt you. Why don’t you tell everyone what happened first in case they don’t know and then..

Ezra: Okay. Well the ultimate sort of hex that everyone has laid on them and Society is that you’re going to die one day and that sort of awareness of your impending death is, you know, something that causes midlife crisis. It’s something that is used to sell you every for everything under the sun, you know what I mean? Anti-age and health stuff and like it’s something that we all have to confront us human beings that one day. This ride is going to be over if we’re like everyone else or who knows what happens but but existence as we know it now may not be around and what I had happened to me just introducing that topic the idea of death and how scary that is my business partner who was also the Ambassador / face of my company on every product page every male was coming from her. I mean that whole thing sort of suddenly passed away. Really, abruptly on like, you know, we knew she was sick and then basically seven days later she was gone. And so..

Steve: I didn’t realize it was that quick.

Ezra: Yeah. Well what happened was she’d had one bout with cancer two years prior. So three years ago and she’d gotten really close to the door, you know, she’d gotten really close and then she made a full recovery and she was a hundred percent back. I mean fully and then generally when these things come back they don’t come back better. So we thought it was like totally Clear all good, and then boom we found out about a year ago to the day almost hey, this thing is back and then within 7 days, she had passed. So, you know, that was really traumatic for me on a mental emotional spiritual level in that. Cindy was very close friend of mine. She was like a groomsman in my wedding. You know, I moved to New York went or Grooms person Grooms woman. I moved to New York when I was 17 to play poker for a living after getting out of high school and I moved in with her and she kind of I lived with her for a few years before kind of going on my own in the city.

So she kind of like was a jumping step between teenage years too young adult years for me. And yeah, so we were like really really close friends. And so, you know, that was tough. She was a much like a second mother figure in a lot of ways for me and then also, you know just from the Practical side of it like sort of setting that down the Practical side of the business operations were rough to in that. I mean, she wasn’t very involved from an operational perspective I had been running the company forever and she actually hadn’t been on a video or audio for two years because when she first got sick we realized hey, you know, maybe it’s a bit be good to diversify the representation of our brand rather than it just being from one person’s voice make it about the experience of all women.

So we had actually started that process but there were things like the community of women who were our customers were very used to hearing from her or given that all of our emails were coming from her. She was doing all of the product demonstrations. All of our Facebook front-end ads were leading with her story and her doing product demos our team, which is 30 people or something at boom was very worried that we were going to go under or fire them. I mean it was just chaos. We had two very quick we had to announce her death, you know publicly because she was a public figure and it was starting to get picked up by news outlets and that proved to be an issue with you know, her family was just like it was an it was mad. It was the most intense period in my business career by pretty far long shot. And yeah.

Steve: Is that why you came to this revelation of having more fun with your business and not just focusing

Ezra: Yeah. I’ve always been in the you know, one of my mantras in life is fun as the goal and love is the way like, I think that that I’ve always been I think that success is a very popular but less fulfilling game than having fun, and I’m really into success and wealth creation and all this stuff that Society will tell you is the way to go but I’m not in it to the detriment of my pleasure in my life because you know, I have I was raised by a bunch of hippies. And so I kind of had that I grew up on a commune mindset that you know that we that you can only give from your own Surplus. And so if you want to be, you know, my tag line in business, it’s serve the world unselfishly and profit and if you want to be of service, which is my goal. I really do then you must first and foremost take care of yourself because you cannot pour from an empty cup.

So I’ve always had this goal of enjoying myself taking care of myself making That I am energetically sound that I can show up and give and so I’ve always kind of been on that path. And yeah, I mean that you know, when someone Close to You dies, it is very intense and you reassess everything like what am I doing? Why am I doing it? What is the point of all this like, you know, you really go through that intense sort of introspection about your behaviors and actions and what is motivating them. Are they motivated by ego. Are they motivated by the desire to please people are that like what am I? What am I? I actually doing here. So yeah, I went through all that man and and on the Practical side of it, you know the announcement of her death to our community the rewriting of all the email sequences the modifying of all of our front-end Facebook ads that the removing Cindy from all of our product.

I mean, it was like the reassuring my team that we weren’t going to go under you don’t mean the whole thing was was very emotionally draining and I felt that like, it’s now August she passed in July of last year and I feel like from July to like January was brioche and then the first three months of this year was like okay things are kind of like getting back to normal and then now like the last three months. I feel like I’ve fully like sort of digested as much as you can I mean morning is a whole thing and traumas of thing and who knows I’m not educated enough in the area of you know trauma to understand. I don’t know what lingering effects that stuff causes, but I feel pretty pretty sound, you know from it and we’re having our best year ever from

Steve: That’s what I’m going to say you had your best year ever and it continues to grow and I kind of I follow you and I know you’ve used Facebook ads Google ads email marketing all that stuff over the years and I was just kind of curious what has been your primary source of growth in the past year despite all this trauma.

Ezra: Well, I think the diversification of having our front-end lead sort of lead and customer generating strategies not being a hundred percent focused around Cindy has opened us up to be well received by perhaps women that maybe Weren’t resonating with her because now we lead with a variety of women. We’ve also discovered that there’s some reverse ageism in our Market where you know women in their 60s don’t want to have a woman in her 40s or 50s telling them about aging so we’ve kind of been able to mix up who is presenting on behalf of our company and that seems to have worked and also, you know through the process of reassessing every area of the company a product cost of goods advertising email strategy and you know, repeat so just we kind of went through every and one thing that I don’t know that I ever told you was you know before Cindy with the first time she got sick I went to her and I said Hey, listen, you know, like do you really want to be doing this? Like how you know, you got sick and you really almost died.

And so I just want to you know have the conversation of I mean, I know I do all the operations in the business, but like I want to have the conversation of like are you interested in continuing this ride or should we sell this company now because it’s worth a lot and you know, you could Be set for life and take care of your kids and all that and maybe it’s time to end this ride. Like, you know a death scare. As I said has you evaluate everything and she said, you know what so we got on board about that and we got really close. We got all the way through the process of due diligence a buyer the whole thing and the deal was about to happen and she passed away and then those people backed out and then I wasn’t thinking about selling the company after she passed. I was just trying to maintain stasis, but I also think that the process of going through and I would recommend the Quiet Light brokerage podcast your podcast e-commerce fuel podcast to listen to folks who’ve almost sold their businesses and hear the things that you do when you go through a due diligence process and sort of kick every Tire.

I think having done that exercise of hey, we’re going to sell this thing understanding all the things that affect valuation profitability things of that nature that I didn’t have a lot of attention on before even though I had sold the business and then having a year of operating after that. I think that also was a big factor in in why we’re growing but yeah, I mean our Facebook ads worked Extremely well, January February March, you know our we’ve introduced a bunch of new products, which has been really great. I think one of the keys to scale once you have a company that’s been around a while is to introduce three or four new products a year that you can cross sell to your past customers buyers and subscribers. So we feel like we’ve done a lot of stuff right.

Steve: Can we talk about like more specifically what your process of kind of re-evaluating all the different aspects of the business were?

Ezra: yeah, I mean, so when you’re looking at selling okay a company there’s a Number of factors that go into the valuation that you’ll receive one of them is repeat business, right? So what’s your return rate? So if your return rate is, you know fifty percent instead of thirty percent or 20 percent you’ll end up with a higher valuation. One of them is profitability. So how much profit do you actually generate your multiple will usually be a percentage of profit and you know, one of them is diversification of visibility and customer Source like we did a bunch of things. We renegotiated with all of our suppliers we switch suppliers. Fires in certain cases, we changed out our packaging like we did things to ensure to increased our margins on the products that we were selling. We raised our prices and we ran a price raise sale, which was the best thing we’ve ever done made half a million dollars in two days just by telling our community.

Hey, our prices are going up by 10% in a week and you combine at the current prices now with a 10% discount, but we got you know, we haven’t Ever Raised our prices and as the company gets bigger things like, you know inventory and salary and our costs rise, and so we have to raise our prices. So we raised our prices and We did things to increase our margins.

Steve: How did you know how much to raise the price and how did you know that you weren’t at like some limit in terms of just pricing.

Ezra: So we split so on are two front and offers. So I only have two things that people buy from me when they find me for the first time. Then those are my cosmetic sticks. They come to me for that a lot easier to sell than it is to sell like skincare for example, because everyone has skin care but the skincare is the back end right the what we sell the people already know as so the two items that are the front end offers. We split tested the changes in pricing from a low change immediately. I am changed to a very drastic High change and ultimately raising the front end price of our products by $10 would have ended up increasing the profit the most significantly but it was cutting down too much on customers that were coming in the door and we have a goal of not only profitability but also a big footprint because one of the other things that affects your valuation is literally how big your audience is and how much revenue you generate.

Not just how much profit you make so all three price tests one against are control and we went with the medium raised on the front end the back end products, which is are all 14 other of our skin care products. We just raised by a flat ten percent across the board and we didn’t even test it and it’s been fine because those people already know us like us engage with our content and our going to buy from us because they like us not because their price sensitive and so we kind of were in the medium end of the market in terms of what we were charging and now we’re more at the higher end of the market and so front end products that are for customer acquisition. I would recommend that you split test that but your back end cross sells you can usually get away with 5 or 10% without much of a problem.

Steve: interesting. I actually didn’t even know that about your business. So you have this like one lead in product that just opened

Ezra: we have to lead in products and it’s like my whole shtick is simplify your makeup routine, you know color Cosmetics. It’s like it’s make Cosmetics or what gets people’s attention and then everything else I sell is basically a back-end upsell cross-sell and a lot of businesses are that way where they’ve kind of got like one flat especially businesses that are driven by Response and if you’re an Amazon brand sure you got a million products you sell but and if you’re a Google if you’re if you’re driven by direct response, but it’s search traffic. You generally have a whole bunch of products you sell because you got a bunch of different queries. But if you’re driven by story-based direct response where you’re telling a story engaging a subscriber in a conversation and then offering them something you usually have one or two products that are the real like 85 90 percent of what you sell on the front end and then everything else tends to be a back-end upsell cross-sell the people who came in from one of those funnels and heard about you and You know pretty much every business that I’ve evaluated that is the same kind of business has a similar story to that.

Steve: So in terms of increasing your repeat business, what did that involve specifically?

Ezra: It involved running more sale event. So we now do six a year it involved introducing more products. So we’ve kind of ramped up the product launches work. I mean there’s a reason Apple does them there’s a reason Amazon does that there’s a reason that people do them? We started building anticipation rather than just we used to just say hey, we got a new product here. It is now we spend two weeks saying Hey, this product is coming building up excitement for it do an ads and emails talking about what it’s going to be and then we release it and we’ve literally doubled the effectiveness of our product launches just by adding a two-week anticipation funnel on the front end of the product launch, which I share that on the Zipify blog in the smart marketer blog how we do that but I mean excitement works if someone’s paying attention to you and there’s an opportunity for them to follow along and get excited about something and sign up for it and then get a few emails saying it’s coming.

I mean, they’re much more likely to convert. Then he we introduced a new you know, moisturizer that helps for after you’ve been in the sun. I mean that’s nowhere near as compelling as giving the opportunity for someone to be excited.

Steve: So in terms of getting people excited in terms of just running Facebook ads are these just awareness ads or are they are you trying to get an email add or something?

Ezra: Yes, it’s for product launches their 95% people who have either been on our email list or bought for us from us in the past. We still we do run lead gen on our product launches to build anticipation for them to cold as well. But But it doesn’t really convert that. Well, so really our product launches are about monetizing the community that we have and then for Facebook lead gen. We’re still leading with our Flagship products and our customer acquisition Facebook customer acquisition and you know, we’re constantly changing up our video formulas and testing different articles and doing everything we can to, you know, reduce our customer acquisition costs for sure, but you asked specifically about you know, repeat business and one of the main things done for that in addition to you know, improving our And marketing significantly.

I mean we release for posts a week. We’ve got two writers on staff. We’ve really invest about a million dollars a year in non branded content marketing that’s designed to engage my community and I think once you get bigger and you have a front end customer acquisition funnel that is bringing you customers the game of keeping those folks engaged through content that they’re enjoying and being entertained by is a big part of scale.

Steve: If you sell an Amazon or run any online business for that matter, you’re going to need a trademark to protect your intellectual property. Not only that but a trademark is absolutely necessary to register your brand on Amazon. Now, I used to think that any old trademark registration service would work and that could even try to register my own trademark by myself on the cheap, but I was dead wrong. Securing a trademark without a strategy in place usually results in either an outright rejection or a worthless unenforceable trademark. Now, that is why I work with Stephen Wagner and his team from Emerge counsel. They have a package service called total TM, which provides the same attention to detail and process that large law firms do at a fraction of the price. Now for me personally, I like Emerge Council because of their philosophy, their goal is to maximize IP protection while minimizing the price. So before you decide to register a trademark by yourself or file for other I could protection such as a copyright or a patent, check out Emerge counsel first and get a free consult. For more information go to emergecouncil.com and click on the Amazon sellers button and tell Steve that Steve sent you to receive a $100 discount on the total TM package for Amazon sellers. Once again, that’s emergecounsel.com over at emergecounsel.com now back to the show.

Let’s talk about content marketing a little bit. Are you writing primarily to tell a story or you writing for the intention of ranking in search?

Ezra: we do know nothing is with the goal of search engine optimization. Not a single thing is with the goal of ranking. I mean, yes, we Rank and we get organic traffic and we do put you know meta title tags and meta descriptions and maybe an H1 but there’s no key word for thought before we create our content or content is all you know eight skin care tips for aging skin. Or how I overcame perfectionism or my battle with anorexia and what I did about it experiences that the women in our community are having we’re talking about them, you know, women are going through their hair graying their skin wrinkling their hormones changing through menopause their skin changing all this kind of stuff dating after a divorce is a big one for women who are in their 50s. I mean, there’s a lot of experiences that they’re having that we can talk about and we’re doing that in a number of ways.

We’re writing articles. We’ve got a new ambassador program where we’re allowing our customers to create videos about our products and also about their makeup routines and so we’ve got a bunch of different pillars that we talk about sustainability is a big one. You know, how we are sustainable why we’re sustainable what we do in that direction. We have these sort of content pillars that we create regular content within a given sort of framework, you know tips lifestyle stuff Ambassador stuff sustainability stuff. You can go to the Boom by Cindy Joseph blog and which will which will about next week be on zip if I Pages might landing page builder for shop We just released blogging and we’re switching it over. We currently have a WordPress implementation for our blog but managing both WordPress and Shopify in the cross-domain tracking and lack of S It’s just a nightmare.

So we built this really sweet blog integration on Zipify pages and we’ve moved the boom blog over there. It’s about to go live and pray excited about it. But yeah, so that’s kind of like what we do for Content.

Steve: So what’s funny about that is when you writing articles, I guess that without the intention of ranking in search a lot of times those articles kind of get buried deep within the blog. Ali right. So are you doing a lot of things you do that content back to people or?

Ezra: we do re-mail on it? We re-mail, you know, any article we track what articles and videos perform the best in terms of click-through rate engagement and purchase rate because people buy from these things to even though they don’t aren’t going to content or aren’t going to products you can get to the our products once you get to our blog. So it’s a big part of how we monetize is keeping this content coming and anything that works any good article if it’s a really good one will turn it into a front-end pre-sell article and run it to to Nuke new subscribers and Prospects. So we will use our current list to determine what is the best content and then we’ll take that and we’ll run that top of funnel. We will re mail on our best post will put them our best ones in our email automation sequences. But a lot of our stuff just gets buried on the blog and is never used again that does happen a lot.

Steve: interesting. So a lot of this really is just building a community word of mouth and social is probably your primary strategy mainly because you’re in the cosmetics Business, I would say right?

Ezra: Yeah, I mean we amplify that content. So any content at our blogs and videos and articles our Facebook fans will see it our subscribers will see it will amplify it on Google. So we’re paying to push that content out once it’s out there running ads to it. We’re also emailing our list and the idea is, you know, people get 150 emails a day. So we send we send three or four content emails a week and that generates 40 Grand a week in revenue for us. Those aren’t sale emails and then every four to six weeks will either introduce a product or run our side. We will introduce product four times a year three or four times a year, but every six weeks or so, there’s either a product launch or a sale or something like that where we have a big monetization of our community. So the content is responsible for it.

Definitely ROIs at a very very solid number based on how much money we spend to produce it and amplify it and how well it has our see what happens is your sales work better, right? If you’re keeping your community engage if they’re seeing content from your and in their news feeds and on Facebook and on Google and on YouTube on the Display Network, then when you run a sale and they see sale ads, they’re much more likely to engage with them. So our sales work way better because we have this content strategy.

Steve: I’ve heard you and Mollie Pittman give a number of webinars about Facebook ads and how advertising is just getting a lot more expensive. What are some of the trends that you’ve been seeing and have you countered them some of the negative Trends I should say.

Ezra: I mean since we’ve been online Steve, I think advertising costs have gone up on average 15% year over year.

Steve: Oh yeah actually more than that for me in some cases. Yeah.

Ezra: Yeah. Yeah, me too. You know, I don’t think it’s going to change and you know, I think that there’s a lot of cool stuff you can do and I think one of the biggest opportunities is short form video content. So sub 15-second video ads on Instagram stories Facebook mid-roll videos Facebook. I think if you’re not doing short form in addition to whatever normal video ads you might be running then you are definitely missing out on the cheap inventory at the moment because that’s where all the cheap inventory is. Of course you also have Have the longer form videos and what most people aren’t doing is also mixing an image ads GIF animation ads and Carousel ads because you know Facebook is only going to show a user a video ad a few times. It’ll show it but it’ll show that same user if you’re targeting. Let’s say a look-alike of your buyers or something or even just you know, people who are fans of Ezra Firestone digital marketer, whatever, you know.

I mean, if you’re targeting any group of people and you have multiple types of Creative Images videos GIFs short form Inform carousels that Prospect in that targeting group will see more ads from you because you have more diverse sort of AD creative that Facebook is willing to show them in addition to that. Most people only run conversion focused ads designed to generate either add to cart events purchase events or even email leads. If you’re only ever running conversion ads again, Facebook’s only going to show a certain amount of conversion adds to every Prospect if you also have 10 percent of your budget in brand awareness in you know, dynamic product ad or Catalog sales in messenger where you’re clicking the messenger, like if you were using different objectives within the platform even at a small percentage of your budget, you’ll reach way more people in your audience because those objectives have a much lower cost per thousand people (CPM) cost per impression.

So even though you’re spending less of your budget on these other objectives, you’re actually reaching way more people than you would if you were just using only conversion focused ads.

Steve: Let me ask you this. I mean your team is like over a hundred people now and this

Ezra: across Three different companies and fair. Yeah, so, you know, it sounds really fancy, but I want to just give transparency into that which is 40 of those hundred people are on the development team for Zipify So that’s a big chunk of folks and we rather developed, you know whole and that is my only physical location all developers are in one place and then you know, let’s say 20 on boom and then you know two essential it’s almost like 20 boom 30 Zipify 10 or 15 smart marketers kind of like, you know, Mixed up in that way.

Steve: I was just going to say to create the number of creatives necessary to do all this testing on Facebook Instagram short stories and what not. It kind of requires a lot of effort on your part. So if you don’t have a large team, what would you what would be recommendations for kind of like a more bare-bones approach?

Ezra: Yeah, and I don’t I mean I think that’s another kind of limiting belief, you know with Boom. For example, we have like five videos that we’ve been running for the last like two years. I mean, yes, we mix them up and edit them in different ways. You don’t actually need a lot of creative. You just need good creative. And so one video editor or one graphic designer is actually plenty and you can freelance that you know, you can hire a freelance video editor and you can shoot videos on your iPhone or you can hire a freelance designer and make GIFs and images and basically you can run the same thing for months and months and months until it stops working or if you’re spending a lot of money. Yeah, then you got to refresh your ads quite often, but if you’re spending less than Or 500 bucks a day. You don’t need to refresh your ads that often. I mean Zipify for example, you’re probably seeing the same Zipify ads that were running for months ago running now because I’m only spending see, you know, 50 bucks a day or something amplifying Zipify.

So you don’t need actually that much creative. It’s more about quality creative that’s going to engage the particular audience. And yeah, you got a test that so when you’re first launching you might need to try three or four different videos by different videos a couple different images, but but you only need one. Team member in that role to support that so for Zipify only have one designer for boom. I only have one designer. Although I also have a video editor at smart marketer. I also have a designer and a video editor. So I have two but you could freelance those roles. You could buy you could buy that on an as-needed basis through you know service providers.

Steve: This is actually a question. This is kind of a different type of question. But I’ve always wondered how Zipify kind of falls into your overall strategy. Is it just because you were doing all these these things with Zipify with boom like the function out the equivalent functionality that you decide to create this SAS company?

Ezra: So I yeah, I believe in permaculture as a business model and permaculture is a farming term and it what it means essentially is to reuse all of your resources to their greatest benefit capture the rainwater water the garden take the chicken shit use it for the compost like take all your food scraps and use those for the composite use use everything that you can to further your goal and a lot of people think that they need stuff outside of what they already have but they just haven’t taken inventory of the assets that are actually around them. And so this is a rule that I live my life by instead of looking outside of what I already have access to let me look at what I have access to and how I can better utilize that and if you look at my business model, it’s very permaculture. Take a look at this. It’s like, okay, I innovate in the direction of e-commerce first and foremost with boom and any other e-commerce business I’ve had over the years then I take whatever works.

And I document that and I share that on my blog with smart marketer and I offer that to business owners and I create courses that are in depth and I sell that and then I take the money from those courses and I put it back into the e-commerce business and then I was also back since I mean 2011-2012 doing development services. I was building websites for people on Magento OS Commerce x-cart prestashop. I understand the e-commerce customer journey and also the technology that powers the From the early days of before Shopify Bigcommerce and Volusion where the big three from, you know, the Magento days the Yahoo store days, the xcaret days the prestashop days the you know, I’ve been in this industry and I’ve also had a mind for development now granted. I’m not the greatest developer myself, but I know how everything talks to. I know how every piece of technology talks to every other piece of technology to create the customer buying journey, and I’ve always sold Services I had An AdWords Services Agency from 2008 to 2012.

I had a Shopify and sort of every other platform development agency from 2011 to 2015 and with Services I failed miserably I mean it may be my worst ever business venture. I had a real hard time in my life setting boundaries in general and at that spilled over into my Services Agency and I think I sold three or four million dollars in services and made like 30 Grand in profit, maybe because like what would is I’d sell someone a website and then and then I they’d come back and say hey, can you do this and I’d be like sure and I go back to my developers. Hey, man, we need to do this, you know, and and basically I just never figured out how to really set a container around a sale. So I was just like doing stuff for people like forever because I didn’t yeah, I didn’t quite have a command of boundaries which is something I had to learn and that’s something that served me well since I have picked up on how to do that in a way that feels good to the person.

I’m setting the boundary with but so I’ve always done development and sold development and I only stopped because I couldn’t figure out how to make it work. But I always thought it was a good business and thought I could do well in it, but I didn’t love so much talking to people or being the person. Yeah, I’m a comic. I’m a charismatic hermit man. I want to be like in my cave making stuff and then come out to your event for two days and then go back to the top of the mountain where I get to be alone and make things. I mean does I’m not like the best service provider because I don’t want to talk to the client but what I discovered so I was take a look at the By ecosystem and I actually in 2014. I created a WordPress plugin for Amazon business owners maybe it was 2013 that allowed you to do the one-time giveaway coupons where you could give a product away for a dollar and give them a coupon.

And this and that that was kind of the strategy for ranking on Amazon back then and so this this WordPress plugin allowed you to collect an email address give them a one-time Amazon coupon follow up with them build a landing page is pretty sweet little plug-in called booster page and I think I spent like 30 grand to make it and about 380,000 in revenue on it. So it was extremely profitable and it was a monthly subscription. Of course. I had to keep it up to date but the update of the development, you know was not that much and so basically I was like, oh, so the way that you make development work is you don’t sell a one-time fee you sell a subscription you software-as-a-service and so once I figured out the software as a service model, I’d always had the goal of when it you know, I want to get back in the development game and I want to do it as a product rather than you are buying me.

My time in my Consulting you are buying this product that I’ve created that is essentially thousands of lines of code that create an experience for you when you log into it and do things to help you but you’re not buying Ezra you’re buying this individual product that you pay for on a monthly basis. So I like the idea of recurring revenue of selling development. And yeah, I mean, I am developing things for my sight all the time and anything that works. I roll into my landing page builder. I roll into my upsell Builder. So essentially it’s a permaculture all over again. Because I’m taking what’s working for me and my students in my Mastermind and I’m developing that into the application and open sourcing that for my customers who can buy that on a monthly subscription. But what I underestimated was how difficult that business model is as Far and Away the most difficult business. I have ever been involved in by a factor of 15 or something

Steve: It’s very resource-intensive too, right?

Ezra: It’s so hard. It’s like so so hard, but it’s really fun. It’s kind of a never-ending spy role of Integrations and Madness and Shopify changes something and just like it’s crazy and the product is amorphous. It’s like with boom. I’m selling a tub with goo in it. And when I when I scale, it’s like more tubs more goop more labels and ship them. I mean, it’s really great goo and it’s amazingly well made and all its really wonderful product, but it’s very simple Zipify is like a code base that’s always changing and so like I don’t need just a manufacturer and then someone to ship it but I need and Engineers, back-end Engineers QAs project manager. I mean, it’s crazy the product side of it is very very difficult

Steve: How do you actually allocate your time between your three businesses?

Ezra:You know I kind of do what is needed when it’s needed. I mean, it doesn’t give you a good answer but each business has a project manager who is responsible for all ongoing operations who you could label essentially a COO and then I have a president who kind of swings across all companies and is sort of like dipping in to the key projects when needed and he’s really great. And so, you know, I might spend a week or two working only on Boom than a week or two and working only on Smart marketer. I might have a week where I You you know all of them in the same day. So it’s just kind of like as needed. But each of the companies at this point has very strong leadership and a very clear and cohesive Direction and ongoing operations. And so we’re no longer.

None of them are any longer in the startup phase where it’s like, we don’t really know what we’re doing. It’s all chaos. It’s like every one of them has consistent ongoing clear operations and objectives and team members and you know with smart marketer. I had a big change because I was both with the lead educator and also the lead kind of person who was doing strategy and content and all this stuff and I found that as boom scaled and a Zipify scaled. I was no longer having time and energy to keep the courses up-to-date and so with smart marketer, I’ve kind of transitioned to the main thing that we sell are the main thing people want to buy from us is training on paid advertising and I’m really good at teaching that because I’ve been doing it for a long time.

But Mollie Pittman is also really good if not, better at teaching that and so she’s now come on board to be the lead advertising educator which is kind of freed me up and I’ve got Colleen Taylor teaching a course for me Brett Curry teaching a course for me. So now with smart marketer, I’m no longer the one responsible for the courses, even though here and there I will do a course and I really like it but it’s more like I am the guy who’s out there speaking on stages and generating awareness because I can do that better than anyone else getting people to know about us and then the monetization or the product side of it is done by other folks, which is kind of cool.

Steve: Okay. Yeah that makes total sense man. Ez, I want to be respectful of your time here. We’ve been chatting for like 45 minutes where can people find you where can people check out your products and see for themselves what you’ve been up to.

Ezra: I got a little sidetracked there because I was going to go on another tangent about something but

Steve: Yeah go on the tangent go for it, man.

Ezra: Well, just you know was going to say that I think what you do is super cool, you know, you do this podcast and you also run a bit like we have very similar businesses and I think that this that in today’s world anyone who wants to do something and then talk about what they’re doing and share that and share tips has this opportunity to be an influencer. I mean maybe a micro influencer, but an influencer to a group of people who are sharing a collective experience who are interested in getting better at that experience over time. And I think that there’s a lot of rewarding things that are available when you build a community around a given topic like not only can you monetize that Community by selling products, but like then you make friends with people in that community and like it’s just A super cool thing to do and I just wanted to like anyone who’s listening to this who maybe has considered the potential of putting themselves out there and starting an Instagram handle or a YouTube channel.

Like I could not recommend it more highly and and you know, you’re talking from someone who’s pretty much introverted even though that is not my public Persona and I’m really good at turning it on on stage and being my authentic self and sharing that but like in general in my life. I’m not like if I get into a big room of people at a party like I don’t I don’t know how to handle that situation super well and I like Smaller groups. So I just think you know that this opportunity is available to anyone.

Steve: I can definitely agree with that. Nothing ever bad has ever happened from creating content.

Ezra: Yeah

Steve: only good things can happen.

Ezra: Totally

Steve: as long as you do it on a consistent basis.

Ezra: Yeah, consistency is the key so you can reach me @EzraFirestone on Instagram. That seems to be the hottest place right now I can tell because it used to be when I spoke at events. I would get Facebook likes, you know a couple hundred Facebook likes. I don’t mention my I don’t say go follow me, but I would just watch. Watch and then like couple years ago. It was like all of a sudden I was getting followers on Twitter and now every event I literally get no Facebook followers. No Twitter followers, but I’ll get hundreds of Instagram followers. So it seems an Instagram is like coming to go to platform at the moment. So you can find me at @EzraFirestone on Instagram, or you can go to my blog smartmarketer.com or if you’re a Shopify person. You can go to the Shopify App Store and type in Zipify, Z-I-P-I-F-Y

Steve: you know, it’s funny Ezra, we are very similar and what we Do and SAS is missing from my portfolio and actually was thinking about doing SAS company for a long time. But just after talking with you and a bunch of other people like my kids are my primary priority and it seems like it’s all consuming.

Ezra: It’s in the first year year to 18 months. It’s a very big cycle but I will tell you, you know, one of the ways to look at this Steve from one of the things I’m looking at and I think this is the last run I will go on but I think it’s really important. I think the game that we are playing is a resource generation, and I think that You know, a lot of people will say what are we doing? Well, we’re optimizing our businesses so that they’re more profitable and perform better over time, but it’s like yeah, but for what to generate as much resources we can in the time that we have to work and then to use that resource towards causes that we find Noble taking care of our family supporting our community serving the world and taking care of the world. And when we look at what are the most effective ways to generate resource, I’m looking at most people look only 3 to 6 to 9 months ahead. I’m looking at I think you need to look further. I’ve got 20 years left at this pace. 32 I’ll be 33 in a couple months.

I’m not going to be working at this pace much later than my early 50s and I’m going to be slowing way down. I think so. Okay. I got 20 years, right and I have some high Revenue goals and profitability goals and wealth creation goals because I have a lot of you know direct people in my family of where I was raised. I got 60 hippies to support, you know, I got a lot of people I’d like to take care of a lot of things I want to do in the world that require large amounts of resource, so As I understand it and have looked at the game of wealth creation its you know, cash flow businesses do not will not get you there. If the goal is massive amounts of wealth creation, which is a fun goal to have if you’re going to play the game why not have that goal. So what gets you there is asset liquidation. So the monetization of assets that you own and have equity in and then the deployment of that Capital into the market to acquire other assets.

Let them appreciate and then That was in the most common way to do this in the you know 70s through today has been through real estate right take your money by an asset level appreciate sell it but I think that you know, the way that I am playing this game is to either purchase operate and grow businesses and then liquidate them or build operate and grow businesses and then liquidate them and then use that money to deploy in the marketplace. And when I looked at smart marketer, smart marketer is a cash flow business, you could never sell it. It’s built around my Persona. So what was a way that I could create an Asset from this community that I have gathered around my Persona who I am serving. Well Zipify could be sold one day Zipify is an asset in the beauty of a SAS business is the multiple that you will receive on the SAS business is even higher than the multiple you receive on an e-commerce business because SAS businesses are generally valued for a multiple of Revenue.

Whereas e-commerce business are generally valued for multiple profit. So I do think at some point if you have the community and the desire and the skill set and the you know, It’s not a bad experiment because it would result in a very valuable asset. Even if it’s very small. I mean, let’s say you built up a small little app that wasn’t super complex. You only needed a couple Developers for and it only made a hundred grand a year. I mean that could end up being worth between 500,000 and a million dollars free and clear liquid in your pocket. If you ever were to monetize that asset which is a huge sum of money in liquid cash. So especially considering even if you have a million dollars in liquid cash you can put a hundred or two hundred of that thousand down towards the acquisition of an asset and take a loan. I mean affords you opportunity that not having large sums of money doesn’t afford you. I know you already know all this but I’m just saying it for the audience.

Steve: and this is just something like our mutual buddy Drew Senaki does all the time

Ezra: exactly, exactly. So anyways, I think you should do it. Maybe someday.

Steve: Thanks. We’ll catch up at the many check conference you go do a hangout with you.

Ezra: Yeah looking forward to it. Hey, man, thanks for having me on the show. I really appreciate it.

Steve: Thanks a lot for coming on. Take care.

Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now, even though Ezra is super successful. We all go through rough patches with our business and the key to success is to just buckle down and find a way to move on. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitherjob.com/episode279.

And once again, I want to thank Privy for sponsoring this episode. Privy is the email capture provider that I personally use the term visitors into email subscribers. They offer email capture exit intent and site targeting tools to make it super simple as well. And I like Privy because it is so powerful and you can basically trigger custom pop-ups for any parameter that is closely tied your eCommerce store. Now, if you want to give it a try it is free so head on over to privy.com/steve. Once again, that’s P-R-I-V-Y.com/steve.

I also want to thank Kaviyo for sponsoring this episode, Kaviyo 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 or win back campaign. Basically, all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitherjob.com/klaviyo. Once again, That’s mywifequitherjob.com/klaviyo.

Now I talked about how I use these tools in my blog and if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store heading over to mywifequitherjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini-course just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com

Steve: You’re listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrapped business owners and delve deeply into the strategies they use to grow their businesses. And today, I have my buddy, Dave Manley on the show and if you listen to the 5 Minute Pitch, Dave was one of the finalist and he runs MMA Bubblehead where he sells bubble heads for UFC fighters. Now, in this episode we break down how Dave attracted the attention of famous writers as a nobody who’s been able to generate his sales.

But before we begin I want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Code Black Friday is right around the corner and for my e-commerce store email marketing is a heavy part of my holiday sales strategy. And in fact last year, it was close to 50% of My overall sales. And of course as you all know klaviyo is the email marketing tool that I use for Bumblebee Linens now Klaviyo is the growth marketing platform chosen by over 20,000 Brands generating more than three point seven billion dollars in Revenue in just the last year and with the holiday season right around the corner klaviyo has created the ultimate planning guide for crushing those holiday Revenue targets for marketing creative to segmentation strategy. These are proven tactics for more personalized marketing, especially in time for the holiday season. To get ahold of this guide, visit Klaviyo.com/mywife. Once again, Klaviyo.com/mywife.

also want to give a shout-out to Privy who’s a sponsor of the show. Privy is a tool that I use to build my email list for both my blog and my online store and right now I’m using Privy Display a cool Wheel of Fortune pop-up basically user gives your email for a chance to win valuable prizes in our store and customers love the gamification aspect of this and when implemented this form email signups increased by a hundred thirty one percent. Now, you can also use Privy to reduce car abandoned with cart saver pop-ups and abandoned cart email sequences as well one super low price that is much cheaper than using a full-blown email marketing solution. So bottom line Privy allows me to turn visitors into email subscribers and recover lost sales so head on over to privy.com/steve and try it for free if you decide you need to the more advanced features use coupon code MWQHJ for fifteen percent off once again that’s privy.com/steve. Now on to the show

Intro: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast we will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle so can spend more time with your family focus on doing the things that you love. Here’s your host Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. Today, I’m thrilled to have Dave Manley on the show. Now, Dave was a finalist for the five minute pitch. My Shark Tank like show with Mike Jackness, Gregg Mercer and Scott Walker where we gave away $50,000 in Cold Hard Cash. Now, Dave runs MMA bubblehead, which is an e-commerce business selling. Well, you guessed it bubble heads of MMA fighters, but Dave’s bubble heads are not the cheap kind you can buy in stores or get for free at ball games. His bobbleheads are the best quality that I’ve ever seen. And he signed on top fighters like Chuck Liddell and Dan Henderson as well and Dave was actually one of my favorite contestants on the 5 minute pitch. And what I want to do today is I really wanted to delve deeply into his story and how he makes sales how he got started because there’s a lot of things that we obviously couldn’t cover in 5 minutes on the 5 minute pitch show and with that welcome to show Dave. How are you doing today?

Dave: Hey Steve. Thanks for having me man. Listen, it is it’s a great honor to be on your podcast. I’m going to tell you why. Three years ago this month in July. I came up with this idea about making bobbleheads for MMA athletes and I had no idea what I was doing not only on the bobblehead side, but more importantly on the e-commerce side. I had no clue Steve, So the first podcast that I attached myself to of the sea of podcasts out there was yours and I’m not just saying that and I Hooked onto your podcast and I ended up just binge listening to all of your episodes back-to-back to back I couldn’t get enough and it’s just so great to be on your show after the five minute pitch and it’s just kind of coincidental that it’s three years later after I come up with this idea and discover you that now I’m on your show. So it’s a great honor for me.

Steve: Well, thanks a lot for the kind words Dave and happy anniversary. I didn’t realize it’s been three years now.

Dave: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you know what Steve I came up with this idea, you know. Not to get really philosophical, but I’ll dive a little bit deeper and like how I came up with this idea and what happened because I kind of tell the story and people who follow me kind of know the story on how it happened. But a lot of people don’t know that about a week before I came up with the idea. I was in Las Vegas and I was at a UFC fight and I have great tickets great seats. I was literally maybe three rows from the cage, right and I was about 40 41 years old at the time and I was enjoying myself. So much I was over until I didn’t want to go to the bathroom. I didn’t want to go get a soda. I wanted to stay in my seat and just take everything in well about an hour into the fight. I started really having like some deeper thoughts, right? and I started thinking man Dave, you know, you’re 40 years old whatever if I was ten years younger, I would just dedicate my life to this sport dedicate my life to this organization the UFC or these athletes martial arts and do whatever it took to be part of this community and make a living because I love that. I love martial arts.

I’d love this sport so much. It’s it’s not even right how much I’ll I mean a lot of people love baseball basketball football or whatever. But I mean, I just feel like the sport is part of my fiber and so I was having these like self talks with myself like it. Yeah, man, I’m a little bit too old to start thinking about that right now, but man if I was just 30 again, and I came home and about 1 week later I cleared of the shelf in my office and I thought I told myself I’m going to start purchasing MMA memorabilia and it was then that I wanted to buy a bobblehead of my favorite fighter and they didn’t make them and then I went on to another fighter who’s just equal he’s famous. They didn’t make him either. So then I went on the most famous fighter that they got name’s Conor McGregor didn’t make him either and it was just right there, right then. I knew that you know, I’m not this. I’m not one of these guys Steve that put it out in the universe.

I don’t know if I believe in that whatever but I knew right then and there. There that maybe something was being answered because I knew boom that I am going to make these bobbleheads. I didn’t know that I was going to make them so well, but I knew that I was going to start taking that step towards, you know, those thoughts that I had just a couple weeks previous.

Steve: So I can understand wanting a bobblehead for yourself, but turning into a business and scaling is a completely different thing. So did you have any exterior motivations for starting it as a business?

Dave: Well, you know, yes, okay. Yes. And no first of all, I thought well they make bobbleheads for every other Sport and they’ve made bobbleheads for every other sport for decades for 50 years. And I thought you know you the UFC MMA is the fastest growing sport in the world. Literally, I mean is it is growing faster at a bigger trajectory than any sport at any time ever and I thought, you know, there’s some serious athletes in the sports that are very very popular. So if I want one Why wouldn’t other people want one as well? So, you know, yes, I thought this could be a business for sure and I just needed to come up with how to make him. See by new I own one bobble head is a Babe Ruth bobblehead that I kept on my desk. Someone gave it to me. I paid no attention to it. Everyone loves bobbleheads including me. I mean, how could you not they’re kind of part of an inner woven and who we are sports fans and Society, but I just thought you know if I want one and these Have millions of fans out there and literally why would another people want one? So I thought you know, yes first learn how to make them learn how to do it. Right and then maybe I can turn around and sell them.

Steve: So, okay. So you knew at this time that you wanted to make them. How did you actually get started? Like for example, I mean, I know someone who makes bobbleheads, but if I didn’t know that guy I would have no idea how to get started. So, where did you find someone to make them for you?

Dave: Yeah. Okay. So first of all, I needed to know how to make them myself. Okay, so I did research when you’re clueless about something Steve and you have no idea how it’s made but you want to make you want to learn you don’t want to just hire someone to do it for you right? unless you got a ton of money and a ton of you know resources to do that, but I’m bootstrapping this thing and you know, my my fiancée wasn’t totally on board with this past my other my friends and family members, I swear to God, Steve some of them laughed at me. And here I am. 41 year old Dave asking my friends. Hey guys. What do you think about me making Bobbleheads you know, it’s a gut reaction just to kind of like chuckle and laugh like dude. What are you an idiot? You’re a financial planner dude, you wear a suit and tie to work you and by the way, you handle my money, so don’t be going up again doing some us something else.

So, you know, I didn’t get the strongest reaction from people, but then when I start from my clothes in a circle, but then when I started branching out and started asking MMA fans about it. Everyone was like hell yes, dude, dude, what how do they not make him and me bobbleheads already? That was my biggest feedback for sure. So what I did and I guess what most people do nowadays is I turn to YouTube and I just really engulfed myself with YouTube videos. Videos about figurines about model painting about about bobbleheads them out clay, paint, spraying.

Steve: Wait a second. Did you make your first bobblehead yourself?

Dave: No, I just I designed every one of them but I wanted to know the ins and outs of making them. So so did I make it myself with my own two hands? No, but did I design it and was I there every step of the way? Yes. It was like I was shoulder to shoulder with the first guy who made My Bobblehead and it was after I made my very first bobblehead and I and I wish I can show you what it looks like because I keep it on my desk to remind myself how far comes because it looks absolutely like crap. It really really does I’m staring at it right now when I have like when I’m down and out and I feel like I’m really struggling right now. I look at that first bobblehead that I make and and I really I really know that I’ve come a long way from making that but anyway, so well..

Steve: This guy that you that that makes them for you is in the US.

Dave: Yeah. He was in the US

Steve: And how did you find him?

Dave: I just found him by just doing research and calling and emailing there’s a lot of model makers out there. There’s a lot of figurine makers out there. It’s a very Niche Community.

Steve: Okay.

Dave: There’s a lot of professional model painters out there that paint for like say the Studio’s, you know for big for movies, you know, a lot of those scenes where they blow up a big city or car or building whatever those are all just models and there’s guys that paint those and so I had a really do a lot of research to find guys who Made this type of stuff.

Steve: How did you convince them to work with you? I mean if some random dude came to me and wanted to make a bobblehead and I was a designer. I’d be a little hesitant.

Dave: Money.

Steve: Okay, ha ha ha. So how much did you have to invest to get that first batch?

Dave: Oh my God. That’s a great question, Steve. Well wasn’t the first batch I made two with this guy and two cost me. Whoo to cost me about $1000.

Steve: Oh my goodness. Okay.

Dave: Yeah to cost me about $1,000. A, I Didn’t Know Better and B I was desperate to learn how to make it and I wanted to make it I mean and you know by far by far it’s the worst bobblehead I have but it’s the most meaningful one that I have too I’m never going to get rid of it and I ended up making about four different versions of this fighter and the fighters name was Nate Diaz and it’s a very famous pose that I made out of him and I wanted to practice because the pose was very unique. And and not to keep kind of strain off topic but one thing that is very unique about my bobbleheads. And for anyone who’s into sports at all knows that when you go to the game and you get a bobblehead for free not only is it really really cheap but it’s very generic all the poses of the same the guys holding a basketball, baseball, football whatever in the same kind of motion and they all look very cartoony.

Like you would never ever know who this guy was unless the name was on the base lets you saw that it was like LeBron James or Clayton Kershaw, you would never know. So one thing I wanted to do was I wanted to take poses from these fighters in their moments of Glory. I mean these they close the cage door on these guys Steve and Magic happens, right? I mean, it’s martial arts. They fly, they kick. They need the elbow and sometimes they get caught in a moment of Glory in a photo which becomes iconic in the sport. So I wanted to take those iconic moments and make it into a bobblehead where people look at that bobblehead and they say oh, yeah, that is that guy from that fight on that day. Like I recognize it just like that.

Steve: Are you still working with that? First guy? Like I’m trying to get that for you.

Dave: Oh no no

Steve: Okay so you paid two for $1,000 and those were no good. So did you move on to a different person?

Dave: Oh absolutely dude. I moved on to a different person and I was desperate to find better and better and better people the what I was learning as I was going. Was that bobbleheads need to be better period. I mean, there’s been no advancement in bobblehead technology and it’s not right as sports fan. So those of you guys who are listening especially hardcore Sportsman think about the best bobblehead you’ve ever had the think about the best bobblehead that you’ve ever seen in your life. It’s not good right? and it’s not good because it doesn’t have to be the Lakers don’t have to make a good LeBron James or the dodges don’t have to make a great Clayton Kershaw because all they want to do is get butts in the seats early so they can sell more beer and better parking more tickets or whatever. So they put the minimum amount of money and making these bobbleheads but it’s a shame because there’s only one LeBron James that comes around in a lifetime. There’s only one Clayton Kershaw that comes running Lifetime. And so when you memorialize these guys in a bobblehead do it right do it right do it.

Steve: Okay, So how many how many guys did you have to go through till you found your final one?

Dave: Probably, like three the yeah the way I found my final one is I just got on a plane to Hong Kong and I just looked at I my fiance thought I was I was on

Steve: Wait, let’s back up a little bit. How did you find this guy from Hong Kong?

Dave: I went to a trade show.

Steve: Okay.

Dave: Yeah art, you know toy trade show.

Steve: Okay, and that was in Hong Kong?

Dave: yeah

Steve: okay, and then you found him there and then obviously the cost were a lot cheaper than the u.s. I would presume.

Dave: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it made it made it doable and the dream started becoming more and more of a reality because if I made them the way I was going either way. It was it’s an impossibility, you know, so..

Steve: So how do you work with someone in Hong Kong? What is the design look like you said you design all of these. Are you sending him photos or how does it work?

Dave: No, you know what? These guys are just they I just send them a blueprint a template all the artwork is done all over the world. So I have artists in the states. I have artists in Europe. I have artists in Asia. It really depends on what I’m looking for in designing the particular fighter, my budget, you know the detail that I want and things like that and then I’ll choose my and then I’ll choose the artist but I put my main artist is in Europe and you know, we design it together and then you know, I get I get the I don’t really want to talk about all the secret sauce.

Steve: Yeah, that’s okay. Well, what is the what is the template look like? Is it like a solid like, is it 3D modeling or?

Dave: yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we make a fine. A prototype that’s not a 3D modeling and my lead painter is in Orange County and we paint it and sometimes we paint two sometimes we pay three until I’m happy with exactly how it looks making sure it looks perfect. And then once I get that 100% correct, and then you know, I send it off and and you know, they do the rest.

Steve: So what are your cost to just design one?

Dave: It all depends Steve on the artwork, you know. Some bobbleheads are very very expensive because for the for the design because I want as much detail as possible in these things and then some are you know, some just some art that that detail-oriented, you know, and so it’s a little less expensive like

Steve: are we talking tens of thousands or?

Dave: No, no what you know all in I’m in a few thousand.

Steve: Few thousand, Mm. Okay, and then it costs you. I remember vaguely from the shows like 20 bucks or something to make.

Dave: Yeah, that’s 20 bucks to make okay. Okay about 20 bucks to make and and you know, it’s a great process and you know, what I pride myself on the process too is I work with these athletes and that’s something that is I don’t think it’s been done before.

Steve: So let’s talk about that. How did you how do you work with an athlete? Like, how do you get a hold of me? Just email them or?

Dave: yeah. I wish it was that easy. Yeah, man, you know that that question is hardly ever asked of me and I would have to say that that that is one of the hardest part of my business and it definitely was the number-one artist part when I was starting out because you know, how do you how do you call LeBron James and tell him that you wanted to have project with them. You know, you just don’t and then people say well, how do you.. and what people say, Well David you call his agent. Well, you know how many how many people call that agen, you know for a phone call. So it’s tough. So I had to do a lot of grimy things to get in front of these guys when I say grimy, I mean I just I just..

Steve: We need more example.

Dave: Yeah, I just hold up my sleeves dude and did whatever it took to get in front of these dudes. So like for an example like I would go to a place in which I knew the fighter was gonna be whether it was a nightclub or a fight or wherever and I would it’s embarrassing Steve but I it’s I would I would I would check out the situation see who he’s hanging out with and when one of his friends I’d have the bobblehead on me and then one of it when one of his friends Peeled off or I’d have a picture of the bobblehead whatever when one of his friends peeled off to go to the bathroom or just you know, walk away. I would hit up the friend and I’d go hey friend. I know you’re hanging out with Joe Blow the fight over there. Do I see you guys hanging out. I can’t get to him and I don’t want to be that creepy guy. So I just want to show you what I’m up to Harry, look at this picture or look at his bobblehead. I would love to make one out of Joe Blow. We let him know and you know, the friend would usually be look at me. Like I was absolutely crazy.

And you know, I would do things like that and then sometimes that work and then one of my biggest breakthroughs was I was waiting in a three-hour line in Las Vegas and was actually two years ago three years ago. It came up with the idea two years ago, I started hitting up Fighters because I was done with my final prototype. I would wait in like these lines three hour lines and I would walk up to the fighter. Now mind you it’s a massive cattle call. So everyone’s there with their photos they want Fighter to sign the photo and here I am a 41 year old guy holding a bobblehead. I don’t have a photo. I don’t have a pen and it’s my turn and I get up to him and I’d say as fast as I could and say, hey man, I’m a big fan. I’m making bobbleheads right now. Would you like a bobblehead made out of you? I can review a really great job. What do you think? and then put the bobblehead right in front of them, And the fighter would look at me. Like are you out of your mind?

Like who is this crazy guy? It’s a security would be like, no. No, you can’t do that. You can’t talk to. Um, but you got your autograph and you move on and then so they you know, you kind of move on to the next file and say okay. No, you know, sorry about that and then the next Fighter the next big fighter would be like two fighters away and I’d go up to the fighter and say hey, my name is Dave, I’m making bubbles and then security get to me..

Steve: Do you have a prototype of each one of those Fighters you were pitching before him?

Dave: Yeah, as I was getting better at making them because mind you I was a year into it. So as I was getting better at making them I felt more comfortable about showing these Fighters not there Prototype, but of Make Diaz because.

Steve: Oh, Gotcha. Okay

Dave: I can’t keep making Nate over and over again.

Steve: Did you have rights for Nate before you get it?

Dave: No, I still don’t have rights for Nate. I don’t know Nate, Nate knows about it. I don’t think he wants it and and that’s not unusual Steve. So, you know, some of these guys just don’t want something really really cool made out of them and I don’t know why and I would love it myself but you know it is it is what it is.

Steve: So you’re not selling the Nate Diaz?

Dave: No

Steve: okay.

Dave: No, I’m selling the Nate Diaz bobblehead. It would probably be my biggest seller because he’s such an iconic figure and the bobblehead that I made is such an iconic pose and it’s and it’s like really really nice but you know it is it is what it is man.

Steve: Actually, So you took a huge risk in the beginning just making a bobblehead when you’re not allowed to sell them yet. And then you use that as a prototype to get other fighters to sign on

Dave: Correct that that was my exact blueprint. I would just I was hoping that other Fighters would see what a good job I was doing with this Nate Diaz Bobble and I never I never was you know, playing smoke and mirrors and saying I had Nate. I’m just I was just saying here’s what I have made so far. When can let me make one out of you. So..

Steve: Who’s your first big fighter that you signed and had the conversation go?

Dave: Yeah, so I was getting nose left and right no no, no, no. No, I did not understand it. My chin was in my chest. I was kicking the can down the road. I was wondering what the hell did I just do with a year of my life and all this money and time and I was I was getting, you know, the thoughts of you know, the self talk. And the self-doubt was starting to creep in my mind Steve like you know, what am I doing, man? And I got a phone call from a friend who said they had a I swear to God who had a friend who had a friend who knew Dan Henderson and Dan Henderson was the guy that I originally wanted to buy the bobblehead of he’s my favorite fighter of all time. So when I heard that there was like four degrees of separation that Dan was interested in the artwork that I was doing for the Bobblehead, I just absolutely lost my mind. I was I couldn’t believe it. So then it got real real real fast, and they said Dan wants to talk to you in an hour.

And I said, okay and you know, I’m at this point. I’m just a total complete Fanboy. I’m just you know a nut for this do Dan Henderson and I am about to talk to him an hour. I couldn’t I was pacing, you know sweating and then the phone rang. It was Dan Henderson and the conversation couldn’t have gone better. It was just like we knew each other and it was great and he’s like, yeah, I’m interest I saw it looks really cool. I think it’s awesome. And then he’s like, you know, we are both in Vegas at the same time and he’s like, well, what are you doing tomorrow? And I said, yeah nothing. All right. Well, it’s meet. So I ended up meeting Dan Henderson at the MGM and I showed him. You know, what I was working on and the hardwork..

Steve: Is this the Diaz one, that you showed him?

Dave: Yeah. Yeah, I showed him everything.

Steve: Okay.

Dave: I still remember it and he was like, yeah, let’s do it and it was like, okay, let’s do it and it so I just went straight to work on Dan Henderson and about some about I would say six months later. I released my first one my first bobblehead to the public that I have the rights to that I could sell and it was Dan Henderson sales for that bobblehead Steve, were garbage.

Steve: How many did you make?

Dave: I made 1500, I thought

Steve: oh my goodness, okay

Dave: you know what, Dan Henderson’s got Dan Henderson’s got millions of fans. I think 1500 might even be too low. I think I sold about 50 in the first month.

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Steve: Okay, so you invested what is that like 30 grand?

Dave: Hmm.

Steve: Wow. Okay. How did you sell those 50?

Dave: you know, I just built an e-commerce site and I had Dan promote it on his social media and I promote it. I promoted it to all 200 of my followers on Instagram. And you know, I just I paid for some Instagram ads and Facebook ads. I just really thought Steve, I thought that you know, because because the Dan Henderson says it’s insane. It’s To fly spent a lot of time on it. It’s a very famous image of one of his really famous moves and I really thought I was going to hold it up to the sky and MMA fans were just going to come flocking because this has never been done before it is awesome looking I was very proud of how the final product came out and I couldn’t be more wrong. I hide I was so wrong, Steve. Nobody came nobody. I just couldn’t believe it and I thought to myself. Oh my God, Dave. I spent all this time learning how to make the perfect bobblehead that I spent zero time on e-commerce and learning how to sell them and it’s still kind of my problem today Steve to be honest with you. You know, I don’t know a lot about e-commerce marketing, you know, Steve. I got a full-time career. I got a serious job. I manage a lot of Money, I have it’s you know, my pulse on the my finger on the pulse of a lot of family’s Estates, right?

So I can’t I can’t just like sleep on that job. So so every extra time that I have I dedicate to the bobbleheads, it’s late at night. It’s early in the morning. So, you know finding the time to learn about e-commerce, it’s difficult. That’s a really difficult task for me, but I’m taking small steps towards that you know, so when people were out there listening, Right now and and they don’t know if they can do it and and they’re having you know doubts you got to keep going man. You got to keep going and and you know, the way I met you through the five minute pitch if you know, it was an awesome. Awesome thing for me. I didn’t win you know, and that’s why I’m still a little bit hurt from that. You’re human, right? and you make it to the finals and you start thinking about winning and you start thinking about what this can do for you and your company

If you were to win and you start it starts getting real and then closer and closer gets it starts getting more and more real and then when it doesn’t happen, how man you get you get, you know, at least I get depressed and sad and you know, I have to keep my you know, there’s this old saying Steve, that Mike Tyson used to say about fighting and it was it goes like this. It says everybody’s got a good game plan until they get punched in the face. And I felt like man, I really got punched in the face hard.

Steve: Dave, dave, let’s be realistic here. You’re doing pretty well. You want to share how much you’ve made this year so far in the first half year.

Dave: Yeah. I mean, you know, dude, I’m not throwing a poo poo party on myself. I’m so proud of myself. You know for sure. No, I’m doing really well Steve in the first month of my business and my Bobblehead business I made I swear to God, I think I made maybe like 1,500 2,000 dollars by month 7. I was up to making 25 grand in a month and you know my last release my last fighter, I broke my old record and I think I made about 17 18 Grand in the first few days.

Steve Yeah. So, how are you marketing? How you improve your marketing since then? So what how do you get your sales? Is it just the fighter promoting? Its own bobblehead or your own email list? How are you doing it?

Dave: Yeah, so, you know, I’ve been very conscious of my social media and social media has been driving my business for sure. So when I wasn’t getting any Sales with the Dan and you know, very little sales with my next, you know fighter. I thought you know, I got to take the bull by the horns and I got to maybe be more out there and be the face of the company and show, show MMA fans that this isn’t just a business or a conglomerate trying to do a money grab that I’m a huge martial arts fan just like they are and I’m just like they are as far as being a fan first so once I started doing that and..

Steve: so what is that Instagram and Facebook?

Dave: Yeah, Instagram and Facebook and for anyone out there listening, I don’t care if you’re selling yarn or red worm composting bins. You gotta get out there and let people know who you are because that is where you build community and it could be Community for anything. For me, It just happens to be martial arts. And once you do that, and once people see that you’re passionate about what you do then you start getting trusted and hopefully people like you and then they’ll buy your next product recurring sales is a big part of my business. I always have felt like once people by one, they’re gonna buy two and once they buy two they’re going to be a collector and once there a collector Steve I can count on them for buying my next one. No matter who the fighter is and that’s and that has surely been the case so far and it’s been, you know, wonderful to get involved in the community. And have people you know, as you know, quote-unquote fans of that of the bobbleheads that I make and I’m really appreciative of that and I’m grateful for that.

Steve: How do you built the community? Do you do Facebook lives or what? Are your post like?

Steve: Yeah. Yeah. I do Facebook lives. I do Instagram lives. I do giveaways. I’ll let people know like today for example is the first week of the first day of international fight week tomorrow, I’m taking off for Vegas. I got three big signings for with three different fighter of my Fighters. And I want to let people know about it and I have a huge announcement to make with one of these Fighters a massive announcement. And this fighter is giving away something like incredible Steve. So as soon as we’re done here, I’m going to make a post saying in two hours join me on Instagram live. I have a huge announcement to make and I’m going to give away a bobblehead and people hop on their interactive. I ask them to ask me questions and you know, a lot of people have really great interesting questions, and I you know, I answer them and give them the time let them know what’s going on and I feel like it’s I’m building a little Community. I feel like that’s really what everyone should do in any Niche that they have where people, where other people are involved.

Steve: How did you start out when you had zero social media following what were you posting about? Like, obviously, you don’t have these announcements all the time. Right?

Dave: Yeah. No, I was just posting cool pictures just photos. I love photography. So I post pictures of Fighters and my comments, you know about the fighter and then I’d post and then when I had my first bobblehead I post pictures of you know, the painting of the first one or you know photos of just the mold or photos of me and Dan or me and Chuck or the signing of them. You know, I was just real Grassroots just taking little baby steps posting whatever I could before I started getting like really cool content where people would tune in and or set their timer to tune in and listen or watch.

Steve: How often do you post as often as I can?

Dave: I don’t want to be one of these guys to just post to post So sometimes I won’t post I well. Well, let me take that. Let me take a step backwards. I post every day on Instagram every single day is you know, as you have to you have to be out there you have to be relevant you have to be engaged. So whether I’m posting something that has to do with my bobble heads or something that’s going on in the MMA world with a particular bike. There’s fights almost every week. So there’s always content to be posted. There’s always cool photography to be posted but as Far as be posting about the bobbleheads or a video about what I’m doing maybe every couple weeks. I’ll hop on I don’t want to over saturate. I don’t want to seem like I’m out there. You’re always trying to sell there’s that Gary vaynerchuk book that I just recently heard about it jab jab jab right hook if that’s I didn’t know about that concept, but that’s the concept that I’ve been living for the past, you know few year or a couple of years, you know, I want to give give give and I love Giving these things away for free.

I love it. You know it’s going to drive me into the Poorhouse but I love for people to have these so I’ll give give and so then when it comes time to ask for something, I don’t feel bad. I feel like I have a community. I feel like people want to support and it’s been successful so far

Steve: and are you running ads also or is it just Strictly Organic?

Dave: Organic dude, I mean bare minimal, I gotta tell you Steven in 2019. I think my ad budget or the ad money spent so far on Facebook and Instagram combined is about a hundred and fifty dollars

Steve: Nice. Okay. So all this is organic and are you getting more from Instagram or Facebook?

Dave: Definitely more from Instagram. I feel like that’s you know, the more optimal place to be I feel like that’s where everyone’s trending to I have about 2,000 followers on Facebook and I have about maybe 11,000 followers on Instagram. I’ve gotten those followers and all in one year and I feel like I touch all my social media platforms, but I really concentrate on Instagram. I want people to know that that’s where they’re going to be able to meet me or see me or hear the news or message me and then the other places are just kind of ancillary.

Steve: So in terms of getting them to your website, is it just your link in the bio?

Dave: Yeah Link in the bio and you know, it’s pretty it’s pretty self-explanatory to MMA bobblehead.

Steve: That’s true.

Dave: But I try to get these fighters to link me up to to tag me. I asked people to tag. Me when when they get their bobblehead, I repost when they tag me, I’m really interactive with anyone that wants to be interactive with me. I answer every single question that comes in. It’s always me. I don’t have a social media manager and I really want to treat every single person who buys My Bobblehead like they’re the only person that is buying My Bobblehead and I do I have that that Concept in mind that it’s it’s one person at a time Steve and and that’s you’re going to build a strong business. I see I see these other MMA businesses or just other businesses out there in general that they have 30,000 followers on Instagram. They posted a video and they get 200 likes. It’s like what the hell is that? What kind of followers do you have there that mean it’s obvious that you you’re buying or you’re not doing something right? And I hear all these people, you know touting and teaching how to get more followers, but that’s not the way it works man.

The way it works is organically you can’t just buy followers it Don’t you know unless you just want the swipe up feature. So when I have 11,000 followers, I know for sure that these people want to be there and I know for sure that these people are real people. They’re not Bots at least, you know most of them because they’re all interacting with me. I post a picture I get a ton of likes and a ton of views and I like that.

Steve: So Dave, we’re kind of running out of time here and I wanted to fire off these questions just for the people on the sidelines who have yet to start their business. What would you say is the biggest challenge in starting your store? And how did you overcome it?

Dave: Steve, there are so many challenges when it comes to you know, what Steve that Mike Tyson saying everyone. Everyone’s got a great plant game plan until their punch of it. It couldn’t be more true for e-commerce Steve you turn the corner when you’re starting your business in e-commerce. You don’t know if someone’s gonna punch you in the face or hand you a pot of gold you have no clue what’s around the corner when you don’t know anything about e-commerce, at least this is my story, okay? and it is very very Cold and when people are out there and they want to make a quick Buck or they want to you know, just they think that it’s going to be simple you better prepare yourself because it is challenging so you have to mentally get prepared. So the biggest challenge on opening your Ecommerce store. Anyone who’s out there who wants to start don’t give up. You gotta keep fighting guys no matter what don’t give up.

You gotta when when when life punches you right? The nose you gotta punch back. You got to keep fighting and I know it sounds cliche. I know what does Steve and I know you know, it sounds cliché when I say it’s easy to stay down and it’s hard to get back up. But you gotta remember why you’re doing it. You got to muster every bit of energy in your body to stand back up to clench your fist and punch back because you can get knocked out and e-commerce really easy if you’re if you’re not mentally ready.

Steve: So for the beginners also, how much money did you invest to get started?

Dave: Oh gosh. I probably you know, it was it was like in tear Steve so I probably had about seven grand Seven Grand or so to get started and then, you know, my next round of funding was five grand and then it went to you know, another five and so it just went in layers and you know, I built safety nets for myself because in my particular business I felt like if there It was no interest. I could have probably pull the ripcord at any time and just thrown in the towel. I mean, I’m not an idiot. I would see that there’s no interest at all.

But as I saw that there was interest I would you know, I’d feed the machine some more but if you’re passionate about what you’re doing Steve and you especially if you have a private label thing and you really think that people could use what you’re making or doing. You got to keep going you got to keep funding and it probably won’t stop, you know for a while. So just be prepared.

Steve: If you were to start over again. You do differently this time around?

Dave: I’d have more money Stephen to begin with

Steve: Ha ha ha

Dave: Because really, you know, and I mean it’s kind of a joke, but it’s kind of not a joke. I would a lot more I would a lot more money for allocate more money for different things and when I’m saying more money, I’m not saying like unreasonable amount of money. I wouldn’t say. Oh I get, you know tap into my 401k or you know, go borrow tens of thousands, but I’d probably just spend wiser and I’d probably have more in the gas tank to do things. Things that I think needed to be done.

Steve: Where are some places where you spent your money unwisely?

Dave: Well for me personally, it was experimentation with different ways on making bobbleheads. So I

Steve: That sounds like a necessary expense to me though.

Dave: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it could be but you know, but I’m kind of a creative dude. So sometimes I’m you know, thinking outside the box a little bit too much one thing that I think I can tell the listeners who are just starting out about ad spending do it wisely. Don’t just throw it into the abyss. That’s one thing. Definitely Steve. I would I would start over I You know, I thought okay. Well, here’s a Let’s do an ad for $200 for the next 10 days and I really didn’t know what the hell I was doing Man II didn’t know if the results are great. I didn’t have like a pixel return. I still don’t I still don’t even know what I’m doing to talk about it that much but I do know that I just felt like I threw the money into the abyss without having data that could be measurable on if I’m spending my money wisely and I think that if you’re going to spend money on ads be as prepared as possible and maybe even bring in a consultant to help you out. Just don’t do it on your own because you don’t want to just throw money into the into the social media abyss.

Steve: I mean ultimately I think the way you did is the right way you start out organically you figure out who your audience is what they like and then you buy ads so yeah probably had a good point now where if you were to run ads today would they would do a lot better than when you didn’t know anything

Dave: Steve, one of the biggest takeaways. Is that I had from the five-minute picth was a line that Scott Volcker said and Scott said man Dave’s got a really cool product, but nobody knows about it. And that is a problem. That’s a problem. That’s a problem for anybody that that has a really cool product. You have to let people know about it. So what you do is you do anything Steve to let people know about it you go on Facebook live you go on Instagram live. If and if you’re camera shy get over it.

Steve: ha ha ha

Dave: Period and and there’s just no other way about it, you know it because people don’t want to read blogs Steve people. I mean sure maybe people are people are out there that read blogs on certain things whatever. It’s just the easier the easiest way to spoon feed people and getting to know your product is video and if you’re out there often and people see that you really care about what you’re doing. And they like what you do they will like you they will trust you and they will buy from you and they’re going to be a fan of yours. So I would say that’s the biggest thing that I would probably even do more if I were to start all over again.

Steve: So Dave I wanted to give you an opportunity to tell the audience about where they can find you and what’s going on. What’s the latest, man?

Dave: Oh Steve. Listen, three years ago this month. I came up with this idea of the bobbleheads. This week is international fight. Week, it’s my three-year anniversary. I’m having signings with cowboy Cerrone with Brian Ortego, Guillana Gingecheck, Bruce Buffer. It’s unbelievable. I went from being a guy a fan with an idea to now working with these athletes hand-in-hand and doing business with them and having autograph signings with them. I’m in I’m totally involved in the community now and it’s all due to hard work Steve. It’s I’m really proud of where I’ve come I’m really proud of the work that I’ve put in. I hope that your listeners out there can resonate with my story and know that if he just roll up your sleeves and you go to work and you take every day like it’s your last day and you kick the covers off your body when the sun peeks into your bedroom and you just work and work as hard as you can there will be results for sure.

I guarantee it. So where I’m at today Steve I couldn’t be happier. I’m dealing with the biggest Fighters. That have ever lived in mixed martial arts icons of the sport. Literally. I mean at the tippy tippy top the one percenters. I’m working with right now. I could I I pinch myself. It’s so surreal. I am so happy and you know, I’m going to keep going I treat every day like it’s a new day and I want to keep working harder and harder and harder and I’m so excited and I hope that people that are listening, you know, really hear my story and work hard. And don’t give up.

Steve: His websites MMAbobblehead.com By the way, if anyone wants to go check it out.

Dave: out go go go to the website. You can see how how they’re made how they’re painted my story go see the bobbleheads for yourself because you’re I know you’re thinking bobbleheads. What the hell Bobbleheads have been the same for go. Check out my bobbleheads. You won’t be disappointed. Even if you’re not a mixed martial arts venue just an e-commerce company starting up your own Journey. Go check out the site,

Steve: you know one thing I forgot to ask you this Dave is the UFC noticing this and are they going to start licensing their the athletes themselves?

Dave: The UFC is definitely noticed. I have spoken in bye-bye text to Dana White a couple times who’s the owner of the UFC and I’ve had a couple meetings with the UFC. Yeah, they’re notice it but to exceed the UFC is not in the merchandising business. They pretty much make the same merchandise year after year after year and you know, no disrespect to the UFC but it’s not that great, you know, it’s the same kind of stuff hats t-shirts keychains things like that. No, they’re not making high-end stuff because their business is making the best fights possible. That’s their business not merchandise, and I don’t know if they have a big interest in that so, you know, I have dreams and I have aspirations of you know, maybe partnering up with the UFC one day and maybe that dream will come true and I can come back on your show and tell you how that all went down, but they are taking notice.

Steve: Okay, cool. Well Dave. Hey man. Thanks a lot for coming on the show. Your story is truly inspirational. I love your passionate it always oozes whenever I talk to you and I’m sure the audience noticed that too and I hope a lot of the MMA fans out there. We’ll go and check out your site.

Dave: Thanks for having me Steve. I mean, I really really appreciate you inviting me on your show. It means more than anything to me. I go on a bunch of MMA shows all the time. And you know, I’m not saying to take it for granted, but you know, there’s sometimes in life where you really sit back and go. Wow. Wow, man, like for me. Wow Dave that this is really an accomplishment dude and for me Steve, this is one of those moments.

Steve: Cool. Hey, Dave that that means a lot to me, man, and I really appreciate you coming on.

Dave: Thanks Steve.

Steve: Alright man, take care.

Dave: Take care.

Steve: Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now, Dave took me to my first UFC event a few months ago. And since then I’ve been hooked and there are a whole bunch of deals that we didn’t talk about during this episode because it happened after it was recorded. MMA bobblehead is going to be big for more information about this episode go to mywifequitherjob.com/episode277.

And once again, I want to thank Privy for sponsoring this episode. Privy is the email capture provider that I personally use the term visitors into email subscribers. They offer email capture exit intent and site targeting tools to make it super simple as well. And I like Privy because it is so powerful and you can basically trigger custom pop-ups for any parameter that is closely tied your eCommerce store. Now, if you want to give it a try it is free so head on over to privy.com/steve. Once again, that’s P-R-I-V-Y.com/steve.

I also want to thank Kaviyo for sponsoring this episode, Kaviyo 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 or win back campaign. Basically, all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitherjob.com/klaviyo. Once again, That’s mywifequitherjob.com/klaviyo.

Now I talked about how I use these tools in my blog and if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store heading over to mywifequitherjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini-course just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com

Steve: You’re listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrapped business owners and delve deeply into the strategies they use to grow their businesses. Now today is a very unusual episode that is not like all the others and as an experiment. I decided to have Andrew Youdarien of e-commerce fuel, Patrick Ryan Andrew’s brand new employee, Kurt Elster of The Unofficial Shopify podcast and my partner Toni Anderson all on the show at the same time to cover day two of the klaviyo conference, but here’s what happened. I had to go to the bathroom really badly prior to this recording and while I was away Andrew, Tony, Kurt and Patrick all plotted against me to roast me on my own podcast. Now I debated for a while whether to release this episode but in the end I was like what the heck what is the worst thing that can happen? Anyway in this episode we go over key takeaways of day 2 of klaviyo Con and I get roasted in the process, enjoy.

But before we begin, I want to give quick shout out to Privy who’s a sponsor of the show. Privy is a tool that I use to build my email list for both my blog and my online store and right now I’m using Privy Display a cool Wheel of Fortune pop-up basically user gives your email for a chance to win valuable prizes in our store and customers love the gamification aspect of this and when implemented this form email signups increased by a hundred thirty one percent. Now, you can also use Privy to reduce car abandoned with cart saver pop-ups and abandoned cart email sequences as well one super low price that is much cheaper than using a full-blown email marketing solution. So bottom line Privy allows me to turn visitors into email subscribers and recover lost sales so head on over to privy.com/steve and try it for free if you decide you need to the more advanced features use coupon code MWQHJ for fifteen percent off once again that’s privy.com/steve. Now on to the show.

Intro: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast we will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle so can spend more time with your family focus on doing the things that you love. Here’s your host Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. I’m Steve and we are here at day 2 of Klaviyo Con. I got an All-Star cast with me today. I got my partner, Tony Anderson. I got Kurt Elster of The Unofficial Shopify podcast not to be mistaken with the official shopify is there an official Shopify podcast?

Kurt: I think Shopify Masters would be the official.

Steve: That’s correct. It’s correct. And we got Andrew Youdarien here from e-commerce Fuel and we got his very he’s funny. We got Patrick here, but he’s holding up his name tag because he’s working for Andrew and I tried to hire him away, but he’s quite expensive actually.

Andrew: that’s true. And I’d like to know this is the multiple or multiple team members. You’ve tried to stay away from me. And none of them have wanted to come work for you given your reputation, which actually leads in before before we get started. See there was something that we were all hoping to chat with you about actually on the show.

Kurt: Well, we’re concerned that you’re under appreciating all Toni does

Steve: were you responsible for this Toni?

Andrew: And of course, she’s not getting paid nearly enough. I mean, we just we just see a lot. I mean she I think it’s safe to say I think everyone here would agree. You’re mostly just a figurehead at this point and Toni does all the work and we think for how you treat her especially she’s under compensate and we would like to publicly negotiate warm out of..

Steve: Toni is actually very well compensated. Let’s not even discuss how much she’s compensated

Andrew & Kurt: clearly she’s clearly your d-roc and we’ve heard your difficult can’t please guys, of course you can you can’t polish this this is this is this is an issue that if it’s not publicly

Steve: and I go to the bathroom.

Kurt: All right happens when you gallons of coffee and..

Steve: Well, we are here to talk about klaviyo. Toni is very well compensated.

Andrew: So we are not going to talk about this very real issues at okay. I guess we’ll just don’t you and your dad you’re going to get your phone number in case anyone is interested in partnering up with you? Okay, excellent.

Steve: And we did discover that Toni. Loves hugs. So if you ever see her out in the hall or at a conference, just give her a hug. It’s a term in verb. It’s one of her five love languages when of hugging

Andrew: yes, so she has all five love languages like hugs. What else we discuss my acts of service, which I think you could you know, maybe working on the

Steve: tons of access service.

Kurt: Yep. I don’t think compensation is one of those five love languages. Yeah

Toni: compensation is my love language.

Steve: Alright. Anyways, we’re here to talk about klaviyo Con and key takeaways. We did spend a lot of time on that tangent. I apologize for all the listeners out there. What’d you guys think of also day two first thing that happened was Jake Cohen came out and he talked about all the new klaviyo features the the features that I was very impressed at were all the new data Gathering features right now when I need numbers, I actually have to contact my wife who then has to run through all these equations on the Excel spreadsheet. And it gets a little bit cumbersome now. I can just pull all my own data. So I’m very happy.

Kurt: I think the thing I like most about klaviyo con is that all the talks or majority of the talks are Merchants their customers. So it’s not like Shopify staff or klaviyo staff saying, hey drink the Kool-Aid. It’s real people saying look, we’re going to pull back the curtain. This is how we’re using this. So just from like actionable tactical advice. There’s a lot of great stuff but to your point about Jake Cohen keynote this morning. I mean the the features coming down the pipe not necessarily surprising but still seeing the implementation seeing how easy to use these new tools are it’s really phenomenal. Of course like the big one. The one that they the big takeaway is SMS is now SMS. You can now approach in The Identical fashion do email as far as implementation goes.

Steve: Yeah, absolutely and he gave a little demo on stage. It’s it was like two clicks to get that implemented.

Kurt: It was like it’s a checkbox in the preferences panel is the craziest thing.

Steve: Absolutely not Actually refer a lot of beginners over to Klaviyo and what’s nice is and I know they were doing this but they’re actually like scraping your site now so that they’ll grab your logo the grab any sort of graphics and then you instantly have some templates that are customized with your colors right off the bat.

Kurt: I didn’t even know that

Steve: I didn’t even know that either because it’s been so long since I’ve been using it. So

Andrew: I thought the there’s a session he touched on a little bit but I thought the email deliverability where they’re automatically testing and trying to to send over the course of 24 hours and figure out what time is best. I think that’s quite I don’t know you guys would like we do. We don’t do where you just pick a time that we think works well and blast it out the ability to just automatically have that happen and optimize around send times for maximizing open and click-through is pretty cool. Like I

Steve: You know it’s funny Toni. I we had lunch with one of the data scientists that klaviyo because I wanted some clarification on how that works and they released this paper where they were trying to figure out. So what they were originally going to implement was optimal times on a per individual basis. So for example, like you might open your email at 11 I might open at 9 a.m. And that would be the most optimal but they did all these studies and it turns out that I don’t remember what she said was something like you would need like 3,000 emails sent for that individual to gather enough data to do that. And if you don’t have enough data, it’s not going to be accurate. So they’re smart sending feature. What it does. All you have to do is send one broadcast to train when approximately everyone has the highest percentage of open rates and for subsequent campaigns it optimizes and sent at that time in a particular persons time zone and it works a lot better

Toni: and what I want at we talked about this a little bit on the first podcast that we did for day one, but what was really cool is that we sat in the keynote learned about all the new features. We actually had a couple questions about one of the things was the personalized time because it didn’t it wasn’t fully explained in the keynote because there wasn’t time but we had a whole lunch to sit there with the klaviyo data scientists and like ask the hard questions and you know then have her basically say what are you looking at? What do you need? Send me an email? So it’s cool because you learn things in the sessions, but then you have the opportunity to In dive deeper with all the Klaviyo staff that’s here at the conference.

Steve: Absolutely. And I don’t know if I excluded some of you guys from the conversation but me and the data scientist. Her name is Christina. We were kind of geeking out because she went to MIT. I’m gonna look so engineer. She was a material science major and so I just it was just nice to and she was getting really excited to talking about all the stuff. So people out klaviyo are very happy and with their jobs and she was just ecstatic to be talking about these numbers. She even took some notes Down based on what we said, so they’re constantly gathering information. Patrick any key takeaways?

Patrick: Yeah, I think the analytics portion is it seems like everyone had to jump through hoops to get analytics Data before and now it’s going to be right there a couple clicks and you get the data you need and it looks like they’re probably going to get the eventually get the graph data and crunching right on screen as well. So I think it’s going to save a lot of people a lot of time.

Steve: Yeah, so I had a couple things to say just about like the customer analytics because klaviyo has all of your data across your entire store. You can basically get your Revenue numbers based on any segment. So anyone who has spent over $100 and bought red handkerchiefs in the last week. I can easily get a nice graph year over year to see how we’re doing in that in that respect and just to have all that data which is completely accurate since you’re sending all your data to klaviyo is just really powerful. You don’t need to contact your wife for example to get the numbers. I think I already said that right? I probably I’m sorry Jen. I’m really sorry.

Andrew: We love you Jen

Steve: what’s sessions you guys go to I know Toni I went to the chubby session. I don’t think we saw you there which sessions you guys go to

Patrick: try to go to Chubby’s boot was full they will ya what was it was a good

Steve: it was those guys are a riot. I found it hilarious. They what they do is they have they test all these subject lines and they also send emails five times a week, which I thought was pretty insane, but they’re open rates weren’t bad given how much they send. I think they’re average open way was 16% given all their sins. I think you’re the data was not actually 9 percent is what their year-to-date numbers were which I thought were a little low. Because we Toni and I we sat in on a deliverability session once and I think they were telling us that if the deliverability drops below 15% you should be worried about it.

Toni: Yes, one of the things I was actually curious that they didn’t talk about in the session. Although I’m a huge Chubby’s fan. Like I think their marketing is amazing and the two guys that were speaking like were totally brand appropriate but I’m curious if their conversion rates on those emails, right? Because I did, you know, we’ve had this conversation afterwards like nine percent seemed a little low but because like some of their emails are not sale emails at all, right, they’re just random content and so I’m wondering like their conversion rates because they send I think three or four different emails out to right like they have one that’s very specific and then I think they’re Friday one. They said was like the Weekender which is sort of nonsensical a little bit. So I was curious if they didn’t discuss because it wasn’t that wasn’t the topic.

Steve: Well, I’d be more curious what their deliverability rate is right? Because when it drops below 15% that means maybe yahoo, or Microsoft emails as a whole are getting blocked all together.

Toni: Yeah, that’s true.

Steve: Actually, one of the Klaviyo representatives offered to introduce me to the Chubby’s founder. So I’ll have them on the podcast at some point. And if I had the courage I will ask them those hard questions and see what they say.

Kurt: They’re a lot of fun. Let me ask you a question German. What are what are some of the common themes that you’re seeing among Merchants presenting talking whatever it is.

Steve: I think the higher degree of personalization across the emails. I really like what they’ve done with the flow Builder the ability to just Branch depending on the type of customer. I think we Toni and I we touched on this on yesterday’s episode already just you know higher lifetime value customers, you might want to treat a little bit differently versus the ones who might not spend that much or haven’t become customers yet might want to heavily discount just to get them in the door. I think that has been the general theme of the event. I know what do you guys think?

Andrew: It’s a the the own marketing is probably what I would say the biggest thing that they’re pushing. I think it I think it resonates you want to Define what that is for the people who don’t know what that is. So any any marketing channel where you have total control over it? So right Google Facebook Amazon do not count because you’re hitchhiking off. Someone else’s platform some in some way podcasting email direct mail. Those will all be own channels SMS things like that. So I think that’s a huge one that’s been talked about a lot the other one. I’ve seen a lot. I think this is true is like people like if you’re gonna if you’re gonna start a business and run it and sell people stuff like you got to have a better reason than just selling people random stuff and because otherwise it’s hard to stand out. It’s hard to like higher motivated smart people and it’s hard to it’s hard to there’s a lot of noise in the world today, you know, so like having a good why I’m seeing that a lot more with with with companies and Brands.

Steve: Sorry Andrew. What do you sell again?

Andrew: I sell I sell relationships and Community.

Steve: Okay. Yeah.

Andrew: What do you sell digital products IC. Yes digital products longtime member here long time on the beginning. I’ve been to all the e-commerce fuel lives

Andrew: and not so I’m not sure if the 10-year will continue. But yeah

Steve: you know if funny thing we talked about own marketing even with email with Gmail introducing all the different inboxes arguably email is not quite owned either right because you got to stay out of the promotional inbox and Google technically has control over that

Kurt: I like the idea of own marketing, you know, like it’s you know, Amazon, you’re just renting a table at their Marketplace Facebook Google ads you’re renting the traffic from the traffic store, right? And then these other channels really it’s ostensibly you create the content and in talking to the a lot of these Brands and seeing the brands were speaking the common theme was we’re creating entertaining content first. So a lot of people just like really producing lots and lots of content and it’s not necessarily sales content. It’s entertaining content to build a one-on-one relationship and like what a the one of the mantras for Success that I’ve held for years is people buy from people not Brands and to see like an entire conference built around that idea my gosh. So excited but also just thrilled to see actionable ways to do that and people saying like hey the way you make money with these channels is create compelling engaging content and people like and some of the stuff feels like going back to basics.

That we’ve started to overlook in favor of all the shiny toys that are out there like so many people have said we have what flow what’s the one you can’t live without they got welcome series like well, what do you do in the welcome series like, oh, we just trying to introduce people to the brand to us to the team to Ry and like oh, but what about you know products and sales their got that comes later and that like in these are huge Brands big like seven eight figure Brands. So really it’s been been very compelling and inspiring to see that

Steve: absolutely and actually the poster child. I would probably be Chubbies they spent a lot of time on their content and I actually want to just kind of touch on a couple of things one of their men they do an insane number of subject lines. I think I can’t remember who was speaking, Toni?

Kurt: Eric?

Steve: was it was it Eric? But I think they go through like 30 subject lines at least maybe more and they spent a lot of time on that stuff

Toni: they do and but then I think they said they sent they send for

Steve: yes.

Toni: Usually they A/B test with for subject lines, but more importantly in do we talked? I can’t remember we talked about this in our round one, but the preview in the email.

Steve: Yes

Toni: and I know you and I talked about that offline. I can remember if we put that

Steve: No, we put that in there because I wasn’t doing it.

Toni: Yes

Steve: and then you were

Toni: yes, but to see right there. Yeah well to see their preview, you know, what what shows up in the right after and what I thought was interesting we didn’t talk about is the who it’s from where they’re making up those email addresses, which was really cool.

Steve: Yeah. So just to kind of expand upon that they make up funny user names for their emails depending on whatever theme they have. I don’t know if I can replicate them because just the style their emails are really irreverent. Their email subject lines are just so off the wall. And I probably couldn’t do that for like my store, or example. it’d be a lot of fun to do that to be able to put irreverence subject lines. Like what was one of their funny ones? They’re like just off the wall.

Toni: Yeah, very random has nothing really to do with the product. But so I guess I just mind auto-populates, right? So it’s from the actual brand email right? But then like you can also put like someone’s name like I usually put Toni at the oil collection or whatever but they do they create that where you can actually customize enough to be a true email like one of them was like, hello darkness my old friend at Chubbies.com. Right? Like they because it had to do with whatever subject line was or like, is it the weekend yet at Chubbies.com like they change in it’s like really clever and I think it’s just another way to get like be top of mind like look when you get in your inbox, right you’re fighting to get notice and he also said that they try to keep their like actual subject like one a couple words, right?

Steve: Yeah two words, their subject lines are always super short. Yeah. So what they do, I’m just looking at my notes right now. They do a three-hour test when they do there. With test for the highest open rate and then whatever wins they press out to the rest of their list.

Andrew: So this is a little this may be a little niche when you’re not spend too much time on it. But a lot of us here put on events. Like would you guys appreciate about the event or would you have fun with here from an event like an event standpoint as opposed to contest that point because I think that’s fun to geek out on to

Toni: I mean, it’s definitely not as cool as ECF live or seller Summit right? But no actually I will say Adama stickler for events and things running on time like everything’s on time here, you know if session starts at 10 a.m. It is starting at 10:00 a.m. They end on time which is great because sometimes when sessions run along then you’re forced to not get to the next session that you want to go to. Yes just drives me insane when the speaker just keeps talking and you know, you got to shut the mic off whatever but they’ve been running on time. It’s a great venue very walkable area, which I always think is good. They feed you all day long, which is a big deal. Lots of water, coffee. All the standards have that a lot of people don’t necessarily think is important.

It actually is really important to us like a customer to the event and I think what what sets its event apart from other brand events, although I haven’t been to a ton is the amount of like klaviyo people that I can actually solve your problem which we talked a little bit yesterday are the other day on the podcast, but I think that’s a huge benefit to coming here. If you’re a klaviyo user if you want to use klaviyo to its fullest potential like coming here is a good place to be able to figure that out and find like the gaps in your own business.

Kurt: So the swag is a big deal to a lot of conferences. You have the cool swag and it’s like so easy the T-shirt now it sucks. And klaviyo really went next level with swag. So I wore just out of practicality a fanny bag Fanny. Yeah fanny pack to this event only to discover the swag you get when you show up is a fanny pack from a Shopify Merchant. And then as you in the fanny pack is a poker chip that’s has Klaviyo on it. And then as you do different things like get support go to the after-party you get more of these poker chips, and then you can take those to the the swag boo. Which is a Plinko board and you drop the chips into the Plinko board and it spells out. Klaviyo at the bottom and each letter corresponds to a different kind of Swag and the there were like, it was like socks t-shirts. I forgot my sunglasses. So I got some klaviyo blenders, I wear sunglasses which was convenient, but the big hit was like a they’re giving away backpacks that people were really into but it’s always fun to see like, okay not only did they put thought into valuable swag that you’ll actually like use and enjoy later but they made it they gamified it made it this very fun process.

Andrew: This is maybe less exciting but more practical like two things. I thought were cool. It was the paper schedule. We use a nap. Everything’s digital. I hate paper most people hate paper, but I loves this thing. Like I just play time. It’s so much easier. I we’re going to do that at our next event yet. You got one too. That’s great the bells like I think you guys know to like trying to get heard people into sessions at an event is people have great discussions and you don’t want to break those up at the same time like you got to get the the Rolling and the little magic Tinkerbell fellows that Steve you look really you look very beautiful walking around like I don’t know how they got you to do that. But doing the bells,

Toni: like first of all..

Andrew: have a you have a talent for that my friend..

Toni: He had piano lessons for many years as a child.

Andrew: He did?

Toni: So I think that’s part of it but

Andrew: So Graceful wasn’t it?

Toni: but yeah, I’m beautiful and with the to to in Tights as well. Like I feel like that just added

Andrew: I didn’t see that again. He did it again with to to tights?

Toni: On day 2, it was day one. Day two he was wearing regular clothes. Yeah

Andrew: we will post some pictures in the show notes here if you want to see those, so

Toni: I actually asked Steve about getting the bells because I do I agree with you. It’s hard to get people back in session and then it’s annoying when they’re coming in and out and the door and he said, you know Toni we don’t have the budget for that right but I have but I have a megaphone.

Andrew: To tos are very expensive

Toni: he has a megaphone at home. So we’re good. I’m just going to walk through blast and people with a megaphone at seller Summit, you know, and I feel like that’s that’s in line with the type of event. We like to run.

Andrew: Yeah see thank you for inviting us to come on your body.

Steve: Yes. I’ve been like you can’t see me but Been fighting to grab the mic backs as we have two mics. We got five people here and we’re passing around. So would you say you just you didn’t mention like you like the paper schedules would you say it’s more valuable than a nap Andrew?

Andrew: more valuable than a nap? This is a trick question. I think both are very important and I think

Steve: Course you do, Kiss Ass haha

Andrew: I think they are like we are..

Steve: have vendors already afraid of Tony that’s even better long. She’s already terrified.

Andrew: Yes. I know. So will you guys we have an app for our conference? And they’re great. They’re good for messaging and stuff. But like it’s also the schedules the best part about the paper.

Steve: So I want to switch gears a little bit from not making fun of me. Do some key takeaways for the event It’s the final day here. We’re almost done with the event. You want to start Kurt? What are your key takeaways from the event

Kurt: when I get back to my office. I think the the thing I want to do is pick a couple retainer clients and just start going through their flows and trying to reconcile what they’re doing and all of the phenomenal advice I got here like so many people is what’s the one flow and like browse abandonment welcome series and all with this customer service Focus. So I really wanted like with a critical eye go back and look and make sure that we’re doing a good job of engaging and entertaining and delivering that like personal content that Brands like Chubbies are doing so well that I think everybody and you don’t have to do it like the irreverent funny way the Chubbies does but you can certainly make things like they don’t have to be so stuffy and business and corporate that we can leave to the Enterprise, Organizations and instead it approach things in a much more human way. So I think that’s

Steve: I didn’t realize you could copy writing is part of your services. Do you?

Kurt: I have a little bit everything.

Steve: Okay.

Kurt: Now when we do specifically like email setups and email management and as part of that I just I let my inner copywriter out.

Steve: Let me ask you this. What is what is one feature that was announced that you plan on thoroughly integrating with your clients.

Kurt: So number one the smarts end times that’s just like in a single checkbox immediate win. So they said it soon as I say something. It’s gonna do it again. It was with the smart. Sometimes they said on average. It was a 10 percent lift and open rates. That’s a single option that will make that work better. So all right easy win. Everybody makes more money if I enable that feature

Steve: absolutely

Kurt: and yeah that one number one and I think that’s all I got, now go back.

Steve: I’m not editing this

Kurt: not like I gotta go back go back through it. Everybody’s doing welcome series of browse abandonment like everybody asks, what’s the one thing you can’t live without it was browser Bandit welcome series over and over. So I think I need to re review and make sure everybody you’re running both of those and I think the way to supercharge that is to do because personalization was a common theme.

Steve: Yep

Kurt: like a browser abandonment. It works. It’s nice to make a customer service focused but it could be a little generic. I think the magic is in let’s take this idea of personalization apply it to browse abandonment where we do different browser abandonment flows and you could do like split flows and klaviyo now where it’s depending on what category they viewed

Steve: right

Kurt: That’s a very easy flow filter to apply you could filter by collection. So it’s like oh they viewed wallets. All right, then the browse abandonment email is actually an email about which wallets right for me like that kind of thing. So it’s rough start repurposing that content making it very you focused on the customer and just help them by engaging them in this customer service oriented way. I think that’s how we’re going to start selling and really Separating these the small business brands from the the big news cpg Procter & Gamble direct to Consumer brands that are cropping up

Steve: cool, Youdarien, what do you got?

Andrew: I think takeaways are get better about sending email email sound like you mentioned testing that more because I we’re horrible at it. Really? I am Patrick maybe..

Patrick: Don’t blame me I’ve only been there for four months haha

Steve: so just for the record you guys can’t see this, but Andrew said he sucks at and then he looked over at Patrick

Andrew: and said maybe You’re better at this

Steve: I never blame anyone but myself. When..

Andrew: is that true Toni?

Toni: Yes that’s so true

Steve: just a testament to my character

Toni: I’m not sure about that Steve

Andrew: and thrown a lot of rocks from living in a glass room. Literally. So yeah, I think I mean that’s a big one. I think the one to is thinking about just like nurturing. There’s a couple good campaigns on nurturing and nourishing people throughout your throne. Like I got I won’t I’m not blaming Patrick showed up Steve’s got me all defensive but like our nurture series is pretty bad and the opt-ins are horrible on her blog like we just I think we really I need to really redesign it. We’re going to work on this together. But so that was one thing and I think another one was also like SMS is there are some SMS companies floating around it’s not hugely widely used thing for a lot of merchants right now. And I think it is of all of the marketing mediums that have the potential to backfire. I think this one’s pretty as a lot of potential to do that because maybe people are different.

I am very sensitive to the marketing messages I go with text. Text from you like every personal Channel, you know, and like I if I get some messages from Brand, I really love for product really am interested in and it stays like much money. Okay, maybe that’s fine. But if I start getting spammed by text, it will create an emotional it has in the past create an emotional backlash with me and I think Brands should be really careful how they I can be super powerful, but I think you’ll be really careful. Otherwise, you’re going to alienate a lot of customers.

Steve: I know for SMS for me. I think I will probably only use it like as a last resort if people aren’t opening emails may be just as Of like a last ditch effort to give him some sort of discount or some sort of piece of content that I know they want to click over or have them re– opt into some other series. I’ll probably also use it. Maybe this is an e-commerce related but for webinars just to kind of remind people that the webinar starting soon. That’s probably something that might not be that intrusive. But but I agree if it’s just for to announce the latest sale that can get annoying real quick. All right, Patrick. What do you got man?

Patrick: I think data points. We have a lot of data points and I think we use them effectively enough to personalize the email Series. So I think playing with those and the sin x might help our deliverability and open rates, but also but also playing around with the subject lines make a little more fun with that and changing all of our from addresses to see wears a pink tutu at e-commercefuel.com would be perfect. So definitely a great takeaway from this conference. I can Implement that tomorrow.

Andrew: Steve do you know anyone that can do really good Photoshop work for us totally unrelated totally relate, but do you know anyone?

Steve: anyway next question so my key takeaway was I like Kurt I actually haven’t been using a whole lot of the personalization features in my flows and I actually created all my flows back when they didn’t have that whole new flow bloat Builder. So I actually have multiple flows that kind of overlap and I exclude the people on the other flows when I do it. So right now it’s a complete mess and I just need to kind of redo all of them and you can you can consolidate a bunch of flows because you can do conditional stuff within the flow builder now to really simplify things. So that’s kind of next on my objective

Toni: what I love about events. Like this is that you tend to get an aha moment sometimes based on multiple things you heard so yesterday they talked about gender predictive feature, which I was like cool. I don’t know how I’d use that most of my customers are female. But then as I started thinking about it today and having other conversations, I realized that actually I do have Male purchases and it’s always a gift right and then I started thinking well, it’s always a gift. They always come organically and they never use a coupon. So I never want to send them a coupon right because they’re going to buy without a coupon. So I said we were at lunch and we were talking to the data scientist and I was like, oh, I got it. Like I need to make sure that I’m segmenting my people so that they’re not getting a coupon because they’ll never they don’t need to use one and I think a lot of times guys when they’re looking for gifts aren’t likely to use a coupon anyway, so that was my big aha moment.

Steve: Clearly. Those guys are not Asian because yeah,

Toni: yeah

Steve: I use a coupon whenever I can

Toni: I yeah, I and I don’t pull the I don’t use the data like I should but I know just from like especially early on

Steve: noticed there wasn’t like a racial setting on on the klaviyo thing.

Toni: I’m not even gonna respond to that

Steve: I think I’m gonna cut that one out.

Andrew: steve, when you’re shopping for presents for Jen you go and find like half a dozen coupons and then pick from those for the present?

Steve: They don’t have coupons for Cartier, Tiffany’s and all those high-end high-end retailers and

Toni: Walmart’s already discounted enough so you don’t need a coupon right, Steve?

Steve: So I’m going to end this podcast a little bit earlier than I typically do. We’re in a soundproof booth right now, but the ceiling is wide open and we’re sitting right outside of the main hall and people are sent to exit right now. But I hope you guys appreciate this little recap and in the roasting I guess

Toni: this is going to be your most popular podcast ever

Steve: just show me your support by leaving some in the comments in defensive me, please and

Andrew: and just for the record if you didn’t hear at the beginning our defensive Toni and her support, it was edited out by Steve write to him at Steve@mywifequitherjob.com and ask him to include that back into the podcast because it’s an important piece and I mean, I just I think it’s important

Steve: what’s funny is This is all plotted while I went to the bathroom. I had to go to the bathroom before we started recording and then they plotted this whole thing. They know I can’t really edit it out. And then Toni was probably the Mastermind. I’m guessing

Toni: in all seriousness this in all seriousness. This is why you should attend these events because you get together with people that you usually only see online and you’re able to share ideas you joke around you can rip on each other. It’s pretty cool side benefit of being here. So thank you Steve for being a good sport.

Steve: I don’t know if I call this people my friends but we do but we do see each other once or twice a year and it’s a lot of fun.

Andrew: I know Toni and Kurt, I consider you a good friends.

Steve: So, all right. Take care.

Hope you enjoyed that episode as it was a departure from one of my typical episodes. And as you can probably tell going to events with your friends and fellow podcasters can be a lot of fun. For more information about this episode go to mywifequitherjob.com/episode276.

And once again, I want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode and inviting me to the event now. Klaviyo 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 or win back campaign. Basically, all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitherjob.com/klaviyo. Once again, That’s mywifequitherjob.com/klaviyo.

Oh, I also want thank Privy for sponsoring this episode. Privy is the email capture provider that I personally use the term visitors into email subscribers. They offer email capture exit intent and site targeting tools to make it super simple as well. And I like Privy because it is so powerful and you can basically trigger custom pop-ups for any parameter that is closely tied your eCommerce store. Now, if you want to give it a try it is free so head on over to privy.com/steve. Once again, that’s P-R-I-V-Y.com/steve.

Now I talked about how I use these tools in my blog and if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store heading over to mywifequitherjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini-course just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com

Steve: You’re listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners, and delve deeply into the strategies they use to grow their businesses. Now today, I am happy to have the CEO of Nuun life on the show. Now, Nuun spelled N U U N– is a product that I personally use every single day to stay hydrated and feel productive. So I’m really excited to talk to you Kevin Rutherford about how they’ve grown their company over the years.

But before we begin, I want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode, whether you’re just getting your business off the ground or looking for new ways to scale, Klaviyo offers fast, simple, and repeatable ways to grow. And with Klaviyo you can personalize your marketing, build your customer relationships, and automate your online sales. And it is now easier than ever to create amazing email and advertising experiences. Now I want to talk about Klaviyo’s new entrepreneur growth guide, packed with must read blog post, case studies, and getting started content. This guide will help you prioritize what to do next for maximum revenue growth. Now moving to a new marketing platform can be intimidating, but Klaviyo helps you get up and growing fast with proven technology and countless support resources. Now I encourage you to check out this free content now over at klaviyo.com/mywife. Once again that is K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.com/my wife.

I also want to give a shout-out to Privy who is also a sponsor of the show. Privy is a tool that I use to build my email list for both my blog and my online store. Now, what is Privy do, well Privy is an email list growth platform and they manage all my email capture forms. And I use Privy hand in hand with my email marketing provider. Now, there are a bunch of companies out there that will manage your email capture forms, but I like Privy because they specialize in e-commerce. And right now, I’m using privy to display a cool Wheel of Fortune pop-up. Basically, user gives your email for a chance to win valuable prizes in our store and customers love the gamification aspect of this and when I implemented this form, email signups increased by a hundred thirty one percent. I’m also using their new cart saver pop-up feature as well to recover abandoned carts. So bottom line, privy allows me to turn visitors into email subscribers, which I then feed to my email provider to close the sale. So, head on over to preview.com/steve and try it for free. And if you decide you need some of the more advanced features, use coupon code MWQHJ for 15% off. Once again, that’s P-R-I-V-Y.com/steve. Now on to the show.

Intro: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. We will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here’s your host Steve Chou!

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. Today, I’m thrilled to have Kevin Rutherford on the show Now Kevin is the CEO of Nuun life a company that sells hydration tablets that turn water into a Gatorade like drink with very few carbs, and I’m actually addicted to these tablets actually take them twice per day and I can’t really describe the feeling that I get but after drinking Nuun for some reason that I instantly feel better and perhaps it’s because I am dehydrated for most of the day and I don’t even realize it but the stuff works amazing. I always take it before I start my day. Now in any case Kevin has grown noon into a behemoth of a company and I’m excited to hear his story and how he’s grown it and with that welcome to show Kevin. How you doing today?

Kevin: it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Steve: So Kevin. I’d like to start with kind of the origin story. I know you kind of took over the company after it was established, but I was wondering how Nuun got started to begin with and how did the name happen to be like Nuun as a pretty unique name.

Kevin: Yeah, well, there’s a few parts that question. Let me break it down and tell you a little bit how it started and then I’ll finally get back to the brand names here point. So Nuun was started roughly 15 years ago and it was formed by a couple of triathletes that were in training and they were they were really looking for a better solution. So if you go back 15 years just think about this for a moment there were really not very many Alternatives when it came to hydration and sports drinks really the most known still to this day of course is Gatorade. And so what they did is they were there trying to find an optimal solution oddly enough. They’re also going to school like it was Dartmouth if I’m not mistaken. I apologize if I’m off on that data point,

Steve: It’s okay.

Kevin: but I’m it’s a certain and it was actually a business case meets personal need and they came up with this idea of creating this noon tablet. It was based on some research that suggested the optimal way to hydrate and fuel yourself for training long Distance races is you need to separate your hydration from their fuel. And so if you think about that for just a moment the way that you if you’re taking in a sports drink a traditional sports drink like a Gatorade, It’s a combination. There’s a lot of carbs and sugars in there which is meant to be fuel to go with your hydration. So let me let me just kind of give the give the audience a little more detail on this time in its then you go will hold on so that seems to make sense because that’s easier to take in it is easier to take in but it’s harder for your body to work with it.

This is what the research suggested and so if you think about if you actually go back to I think it’s 1964 when you actually Gatorade was invented at the University of Florida in Gainesville, from what I understand back then the product was actually closer and composition to what Nuun is terms of electrolytes and carbohydrates than what the traditional Gatorade product is today. And so yeah, so it’s evolved over time and I think it’s evolved over time both for taste palate because it’s much sweeter with the sugars. There is a book written on it also suggests that there was an artificial sweetener in it back in the time to keep the calorie count down and then when that was banned by the FDA, then I think that’s when they put in different heights, you know, basically some high sugar content.

Steve: So basically, it’s very high fructose corn syrup

Kevin: Right. Yeah, exactly. So that’s the challenge now so enter in Founders at the time and when they were looking at this and they’re going okay. Well, there’s got to be a better way in the science says, oh by the way, I didn’t finish on the physiology. I meant to do that. So in the physiology of your body when you’re consuming liquid some over simplifying this but when you’re consuming liquids, it goes eventually down to your stomach like to your small intestine and that’s what it wants to go and in Balance of 95 percent water. So if you take concentrated sugars and put that there over time that’s going to cause intestinal distress plus when you think about when you’re working out you’re putting stress on your intestine and just like just bodily functions. And so you would want to use a different pathway for fuel. That’s what you want when you want to use food potentially poles and other methods that people use for when they’re working out and hydration is all about electrolytes.

You do need a little bit of sugar to help you absorb the electrolytes but not a lot and when again when you combine the two it wreaks Havoc so long story short these guys basically said this is a better way. Let’s just develop this on our own obviously did very well in the business case to the way. They said let’s just launched. Once this product the name Nuun. So, the truth be told it’s defined as nutrition uncompromised. It’s a made-up word N U U N will tell you I have talked with the founder of the past on this and I think he actually likes to leave it up to mystery. And so what’s funny is there’s stories that have shown up on this one woman on our team that to me Kevin, do you know what Nuun means in Nepal and I’m like what? Yeah, then the Polly’s translation for it. She goes it means salt and I go and so sure enough I’m Diggin I’m Diggin. I find it even Wikipedia you can you do have to kind of dig to find it, but I found it and it’s actually spelled Nun but pronounced noon and it is the translation for salt in Nepal

Steve: I can’t be a coincidence.

Kevin: I wonder if exactly right because the most essential electrolyte that you need to replenish is salt. So I found that quite humorous. I don’t know if that’s how it started. So I’m love to be transparent and honest about it. Okay, I will tell you that we think of it as nutrition and compromise but you know, there’s all kinds of stories out there about what the brand means. I also think that the founder just really love the symmetry of the N the U of U and the N all lower case. I think he just kind of like symmetry. But again, I don’t know for certain. I wish I had a better answer for you guys and I want..

Steve: A couple more questions about the founding story and then we’ll move on but I was just kind of curious if these guys know they the product at all before they just start making and selling it in bulk.

Kevin: Oh well, the validation absolutely validation was really among the fund themselves because they were triathletes but also among their peers and friends. So small-scale testing, yes. And then actually to that point they did consult with a physician and a sports scientist who was living in Australia. I don’t know where that connection came from, but I do know that because it’s oddly enough this position. I introduced with some introduced himself to me at a bike show. He’s like Hey Kevin, you know, I forgot his name. It’s so bad. He was super nice and he goes I’m so and so one night. I was actually part of the science in terms of understanding the composition of the product and worked with him in the folks that started the company. So there was some validation there and there was also real world testing in terms of training for adventure races and training for for Iron Man and a long distance Triathlon races.

So that was the validation then it was hey we’ve got something here and like what you said at the opening you really can feel the difference when you try this product, that’s the cool part and our whole Mantra when it comes to Innovation and how we improve our products is hydration that you can feel we kind of work at the science. And then we validate it just like the US and still to this day.

Steve: You know, I notice I don’t feel that way when I drink Gatorade is it because of the sugar component?

Kevin: Well, I think there might be two reasons. I don’t you know, obviously everyone’s body is different.

Steve: Sure

Kevin: The sugar you would actually would think you would feel a difference pretty quickly because we just think about the injection of a sugar high. However, that being said the electrolyte level in noon is higher.

Steve: Okay.

Kevin: Than a Gatorade and that could be why and I think the reason why when you’re doing this at rest while you’re feeling the difference of Nuun right away is realize that but we’re just not putting enough liquid in our body and so Nuun will replenish that much quicker and the composition of the electrolytes is designed for basically what your body needs and where you’re going to be most efficient. So I think that’s why, so it’s a bit of the composition the electrolyte levels higher and Nuun the sugar may or may not be a reason out of the gates why you don’t Difference because I think over time that you would notice the sugar drop rate falling off the cliff.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah.

Kevin: But I would think it’s actually I would think would actually help you feel better.

Steve: Okay, I’m just kind of curious. What does it take to make one of these tablets? Like if someone out there were to just make a product along the same lines. Does it require any sort of FDA approval or anything like that certifications in order to sell some of these things?

Kevin: My hesitation on that one is you know in today’s world. I guess if you were to sell products online, I think you can you wouldn’t really need an FDA approval. You could probably get around that system. But I guess long story short, We do go through FDA approval. We also work with different retailers and get approval for them in terms of agreement as to what ingredients we use. So I you could do it you could do it in probably skirt around a lot of Regulation pretty easily.

Steve: because I do know that people who make those protein powders. I don’t think there’s any regulation on those it seems.

Kevin: yeah. I know I think you’re right. I think that’s the chat one of the challenges with the you know, supplements in general. So one of the things that we did to counteract that one and actually it’s great that you’re aware of that. I wish more people were aware of that. So one of the things that we’ve done is we said don’t just trust us, right? take these validations. So we actually go through the effort to make sure that you know that it’s non-GMO project certified we go through the effort to make sure it’s gluten-free certified. It’s vegan certified its kosher and certification and last we have another certification that’s around safer sport which basically means we have every single batch has tested so that you know that there is no contamination that could have a banned substance in it.

Steve: Okay.

Kevin: But again, the certifications are to give you confidence to say and which cost a lot of money and time but sure that way you look at and go what they say is what they’re doing.

Steve: Okay so they’re not required but you guys do it as an extra confidence level for consumers.

Kevin: That’s true. Now when you start to go internationally, right, so maybe that’s every Canadian like some people know their Canadians except me but as we as we ship our product across the border to Canada Health Canada is much more strict. And so we do ship there. We do ship to the UK and Australia New Zealand and all of those countries do require much more regulation to be passed which obviously we do.

Steve: Okay and then once you have the manufacturing down or at least of the founders, like how did they generate the first sales? Like, what does the overall marketing strategy to get a product like this? Because there’s just tons of these maybe not tablets per se but there’s a ton of hydration products out there.

Kevin: When you think of a tablet, they didn’t really exist roughly 15 years ago when the company started. So in this case the like consumers like what the heck is this? Right? And how does it work? And is it safe? So there’s a lot of Education when you think of when you first start how you have to do this?

Steve: Yeah.

Kevin: So I think that the recommendation that I would say on this one and how to approach it and it’s probably pretty consistent, you know feedback that you’ve had in this is exactly what the founding team did is they started small I think of who is this product relevant for who are we targeting and it was the athlete so it’s the adventure Racers of the triathletes. I believe the first store that ever carried Nuun is called First Ascent in the on the north side of Seattle and which is where I’m located in Seattle right now. You go to that store and you convinced basically kind of persuade them to give it a shot likely you give it to them Free and just kind of prove it out and then get in store in Sample and I think starting store by solar one by one you start expanding and you start to get momentum. You also hear the consumer feedback over time and in the store feed back and then that’s where you start building from.

I think truthfully I think the big mistake that people have is they want to go big so fast and I think that you really want to start small and focus and learn and adapt and accordingly and this case you’re not really probably going to die that much on the product that you’re going to adapt on how you communicate it.

Steve: You know, it’s interesting you said so they went to the retail channels first, I guess online wasn’t really huge back then would you have done the same strategy today?

Kevin: I would have done a combo. What I would do is I would I would try to find curated distribution meaning Nuun today. If I were to start I would go and work with some of the hot trendy like in the sport for run for Triathlon for bike. I would work with them. I would probably work with you know, the local natural stores as well because we use all clean ingredients and then I would also take the same strategy targeting that same consumer online. The reality is a lot of businesses are being built through online first, but I think you can do both one of the things that will happen is discovery in the store then kind of relay over to conversion fairly quickly and then that can build your online sales. I think I can go both ways. I think a lot of us think of online is the the way but I think a combination of the two is actually more more powerful most consumers today still treat most of their shopping in store.

Steve: Yeah

Kevin: And I’m not seeing the trend isn’t changing. I agree it is but the data would say, hey most people still The store.

Steve: I think I would agree with you. Like if I just saw some random supplement in a Facebook ad for example, even if it was a free sample, I’d be reluctantly to try it unless that kind of happened to glance over and see it in a retail shop. So I think they do work together for sure.

Kevin: Yeah, absolutely.

Steve: So, okay. So back in the being they start out in small retail shops and then Target a small community presumably the triathlete community.

Kevin: Yeah, absolutely that in adventure racing was a bit of a component / for the brand as well adventure racing. If you’re not familiar with that is because you’re basically doing a race that has orienteering involved in it to get two different touch points and you’re racing somewhere like could be 24 48 72 hours over some pretty rough terrain. So the torture test is if this thing works for that or an Ironman athlete then guess what this has got to work for me and that’s kind of the approach they took go for the torture test. Yeah. That was that was actually the approach.

Steve: It kind of spread via word of mouth and write these athletes were using them and then they were recommending them and then soon other athletes were using the product as well.

Kevin: Yeah, exactly. And here’s the other interesting thing is there’s two there’s two components. There’s word other the word of mouth is the overarching which I agree with you. That’s that’s absolutely what happened to spread word amount. There’s through the athletes. Then there’s the influencers at the time that it wasn’t influencers. Like we think of Instagram today that didn’t exist. But it’s the same concept in this case. It was the influencers were the store managers or the store owners of these kind of leading independent stores that lead in Triathlon or cycling or run. And if they’re recommending this Nuun hydration, it’s got to be good. Right? It’s that kind of concept and so that’s what that word about what happened and then of course, they’re sampling and sore and being a races in sampling. They’re introducing its people.

Steve: So by the time you took over the company, we were there getting most of their sales from and what was the marketing strategy at the point where you took over?

Kevin: Yeah, absolutely. So I took over, you know, it’ll be coming up to six years and the primary source of where we were selling the product was at least the predominant Channel. I was starting to expand from there. But the predominant channel was really the sport specialty side of things is what we call it or sports stores. So think about again as I mentioned the trap on shops on child’s bike shops, but also really good customer for us. It’s been around to this day phenomenal customer for us is REI.

Steve: Okay.

Kevin: Which is an outdoor retailer and they’ve been a really good partner. Which not only is it a good partner for Revenue but these retail stores are in many ways distribution is marketing and so they’ve really helped really help give us credibility because of who they are and through Association we did have some distribution in grocery as well. But was growing the time obviously it’s much more significant today than what it was. So I would say that and then even the online sales were starting to build through Amazon at the as well we were real early adopter again. Those were obviously much much smaller at the time but the predominant volume first coming from the sport side of things and then the grocery was starting to build the digital was starting to build and gain momentum, but that was kind of where the volume was.

Steve: How do you get into REI? What does it take to get into REI?

Kevin: I don’t know how we got in originally truthfully. I actually don’t know how that happened. I do get that question a lot by the way, REI in particular. And I think to get an REI today, what you want to do is you’re going to want to prove your brand and other places first because REI is not going to likely take the risk on a start-up not likely but they will take it on a small new and emerging brand. So Noon would still call it an emerging brand. It’s not the billions of dollars that Gatorade is today. So I think today REI probably a lot more sophisticated on their choices of nutrition than what they were, you know, 10 years ago is actually when I think we wanted to REI so it’s pretty long time and like I said still like a critical customer to this very day and the future for our plans. So I think you gotta prove it out likely in some of these sports stores.

I would even I don’t know if you can do this, but the one of the ways to get into some of these chains, you have to be really Scrappy about it, but can you build relationships at a store level and it’s kind of going around the rules so hopefully REI doesn’t get mad at me for saying it. I don’t know if we did this REI, if you’re listening. I say this because I think of at Whole Foods and how the team kind of works that is at store level and starting to get some proof points and you’re basically talking almost like a an independent store owner in this case. It’s a store manager and can you get that relationship to just get a shot to see if this thing works does it sell and I think you could do that REI which then could filter back up to the headquarters where you can have a shot to get in there.

I think it’s REI is no different than any other retailers long story short, is kind of find your proof points start small and then yeah then how do you how do you if you can’t even if you can sneak it into a store and show that actually moved their store that I think that kind of bodes well.

Steve: So what you just said is in line with a lot of the other people who are in retail you start at the small boutique shops, you demonstrate sales and you take that data and try to get into a couple of tests stores and like Whole Foods or whatnot and then hopefully the sales are good and that’s how you get in. I was just kind of curious what your perspective was. But yeah, it sounds like it’s in line.

Kevin: Yeah, well and again it comes back to you actually want to curate the distribution anyway, because you’re finding these Boutique shops as you called it and so, you know use it on one of the brands that have recently got acquired as I’m a big fan of this brand is Sun balm, which is think it is like sunscreen suntan lotion rights on care and these this group built this brand their Boutique equivalent was surf shop and how do they build it there? And then it kind of went to hospitality but they get those proof points, right and they build the brands together with this so they it’s a win-win that helps the boutique shops. If you will the surf shops and helps the brand and then you build it together and then you go. Okay. It’s time for us to expand the picture. We’re more available in the proof points are critical for those bigger stores.

The data is what ultimately is the proof point. You can only go so much on gut. So if the consumers picking it up and that’s why you want that data point then there were more likely to lean in the further removed you are from a business. The more you need data is kind of My Philosophy with the team.

Steve: Okay.

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Interesting. So does that imply then that starting a company like this purely online is would be extremely challenging.

Kevin: Well, I think I think nothing is easy. I don’t think there’s any shortcuts. I think that’s a misnomer so I don’t think it’s easy at all. But I do think it can be done and there are a lot of examples of brands that are building through digital and building from the ground up so it can be done but it’s also very you know, and it’s very accessible because anyone can do it sure but that also means the barrier for entry is very low. So the Clutter is really high.

Steve: The competition is high. Yeah

Kevin: Yeah. So so I think it can be done long story short, you know, it’s Interesting as well that you know, I grew up in a more traditional CPG, you know consumer packaged Goods environment SC Johnson and I worked at Miller Brewing. It was a cauchy which is owned by Kellogg. And and what’s interesting about that is when you look at marketing skill set of what you needed then is is very different with the emergence of happening of the digital world. And so when you think about Talent those that work in it could be multi-level marketing to direct consumer marketing brands in the past where you go that’s not and I’m paraphrasing and kind of making this up but it’s almost like I was aren’t real marketers, but it turns out it turns out that that’s probably a better skill set than a traditional CPG today when it comes to the digital side of things sure. It’s just interesting how it’s changed a lot and pretty quickly in the last like even just like takes five years.

Steve: It’s changed a lot. Oh, yeah for sure. And actually that was kind of a Lead into my next question. So you got this company you take over it’s already got sales in a bunch of different channels. What was your strategy to grow it as much as you did in the past five or six years?

Kevin: The key Point here is I didn’t grow it. We did and I say that truthfully here’s the deal. There was a lot working for news. So something changed, but I will tell you that the foundation of what the product is what the philosophy was behind. It was really great team that was in place was also a really interesting because I thought it was really strong. So my Approach was this when I came in I actually first started not to try to change anything. I really just wanted to get in here and understand what was going on. And first what’s working. Where can we put a megaphone on it? How do we amplify that and then secondly then what do we need to stop doing? And then what do we need to start doing? Like what do we need to do differently?

Steve: Okay

Kevin: So that that’s kind of creepy. So when it comes to what’s working, I’ll tell you why I’m saying this is not going to be rocket science for the listeners out there, but I’m such a big believer that Biggest Difference Maker in every business, it comes back to the people. It just comes back to the team. And so I think what I helped bring to the table was a belief in what we were doing as a company to the team because they worked the team would like the business was growing when I came in but it was the growth rate was slowing if that makes sense

Steve: sure

Kevin: And admitting not declining but it wasn’t growing nearly as fast and yet the business is still not that big so it shouldn’t have been slowing and growth which is part of the reason for a change. And so I think the number one thing that I hope I helped get a different lens for the team was to believe in what were we trying to accomplish as like kind of a mission for the company but secondly to believe in each other and ourselves and I think that’s where the self-doubt might start to happen. And that’s a vicious cycle which is why I think culture is the ultimate competitive Advantage not very exciting when people are looking for what’s the business strategy it truly is like that that’s Ultimately will sustain winning or not winning.

Steve: Interesting. Okay.

Kevin: Absolute conviction on it from my perspective. So that was that was one too. So then it was saying well, what do we need to put a megaphone on? What do we need to do? And so we were doing some really great things on the support side of things and what happens with a lot of businesses is some teams start to think about well, where can we take this where we go next and they think broad versus depth, right our breath forces death and I really wanted them to make sure that we were keeping focused. Like let’s all keep focus and not lose what we’re really good at. Let’s amplify that so let’s amplify the relationship with REI. Let’s amplify the relationship that we have with bleep feeds or any see in Canada. Like what can we do more with that? Not necessarily. Where do we need to go next? I’m not saying we don’t go other places, but that you start first with where your strengths are.

Steve: Can you give me an example of like amplification with REI? For example, like what does that mean? Exactly?

Kevin: Yeah, you know, so what we did on the REI friend is we came back to them and talk about doing unique items. We started to plan with them and give them a preview as to the future of what we were doing with Innovation. And how can we partner together? We weren’t doing that with that system before right? Once we launch with them. We were doing really good things, but we weren’t thinking of them as a strategic partner may be in part because we didn’t think maybe we didn’t believe that we had the right to do that because we were little tiny noon instead we came in and saying no, we’re like a leader in hydration growing clearly the number one tablet at the time and still up by far the number one tablet now and Cohen with a leadership position say Hey, how do we grow together?

And so then we started to develop plans together and then we started doing things with rei.com that we were never doing before terms of sampling. We increase the number of demos we did in store. So again to drive more velocity

Steve: I see.

Kevin: So we just did a lot deeper on Partnerships. We were doing some of it. We just went deeper and double down and put more Investment there.

Steve: Okay, that makes sense. And then the volume is naturally grew and the partnership’s grew deeper and presumably they would Market your products more too, okay.

Kevin: Absolutely, you know, one of the things we’re really proud of the teams just done such a phenomenal job you if we use REI as the example. Last year, we were we were runner-up for vendor of the year at REI, which is pretty wild knowing there’s a lot of different brands in our category and our category by the way was bigger than just nutrition. It’s like think of it as like water bottles and that whole kind of segment over there in the store and we were put up for vendor of the Year. And that was basically it came back to how we work with them how we treat them how we interact with them how we invest time energy and resources with them. So yeah, we went deeper and works for and I think for both of us.

Steve: Cool. What were some of the other aspects of the business that you Amplified?

Kevin: Yeah. So like I said that the idea of believing in ourselves really drives even better and faster. Execution in store. So it’s really the quality of execution. So that’s why I started with culture for you. One of the other things though that we did is that was to get momentum back. There isn’t massive change their here’s where the change really have and where the magnifying effect happen for the team is like, okay, We got her groove back. We got our stride back. I’m a big believer that momentum builds momentum is a Mojo builds Mojo. And so we got this momentum going great. While that was happening, We re-trenched ourselves and said what’s our nutritional philosophy in and basically the mission that we have is we Inspire everyone to move more our nutritional philosophy is to basically give you what you need and nothing that you don’t which is hydrant. You can feel this wasn’t formalized before and so what I did with the team was we step back into what does that look like?

That led us to having this whole live clean clean product claims Planet Clean Sport, and so we realized then I go. Okay. What ingredients Again in the current Nuun tablet that we launched with 15 years ago. Now what is in here that is inconsistent that we need to do better with our product because no one ever wanted to change the product. This was an interesting one, a lot of resistance to change a lot because people loved what we had and the reality was is we had when it launched originally an artificial sweetener, which because that kept the calorie count down in that capacity to keep the calorie count down that made it’s consistent with the science. We had a preservative in there for longer shelf life. We just had some ingredients in there that made sense of why it was developed but then we need to develop a nutritional philosophy and if it’s all about clean ingredients, I’m like, okay, we can’t have this anymore.

Truthfully, nothing’s easy as I told you before when we went to go develop this and we had our Kuroko manufacturer. They basically said you can’t develop a tablet with the philosophy that you’re doing. Are you I kid you not I believe the words were it is impossible and I’m like no we’ve got to do it. Otherwise, we’re gonna have to go find somewhere else to do this. We’ve got to figure it out and we did it,the team did it. With them. We did we completely broke down the Paradigm and said well, how would we do it and worked out it worked at it? And the reason I bring that up is you when you start with the strategy of the philosophy the mission and you go. Okay, what is consistent and what is inconsistent? Because good strategies not only what you will do, but it should be what you want do and so when we took those ingredients out change that we had a whole new platform meaning now, we’ve got a product fit has the performance and you’re not compromising on any ingredients, sweet. So then we go at that opened up a whole new market for us.

Steve: I see.

Kevin: From a business sense and the way I would position this when I’m talking to our board in our investors. Is this going to open a whole new market what really drove it honestly is what’s the right thing to do? What do we want to do? And if we make this for ourselves, this is how we do it. This is our mission that actually, what drove it. When you communicate your audience’s you need to make sure you talk in a language that’s relevant and matters to them. So when I talk for investors here’s the market that is going to open up to which was true. And that’s what happened. And so then after we went to an all natural all cleaning product, we ended up taking that momentum that we had proof points at the REI in the sport especially and went to all Whole Foods Across the Nation all Sports stores, and it was a whole new market for us.

And now we’ve completely changed the game. That was that was probably the game changer right there where it went to a whole different level and then and then we just keep on putting the gas down even harder because we’ve got to think we’re so confident in who we are and what we’re producing and why we believe it’s the best thing for you that it’s just it just keeps on it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Steve: So since we’re on this topic of product since I’ve been a Nuun consumer for quite some time now, I noticed relatively recently You guys started introducing an a lot of varieties whereas in the past. There’s only two and it was easy for me to find that right. I just want the hydration after one. I’m going to have and then I remember when all these different varieties came. I was a little bit confused as to which one I should get. What was the philosophy behind that decision?

Kevin: Yeah. So that’s a really good point. Right arguably. You could say why even add any other products just so more of what you have which is the optimal hydration product that you’re talking about which was designed with the torture test of Adventure athletes an Ironman athletes in mind. Right like the people that are basically sweating and it works when you’re not sweating too which is what you’re talking about first thing in the morning. You’re like, you know, as you were talking about you’re saying I just take this first thing in the morning cuz it makes me feel really good and it’s because you’ve been dehydrating overnight to set also probably makes a lot of sense. The idea here is we said well is this product designed optimally for kind of daily Health occasions? And that’s where we were starting to think through hydration is needed. We need to hydrate throughout the day. How can we help that and what are different needs states that we can address through hydration?

And when we looked at what we’re now calling sport but original product is now cleaned by ingredients obviously, which we did many years ago now. That product is designed for if you will sweat preparing to sweat recovering from sweat, but it’s all around that sweat occasion. And so the other product we launched we said, okay, so we introduced we actually introduced if you’re called as a caffeinated version called Energy.

Steve: Yep. Yep.

Kevin: It’s the same product as just what caffeine and some B vitamins in there that was kind of an introduction. It’s like okay that makes sense the problem with that from a communication perspective which consumers didn’t totally understand. They thought they didn’t know it was the same product just with copying. So with one of the things that you’ve seen is we’ve had to simplify our communication, but I’ll talk to you through the portfolio really quickly and then I’ll say here’s the communication then we did a vitamin product. It was basically about daily health and it’s like the electrolytes are in their same complete electrolyte profile, but we lowered it because you don’t need as high as sodium levels. You don’t need 300 milligrams of sodium when you’re not sweating you do need it if you’re preparing for during or after the split, but if it’s just like I’m working away at my desk or if you you and I are talking to podcast, you know, I’d probably I’d love some electrolytes because it will make the water work harder for me get at the same time. I don’t need it as high.

So that’s when we came up with that and we added in 11 different vitamins and minerals that the research suggested that most people were deficient in so that way you’re constantly getting in vitamins and electrolytes while you’re hydrated throughout the day so that was the idea but it’s causing confusion back to your point. In fact since then, we’ve also launched an immunity product which is, you know, we looked at air born in emergency and we said well, what about these situations and we felt like what was happening with the current competition? And we have this philosophy of we had to start all over again. How would we do it? When you looked at the immunity side of things these products were basically getting an a vitamin C arms race. I’ve got 1,000 milligrams. I’ve got 2,000 milligrams. The problem with that is you can’t actually absorb all that.

Steve: Yeah.

Kevin: So that’s when we developed some pretty, so long story short. We have all these different products and it was causing confusion. So what we’ve done since then and just like in the last two months is flowing through it shelf and that’s what you’re saying is we have a Nuun sport that’s fpr sweat occasion, we have Nuun vitamins daily health and it calls it out on there. We have immunity to boost your immune system and even most recently just launched a rest product to help you get a more restful sleep. So there’s just different ways to hydrate throughout the day you need to hydrate throughout the day. Maybe we can encourage people to hydrate more for more Optimal Health and we can address different need states at the same time. That’s kind of the philosophy. We just have to be really clear on when to use it. Like which one do I use and when.

Steve: Yeah, so I guess what confuses me and this is kind of outside the scope of the interview but like if I’m taking a hydration do I need to take a vitamin one then or should I take both if I take the restful or the immunity that’s like four tablets, I guess right there which seems a little..

Kevin: Yeah.

Steve: And so that’s where the confusion, I’d rather just take one and cover, you know, 3/5 of that

Kevin: Yeah, so if I was if you were to just pick one product, I think you would work with what you’ve been always drinking the Nuun hydration Court product a high electrolytes because it’s really good for any occasion. Is it excess electrolytes? Yes, because its water soluble you’ll just pee it out whatever you don’t absorb, but you don’t always need that high. So for those that want to dial in for that’s what we find is our consumers very involved. It’s like what do I need for what occasion and how do we deliver on that? Again, did you only what you need versus what you don’t and that’s why we have two different products for different occasions. So it’s a very fair comment though. Like I completely understand here because here’s the flipside the downside is so vitamins is a phenomenal product, but it’s not designed optimally if you are about to go out for a century ride bike ride because the electrolytes are going to be high enough.

Steve: Right

Kevin: But it’s perfectly designed for you know again you and I having a podcast discussion right now. I’m just kind of relaxing and chatting because the electrolyte levels are optimal and I’m getting vitamins. I don’t need you don’t need even more electrolytes at this point.

Steve: Okay

Kevin: So I realized maybe a small confusion but..

Steve: I was just kind of curious what the business decision was. But I mean the business decision really is so you can move into new markets essentially, right?

Kevin: Yeah, kind of exempting from a personal perspective. You’re right. So from a business perspective what it would tell you this is when we launched vitamins and when we’ve launched immunity and then now rest they’ve all been highly incremental in terms of business volume to the current sport product the sport product continues to grow and then these additions have been incremental but also Nuun Markets new need States is what we’re addressing.

Steve: I mean now we’re essentially tackling multivitamins as well as Airborne, correct, right?

Kevin: Yeah.

Steve: Okay.

Kevin: That’s true. Yep. So it’s a new way to enter into the brand.

Steve: Exactly. Yeah and basically piggyback on what you have that’s already successful. Because I know for a fact that time are you taking Nuun every day instead of taking Centrum. For example, I might just take a vitamin, Nuun.

Kevin: Yeah, I think that’s fair. I think that’s fair.

Steve: So, okay. So back to the original thing we were talking about. So what were the things that you decide to cut out? So you we talked about what you Amplified? What did you not amplifier but decrease essentially?

Kevin: yeah what do you stop doing? Right? And so one of the things that I mentioned to you as we made the change in the product that was one of the things that we we really stopped doing was we said, how do we change the product and and turn this a different way the other thing that we did was we stopped looking for fast channel extension at the time. Now, we’re doing more Channel expansion because we’re ready for it, but we weren’t ready for it. So whether that’s the club channel the drug Channel we were going down those paths and behind the scenes and actually entered into stores and we weren’t doing great in those and so how do we pull back from that and that’s that’s kind of where we collectively said we need to Stop doing that and let’s go deeper where we are and really retrench to get stronger growth rates and then start to expand but don’t go too far out.

It’s those closer and adjacencies, you know, the reality is as our consumer tends to be highly involved. They want to read the ingredients. They want to know what it’s for which is why we can do different need States. If you go too far down the path of a conventional General market, we may not be relevant for them yet at this point and that’s what we are finding. So that’s one of the things that we did differently stop going after drug. Stop going after Club.

Steve: I guess that makes sense. I mean when you go after too many things you don’t do any of them well, and so I guess your philosophy was to just go deep and then once you’ve saturated that particular Avenue then look to expand.

Kevin: Yep, exactly. And by the way, you won’t really ever know a few saturated it because there’s always likely a bit more room to grow. So, I think it’s I think it’s when you feel like you’ve got and somewhat of an over index and now you’ve built up in a without a lot of data being smaller companies, you’re going on a little bit of intuition to say, I think I think we’ve got pretty good awareness now. :et’s go to the next adjacency of consumer and reach and then that’s when you go to the next channel.

Steve: I guess you can measure diminishing returns though, right?

Kevin: True. You’re right.

Steve: Absolutely. Maybe that’s it. Okay, cool. I feel like I caught you kind of like an inflection point right You released all those new varieties relatively recently. I want to say so what is the next growth face that you see for Nuun?

Kevin: Yeah, I believe there’s still a few more needs dates that we believe that we can extend to for hydration, like taking the tablets hydration plus so think it as electrolytes but lower level than the sport electrolytes plus this so electrolytes plus immunity electrolytes plus to deliver on a more restful sleep. So there’s a few more indeed states that we have in mind that we want to do on that. There’s also some different platforms that we think we can build from and reinvent a few different categories out there. So I can’t talk too much about that. But if you think about nutrition uncompromised and take it from a supplement perspective, but that probably should be a good indicator of okay. So what are some sleepy categories kind of stale and stagnant that that really need to be reinvented and so we’ve got our eyes on a couple of different categories where we’ll build a platform to reinvent.

Steve: Okay.

Kevin: I’ll give you an example for that. That’s not that’s not Nuun, but it will give you a chance to give you context, you know. Kudosuour friends over at Justin so whichever one probably those that know it and most people do now as an almond butter. If you go back in time when they went into the category, it was a stale peanut butter category selling for a buck .99, $2.99 a jar. Now people are buying anywhere from $7.99 to $11.99, $14.99 for almond butter because it’s a better quality and it changed the whole category from peanut butter to nut butter and I think we can go into a few different sleepy categories and get you to rethink the approach in terms of better nutrition higher quality and but just more efficacious.

Steve: Okay one last question for you that I was just kind of curious about in terms of your online versus brick and mortar strategy, which do you put more emphasis on which is doing better for you and just kind of what is your outlook on that?

Kevin: Well, there’s no question in my mind. That digital is where the fastest growing Market is period out there in terms of consumables and beyond that. In fact, I have a fundamental belief that two things here, passes. The world is moving today will never it’ll never be too slow again. So if you haven’t got your digital capabilities up you’re already behind and you better get caught up pretty quickly. So that should let you know that I think digital is definitely work emphasis needs to go that being said, there’s still a lot of room in grocery and traditional channels where people are shopping and and it’s it is the bigger part of our business still to this day. I believe the bigger growth area of our company over time is definitely digital.

However, I think there’s still a ton of growth in the more traditional bricks-and-mortar area. So it’s the answer is it’s a little bit bag. It’s yes, it’s yes on both but I would lean digital because I do think that digital did not see other philosophy is digital is changing everything. In life, period. So we really need to make sure we capitalize on that. We’re seeing growth happens pretty close on both. It’s a little faster on digital but it’s also a little bit smaller base granted It’s over time that the gap closing.

Steve: was going to ask you was on the digital side. What is there left for you to do in terms of growth? Is it just doing more which you already have or are there additional avenues that you have to try?

Kevin: Well, I think one of the things that we’re learning that we need to get better at is our own direct to Consumer website. I think that less is revenue but more about learning whether that’s data science Performance Marketing. We are all those terms out there. We’re OK at it. We’re absolutely focused on how do we get better at it? And the idea here is how do we learn more about our consumer? How do we offer more toward loyal consumers which will drive higher retention and loyalty and I think that’s a really big area for us to get better at and get better at quickly on the digital side of things.

Steve: Okay.

Kevin: Yeah, you know, there’s obviously Amazon and online stores or out there and we’re growing really well that’s not going to change but I think the area that’s very different for us is through our own website because at that point you have you own all the data and then now we can really build a deeper relationship and understand what we’re doing well and what we’re not and in their consumers need.

Steve: You know one thing I just noticed because I was shopping on your site earlier. I‘d buy Nuun and I consumed it consistently, but I’m not on a subscription and that was actually looking on the site for a way to save money on a subscription but it wasn’t maybe already have one but I could not find it at least for me as an avid consumer. Like I think if I was incentivized to get on a subscription basis, then I would join instantly. But anyways..

Kevin: We’ll make, I agree with you. I agree with you. It’s definitely in the center part.

Steve: Okay, so can kind of conclude this interview where can people find more about your product and if they have any questions for you or want to contact the company directly. Where can they get a hold of you guys?

Kevin: Yeah, absolutely. You know, we’re really fortunate you can find us in a lot of stores online. We already mentioned we talked a lot about REI. The fleet Feats of the worlds are also at Whole Foods and Target, Kroger stores. So we’re basically going to find us a most of most of the grocery stores and stores where you shop today most and then obviously online look us up on any social media handle. So Nuun hydration is the handle for I think all of them being Instagram, Twitter, and well Facebook just look up your hydration. If you want to find me personally, my name is Kevin Rutherford in my Instagram and Twitter handles a little bit different. It’s the clean_lantern that’s clean underscore lantern and the team the team called me that one and it was all about Beacon of light for her planet the planet and humans and all the earthlings that share it with us. So that’s the idea. So but yeah, you can find us there and really appreciate the time. It’s been really fun chatting.

Steve: Yeah. Cool. Thanks a lot of come the show Kevin really appreciate it.

Kevin: Thank you.

Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now, I personally love getting an inside look at how my favorite hydration tablet company has managed to grow to an eight-figure business. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitjob.com/episode273.

And once again, I want to thank Privy for sponsoring this episode. Privy is the email capture provider that I personally use the term visitors into email subscribers. They offer email capture exit intent and site targeting tools to make it super simple as well. And I like Privy because it is so powerful and you can basically trigger custom pop-ups for any parameter that is closely tied your eCommerce store. Now, if you want to give it a try it is free so head on over to privy.com/steve. Once again, that’s P-R-I-V-Y.com/steve.

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Outro: Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com

Steve: You’re listening to the my wife quit her job podcast the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and dig deep into what strategies they used to grow their businesses. Now today, I am thrilled to have Dawn LaFontaine on the podcast and if her name sounds familiar it is because she was a finalist on the 5 minute pitch. And in this interview today we’re going to do a deep dive into her cat products business.

But before we begin I want to give a shout-out to Privy who’s also sponsored the show. previous a tool that I use to build my email list for both my blog and my online store. Now, what is Privy do, well Privy’s an email list growth platform and they manage all my email capture forms and I use Privy hand-in-hand with my email marketing provider. Now, there are a bunch of companies out there that are managing email capture forms, but I like Privy because they specialize in e-commerce. Right now I’m using Privy Display a cool Wheel of Fortune pop-up basically user gives your email for a chance to win valuable prizes in our store and customers love the gamification aspect of this and when implemented this form email signups increased by a hundred thirty one percent. Now, you can also use Privy to reduce car abandoned with cart saver pop-ups and abandoned cart email sequences as well one super low price that is much cheaper than using a full-blown email marketing solution. So bottom line Privy allows me to turn visitors into email subscribers and recover lost sales so head on over to privy.com/steve and try it for free if you decide you need to the more advanced features use coupon code MWQHJ for fifteen percent off once again that’s privy.com/steve.

I also want to give a quick shout-out to Klaviyo for sponsoring the show whether you are just getting your business off the ground or looking for new ways to scale Klaviyo offers fast simple and repeatable ways to grow now with Klaviyo you can personalize your marketing build your customer relationships and automate your online sales and it is now easier than ever to create amazing email and advertising experiences. Now I want to talk about Klaviyo’s new entrepreneurial growth guide packed with must read blog post case studies and getting started content this guide will help you prioritize what to do next for maximum revenue growth that moving to a new marking problem can be intimidating but Klaviyo helps you get up and going fast with proven technology and countless support resources. Now, you can check out this free content now over at Klaviyo.com/mywife once again that is Klaviyo.com/mywife. Now on to the show.

Intro: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast we will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle so can spend more time with your family focus on doing the things that you love. Here’s your host Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. Today, I’m thrilled to have Dawn LaFontaine on the show. Now, Dawn was a finalist of the five minute pitch by Shark Tank like show with Mike Jackness, Greg Mercer and Scott Voelker where we gave away $50,000 in Cold Hard Cash. Now, Dawn runs an e-commerce business selling cardboard boxes for cats. This is called Cat In The Box and her products have been featured in Parade, Product Hunt and the Boston Globe and in this interview, we’re going to talk about Dawn’s triumphs, her obstacles and getting started with their business and with that welcome to show Dawn. How you doing today?

Dawn: Oh very good. Thank you so much for having me Steve and it’s truly a thrill in a pleasure.

Steve: So Dawn, How do you feel now that the I’m in a pitch is all over?

Dawn: Oh my goodness. I’m just so utterly relieved. I just I’m just glad I didn’t, you know, didn’t screw it up and I did a good job, and I’m just you know glad to have had the experience.

Steve: Yeah, and I was telling Dawn right before this interview that I thought, you know for the finals at least Dawn’s preparation for her final five minute pitch was amazing. She clearly came prepared. She did a great job and I was very impressed.

Dawn : Well, thank you for saying that that actually means a lot coming from you.

Steve: So Dawn, what’s nice about the podcast is we get a chance to dig deeper into your backstory. Unlike five minute pitch when you only have five minutes, so please tell the audience about your product and how you got started with it.

Dawn: Sure. So I make Whimsical cardboard box toys for cats to think inside the box. If you have a cat or if you know someone who has a cat you probably already know that cats are just weirdly attracted to cardboard boxes. I mean you could leave a box that earrings came in on the counter and a cat will definitely try and squeeze into it. So if you have a cat you probably already keep like an old Amazon box around for Cat to sleep in or hide in or play in and that’s great because you’re meeting your cat’s needs for a cardboard box, but you don’t know where that box has been it’s dirty. It’s ugly and it might be imprinted with toxic inks and my boxes they’re kind of unique. They’re clean. They’re safer cats. I am print them with human grade soy-based inks. They’re environmentally friendly all recycled cardboard their fun attractive their bit of a conversation piece and most importantly, you know cats really do love them.

Stwvw: So, how did you get the idea? I mean, it seems kind of random to me. At least when I first heard your pitch. I was like, wow, I never would have thought of yet.

Dawn: You are not a cat owner.

Steve: Yes, that’s correct.

Dawn: I actually got the idea on a trip with my mother to drop her cats off at the cat sitter. This woman had a really beautifully appointed home. She obviously cared a lot about her Decor but her living room was filled with old shipping cartons, and I know she saw me looking around which is kind of embarrassing now, but she said, you know to be quite sheepishly, you know the for the cats. So I’ve owned cats. I knew they’d like boxes, but it did get me thinking. Why do their owners put up with dirty ugly Amazon boxes In their homes? Why not something, you know, that’s, clean attractive, cat safe, maybe something even a little bit stylish and that’s how the idea for this business came about.

And let me just back up here a minute and say that I often think of quote-unquote great product ideas all the time. And now that I’ve you know involved in this I know it’s not about the product idea but the implementation, you know, that’s the hard part but as I walk through life thinking about better ways of doing normally walk through life thinking about better ways of doing things and when I thought of this particular one I said to myself for a couple of reasons that this is the idea that I should pursue.

Steve: So when you thought of the idea, first of all have you started any sort of business before this one?

Dawn: I just did a little service-related business while I was raising my kids. I’m a professional writer editor. So I didn’t, you know, just a little bit of freelance writing and editing on the side as a way to contribute to the family, bottom line. So I’m not it wasn’t a business in the sense. I didn’t have a website. I didn’t mark it. I mean people came to me so I don’t think it’s really comparable to this kind of business.

Speaker 2: Okay, and are you working full time right now, or?

Dawn: No, I am, this is a perfect job for me.

Steve: Okay. So what kind of full-time job

Steve: I’m sorry so, Cat In The Box is a full-time job for you.

Dawn: Yes. Yes.

Steve: Okay. So when you started this were you working or?

Dawn: No. And in fact as my kids have gotten older I was still home full time with them. I’ve been home with them for 21/22 years or so and they were you know, my son had just had you know gone off to college and actually was graduating college. My daughter was just going into college. So I had sort of even weaned myself off of the freelance work that I’ve been doing as I’m trying to mole what you know mall over what should I do with the rest of my life. I mean, it’s really my age is really a Crossroads in a person’s life. And this is the path I decided to take.

Steve: Yeah. So what were some of your motivations I imagine the freelance work was going well with the writing. Yeah why business?

Dawn: Couple of reasons, one is when my husband and I were first married before we had children. I was really the big Breadwinner in the family. I made you know, as a percentage anyway of our family income a lot bigger piece of the pie than he did and while I stayed home with the kids, it’s just not something you think about at the beginning of the road when there You know newborns or kindergartners even. He’s you know worked for the 25 years moved up through his career. And now he has a really interesting strategic job and I don’t have all that time left in my working life to start over where I was in my 20s and you know work my way up to the point where he is, so it was hard after I devoted so much of my life to somebody else to think of starting all over so, you know to my two kids which I’m happy I did but to start all over.

And then interestingly it’s sort of the same Crossroads here. He actually got laid off from a job that he’d had for 15 years and at that moment I said, well, I mean, I, you know, I got to get back in the workforce. I we got to have an income and I actually just applied to two part-time jobs that I was overqualified for and I was the kind of person in my twenties if I went on an interview, I got a large percentage of job offers that I went after and here I applied to you know, really kind of Modest part time jobs, and I didn’t get either one of them. Snd it started to make me think about you know, what do I really want? Rest of my life and that the idea that I needed to control my own destiny. And interestingly, my husband actually never really ended up having a gap in his work history. He got one from one job to another he got a severance check from the old job and we use that to start this business.

Steve: Okay, and in terms of this business how did you know is going to sell like, how’d you go about validating you before you got started?

Dawn: Had I taken your course from day one. I’m going to do that. This was just like hmm, you know, I’ve owned cats they would like this and that that’s really not a great idea, especially since my product really doesn’t exist. I mean if seen since a few sort of similar kind of things nothing that’s exactly the same but I couldn’t say well oh there you know, so and so is selling a million dollars worth of these things a year. I should be able to grab a tiny piece of that market. I the really wasn’t anything that existed on the market like this and I really didn’t do my due diligence and testing it to start out. Unfortunately.

Steve: I mean, but it was a hit clearly because all this And all this press and a decent Instagram following from it.

Dawn: Right. I mean, I think the bottom line is I cats absolutely love it. That’s not question. I’ve got a million videos and photos showing that they love it. They do love it and the the cat owners really like it too because they are clever and they’re fun and they love to take pictures of their cats in them. The problem that I face is a completely different one had maybe this category existed before I started this wouldn’t have been this issue. But this is this is not an SEO play. I have to convince people that they might be interested in something like this and they’re not looking for me. I have to go out and look for them.

Steve: Yeah. I don’t know if that’s necessarily the case, but we can talk about that a little bit better kind of curious about is presumably you’ve never manufactured a product before how did you even know how to get started making this thing?

Dawn: Well, I didn’t and but I am the kind of person who researches something to death anything whatever it is, so that I’m actually that’s the part of the this thing. I think I’m good at so it was you know, I knew what I wanted to make. I’m not a designer. So I had to find somebody to design it for me. But in terms of finding the manufacturer, I just started cold calling and cold emailing box manufacturers cardboard manufacturers in the US and the problem wasn’t finding a manufacturer. It was finding somebody who was willing to work with me was a kind of a Goldilocks problem the big manufacturers who had the capability to do complex designs.

Like what I was asking for we’re not interested in a little business like mine and the smaller companies that would have been thrilled to have me as a customer simply just didn’t have the capabilities. So it was a matter of finding, you know, just that right manufacturer who is willing to work with me and had the ability to make what I was looking for.

Steve: Can you talk about this process though? Is it, was it just literally trial and error to find the right manufacturer or did you use any language or negotiation tactics to get them like a larger guy to work with you?

Dawn: The larger ones really wouldn’t so..

Steve: Okay.

Dawn: No, they and you know often you know, you contact A salesperson through email or through or by phone and they’re generally willing to help and they’re willing to say well I had one guy who told me you’re never going to find somebody to manufacture this in cardboard. You need to do it in paper board, which is the stuff that like game boards are made of or or cereal boxes. And I know that that doesn’t meet the cats biological needs that corrugated cardboard meets so that.

Steve: I’m sorry. Why is that actually I don’t I’m not a cat on her so I don’t know but what’s the difference between paperboard and the cardboard for a box?

Dawn: I mean a cat will probably go into a paperboard box to I mean, they will go into a paperboard box too but it doesn’t quite meet their needs. So I think I mentioned in the five minute pitch presentation that one of the key reasons that cats are so attracted to cardboard boxes and this is something that has been shown scientifically is that cats do not like to live in the temperature of that. We humans like to In the house, I mean, they like it 86 to 97 degrees in our house. None of us are keeping our house at 97 degrees. So they’re basically freezing all the time and one of the really cool things about cardboard about corrugated cardboard are those little corrugations the as you probably know are is very insulating. And so those crates create little air pockets and it makes the inside of a cardboard box very very warm a corrugated cardboard box very warm. And so that’s one of the reasons that keeps, you know, trying to find its way back into a box.

Steve: Okay, and then so you ended up finding someone small to work with you.

Dawn: It’s there. I would say they’re more of a medium sized manufacturer now the disadvantage of and they’re just if they’re great. I mean they do a great job. They’re a wonderful manufacturer, but because I am not a big customer of theirs for example, but right now I’m in the process as you are well aware of readers of Designing a new a new product. And so, you know, they sent me a prototype which is was not what I asked for and you know make my changes send them back I get stuck down to the bottom of the pile. And I got to wait till they get back to me for another iteration. So it’s just a very very long process. It can take months, especially, you know, I would love it if I just gave them my dimensions and they would just make something that shape and size with those size holes and that placement of things but they just they do things their way. They think it’s a better way of doing it and then I got to keep going through various iterations.

Steve: What’s the design process like so first of all, where did you find your designer? And what is the like how do you even design a box? Is there like CAD software for that or?

Dawn: Yeah, well, yeah, they have actually specialized software there. The Box Company actually has employees who are box Engineers. These are people who went to college and two major and packaging engineering which I did not know was a field that either right and I guess to varying degrees they’re good at the designer or the not you know, you know, not just the assembling or the creation of the box, but also the creativity behind the box and I don’t have any design background or ability at all, but I knew what I wanted it to look like. I just could see it in my mind. I just you know, maybe not that great at expressing it exactly how I wanted it. I mean even things like for the milk carton, for example, I have a for folks who are listening. I have a design that’s shaped like a traditional milk carton like a half gallon of milk the little top where the date stamp is

I mean, they couldn’t get the size of that right? I know it doesn’t seem like much but when it’s too small, it doesn’t look like a milk carton and when it’s too big, it doesn’t look like a milk carton. So I kept having to say bigger or smaller bigger smaller, whatever.

Steve: Interesting. So that’s not conveyed digitally in the file in the design file?

Dawn: They have to actually create the design file.

Steve: Got it. Okay.

Dawn: They’re actually like a creative room where they’re actually hand cutting everything to create a prototype. So they’ll create a you know, cut it all out and then I’ll say no and you know, it has to be like this. It has to be like this and so it came back to me and until I got what I thought was the right shape that would fold properly that look like I want what I wanted it to look like and that a cat would be willing to go into and then in terms of the appearance of the box. I worked with a designer that I worked with. I think I mentioned I just I did had a freelance writing and editing background. I worked on a bridal magazine for some years and this was the woman who I added the magazine and she was the designer.

Steve: I see so the process was the designer doesn’t actually design the box. It designs the design then you handed over the Box manufacturer and they turned into like this box file.

Dawn: It was actually just the opposite we started with the shape of the Box first and then she has a design to that shape. So they actually provided her with the outline of what the box would look like and then she had to go and design the design for that.

Steve: I gotcha. Gotcha. Okay in terms of like all the lettering everything they later convert her design back into the box side or they Incorporated together.

Dawn: Right. And that was extremely complex process because publication Printing and other words printing on documents is nothing like printing on a box. There are very very different. And there’s a lot of error when you’re printing on a box. So you have to create a design that allows for for the design to move at least a quarter of an inch in any direction. So it’s really so I mean, for example the cheese box, they really just wanted me to do solid yellow box. I had gone through so many versions to make the little what looks like the Swiss cheese holes. I various different three-dimensional looks but none of those met the needs of their printing press so that we ended up with something that you know that satisfies me, but we went through multiple different completely different looks for that that one that worked for me and for them.

Steve: I never would have thought manufacturing a printed box would be so complicated.

Dawn: Me neither.

Steve: So how much money did it cost you to get started with this?

Dawn: Yeah. I was actually before our conversation. I was looking back through my files. I’m not even sure what to count but I’m going to say somewhere in the order of around 14 thousand dollars that included the printing plates and the cutting dies which were at least half the price up front. That also included the manufacture of the actual boxes and you know some photography and of course the work of the designer

Steve: So interesting. So these are plates that print them. It’s not like a printer that prints on the boxes.

Dawn: Right there. There is a natural like an old-fashioned kind of plate and if you saw the cutting die, I mean you wouldn’t even know that that was going to make a box you would it’s so antiquated looking. It doesn’t even it doesn’t look like something that should be in the modern era but it’s an unusual process.

Steve: Okay. So I guess that provides you with some barriers to entry right? So now that you own this place like the plate is yours, right?

Dawn: Right.

Steve: Okay, and then no one else it’s it makes it much harder to copy this box basically.

Dawn: I think it does and I know there’s a lot of talk and there was even during the five minute pitch process about patents and so on and so forth, but there are other things that that may even be a higher barrier to entry and this this whole process. I mean you really have to be dedicated to do it and you have to have some money up front to spend on these kind of things.

Steve: Okay, and in terms of getting that first prototype and all that it was that expensive? Just working with them like digit to pay them upfront.

Dawn: No, they’re actually pretty generous about that. They wanted my insurance is that I plan to buy something which I I said, yes, of course, but and I guess they would have probably charge me for their time had I not purchased but my intention was to do it and when they got it right then I just had to pay for the printing plates and the and the kind of guys up front.

Steve: Okay, and did you start with just a single design?

Dawn: I started with you. Actually my first thought was oh I’ll do five and I’ll make it climbed all I’m like, what was I thinking I mean, I barely got to out it took me like eight months or

Steve: Oh my goodness. Okay.

Dawn: Between going back and forth and back and forth and back and forth over the sing it took forever. So yeah five was not going to happen and they weren’t going to be bundled.

Steve: All right, so you launched with to and how did you launch that? Did you start a website at first or..

Dawn: I did that was actually the first thing that I did was just start a website. I’ve actually listen to some of your free material and I understood the whole, you know, potential conflicts with Amazon and some of the problems I thought oh, well, I’ll start my own website that all you know, that eliminate all those problems. Well creates all kinds of new problems instead, but that’s what I did. So, you know..

Steve: Which platform did you choose and are you a technical person?

Dawn: I would say I’m not a technical person in the sense that I don’t have a technical background, but I’m definitely not afraid of Technology. I enjoy digging into that kind of stuff and I’m willing to learn. That being said I didn’t think it was a good use of my time to you know, do some of the open cart things that you had also talked about and I really liked the look and feel of some of the Shopify options. So I chose that to start with

Steve: Awesome. And then in terms of the design did you do it yourself or did you get a developer?

Dawn: I’m really a do it myself or kind of person all the way around I’m Frugal I like to save money. I like to see what I can do. And then later on if I have a need I will hire somebody if they can provide a service that I can’t render myself. So the design of the website so far as me and the redesign of the website or at least the front page will be me.

Steve: I actually think it looks pretty nice and I’m looking forward to seeing you redesign as well.

Dawn: As I said it was based on something that you said on your lecture and it really really struck me how it could be improved.

Steve: All right, let’s talk about sales. How did you get your first sale?

Dawn: The first sale was actually through product hunt. So I think the day I launched my website. Site actually wrote a note to somebody at product hunt and first they said thanks, but no, thanks and then immediately sent me another email back and said okay and so..

Steve: For the listeners, can you kind of describe what product Hunt is first? Right?

Dawn: It’s actually a platform for people who are interested in what’s new in mostly in technology and it’s a platform for them for for new products to get exposure to this very interested community and oddly. They also have a slight interested in cat products. I don’t understand..

Steve: I was going to say for product. I didn’t think that your product was a fit. Right?

Dawn: Right and I would say generally know and if it was a dog product it probably would have been a no but oddly they just seem to have some some cat products on there. So that’s sort of struck me and I did find one of the product Hunters who had actually promoted a cat product before I reached out to her directly and So eventually she did hunt the product for me and which means that it got up on their platform and I got some, you know views it didn’t didn’t explode on that platform like some technology products do but I got my first couple of I don’t remember how many was maybe one or two or three? And that was it sales from for product type

Steve: I’ve actually never used product type before so what is the process like of getting on there? And what is the actual listing look like I voted before but I don’t think I’ve ever tried to list anything on there before

Dawn: Right. Well what you see is what it is. So getting onto products, I guess they say that you have just as much chance hunting the product yourself in other words just you know, sort of applying and getting on there. But the backstory or what I’ve read is that it actually pays to have an experienced product Hunter another words somebody who already has a relationship with product hunt and they have a history of promoting successful products and they’re kind of ranked on proud. You can find the ranking of these hunters and maybe there’s you know, there’s a top hundred or so and the hunter that I ended up using was in the top hundred. So for me, I thought it was important to reach out to somebody who had Variants and interest in pet related products.

And the person that I chose so they actually post it for you and they have their own set of followers and that the idea is that you have an established audience already eyeballs that are already on a product looking for what this product Hunter is posting.

Steve: How did you convince this woman to to do that for you?

Dawn: My, I think my writing history does help. I’m good at writing convincing letters with the right tone and the right length. I mean the right there, you know, just..

Steve: I mean, what did you say? I’m just kind of curious if you remember

Dawn: I wrote something a little bit clever something about you know, however many YouTube videos can’t be wrong castle of boxes. There’s like a million YouTube videos about cats and boxes and then just wrote something that was just warm and and hopefully a little bit clever and it caught her attention. And as I said, I think she said no first and then immediately wrote me another note said I changed my mind. Yeah..

Steve: She’s a cat person?

Dawn: She has hunted other pet products. I did not end up establishing a personal relationship with her where I found out whether she indeed is a a pet or a cat owner, but she has hunted other pet products before and I thought that was important because that meant that her audience was interested in pet products.

Steve: And how did you find her in the first place? Is there like a list of the top 100?

Dawn: Yeah, there’s a list of so it’s just her name and she has an unusual name and I just you know kind of did a Google Search and she’s actually in the UK and she has a Consulting business there and I was able to track her down through her either through her LinkedIn page or through a contact form on her on her web page.

Steve: If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, you’re going to need a trademark to protect your intellectual property. Not only that but a trademark is absolutely necessary to register your brand on Amazon. Now, I used to think that any old trademark registration service would work and that could even try to register my own trademark by myself on the cheap, but I was dead wrong. Securing a trademark without a strategy in place usually results in either an outright rejection or a worthless unenforceable trademark. Now, that is why I work with Stephen Wagner and his team from Emerge counsel. They have a package service called total TM, which provides the same attention to detail and process that large law firms do at a fraction of the price. Now for me personally, I like Emerge counsel because of their philosophy, their goal is to maximize IP protection while minimizing the price. So before you decide to register a trademark by yourself or file for other I could protection such as a copyright or a patent, check out Emerge counsel first and get a free consult. For more information go to emergecounsel.com and click on the Amazon sellers button and tell Steve that Steve sent you to receive a $100 discount on the total TM package for Amazon sellers. Once again, that’s emergecounsel.com over at emergecounsel.com. Now back to the show.

And so you get your first couple sales on product hunt. How did you get all the Press?

Dawn: I have a writing background.

Steve: Okay.

Dawn: I just..

Steve: That comes in real Handy. Apparently.

Dawn: Yeah. I’m glad I have at least one or two skills that I can apply not that’s it. That’s where it ends. By the way. I’ve no desire. No marketing skills. I have no I’ve never sold the thing in my life, Girl Scout cookies, that was probably the last thing I want so right so I’m I know how to write a press release and the traditional media. It’s a little bit about, you know, darts on the dartboard, you know, send out a whole bunch of them and maybe you’re lucky to get one or two people to respond to you and and the thing about also knowing about how to write a press release is that I know what Looking for and so I know what to write in my letter.

Steve: So can you talk about this process? So by pressure release you don’t mean like using like PR web or one of those services. Do you?

Dawn: No, no. You can either write a press release and then sends it along with a personal letter to an editor that you’re targeting. The first thing to do is to decide who you’re going to Target don’t go for the Wall Street Journal first,

Steve: Boston Globe is pretty big

Dawn: Right but I’m a Boston residents. So I went through the the Metro West Section, which is where I live. So I live in the little bit West of Boston and so they’re always looking at the bottom line is journals are always looking to fill a newspaper. They got a lot of newspapers and I gotta fill them. So what you want to do is you got a busy journalist who doesn’t have a ton of time to do a lot of research. So if you can provide everything that they need in your letter for an article links to your actual photographs links to you know to your website all the who, what, when, where, and how of your business in the letter you’re saving them. Kind of work and they might be inclined to publish just for that reason and if they have an interest in your topic in this particular case getting through the Boston Globe door through the Metro West Section door is a great way to get into the Boston Globe because they’re interested in more local business news. So.

Steve: So a couple things I just want to ask you about. So how did you get ahold of the editor or the contact information? And then what’s in this letter exactly just in case someone who’s listening wants to try to do this method.

Dawn: Right, So actually they make it really easy to find their contact information because they want you to contact them. So usually there’s a byline or something like that at the end of the similar article. So look for somebody who’s written an article like one you’d like to be written about your business. So that’s the other thing too. The story has to have a hook. So in my case was really important to do it at the beginning for this particular section of the newspaper for this particular Editor to, so the hook was I just opened this new business. I think I sent it to So it was Saunders and she may have sent it to you. Like I got a little blurb about five minute pitch in one of my other local papers.

Steve: Nice.

Dawn: Same thing, because five minute pitch was you know, that’s that’s an event. That’s a hook. So you have to have a hook. So if you’re you have some news about your business, you have a new product you started a new business and it depends on what your particular local media outlet is is looking for and keep read it and and see what they’re looking for. Then it’s easy enough to identify who writes those stories and usually the newspaper website has all those all the contact information right up there and they’re looking for your email send them an email that contains everything that they need for a story. Wite it clearly make it so

Steve: So what is everything they need for story. They need the story. They need photos. What else?

Dawn: it’s always the who was, that’s that’s a journalist thing. Who, what, when, where, why, and how so whatever your story is try and answer those questions completely for them. Give them every single thing that they would need. Look at a similar story. What’s there? Well, it’s located in such-and-such town. You know, the business does X Y & Z. This is why it’s Unique provide them with great photographs. And in fact, I think I provided a beautiful high color, full color, high quality photos and that section of paper was color that day and I think it was because of my photos. So I got really really beautiful photos in it and I provided that to them and they didn’t have to go doing the work of digging around for it. Provide them with quotes in your note. You can say, you know, whatever whatever you want to say. They published my quotes exactly as I put them in my letters.

So think about what you want to convey about your business first and foremost have write it clearly, right it succinctly and then provide that also in the letter. So you’re almost writing the story for them and it saves them a lot of work and they may be inclined to publish just because they have space to fill and you’ve provided them with everything that they need.

Steve: This sounds like a pretty long email.

Dawn: You know if you looked at my articles on actually can click on them through my website. They’re not that long. I mean newspaper articles aren’t that long? Okay. So we’re doing a big huge feature splashed way that would be different and and they may be interviewing other people and so on and so forth for this there, you know, pretty short little blurbs.

Steve: Okay

Dawn: A couple had you know sections of a column.

Steve: and once you get in one of these Publications do they lead to sales was my next question.

Dawn: They did actually so the Boston Globe is actually I’m sorry. That was it was another local paper called the Metro West Daily News, which is the really big local paper around here and they have a lot of small little Publications that have different names but they feed all the information into these small Publications that actually gave my that actually had a lot longer shelf life than the Boston Globe even though the Boston Globe had has a bigger readership the small local paper is really what everybody reads and because they have all these little additional papers under different names, but with the same content, I got to go out into all these different communities. So my Story had a lot more longevity that way and I actually got more sales trickling in overtime through the smaller paper than I did through the you know, the one day Splash from the Boston Globe.

And the Boston Globe thing, basically that got all my friends to call me and say hey I saw you in the Boston Globe really led to more sales was my little what MetroWest Daily News are big local paper which has, you know, feeds these smaller papers.

Steve: So interesting going forward. Are you now targeting some of the smaller publications then?

Dawn: I need to have a hook. So the five minute pitch was one had I won I would have probably done more with that

Steve: I see.

Dawn: But it’s in the interim maybe when I release a new product or if you know something else, you know different happens, then I’ll have the hook and I’ll be able to go back to the to the media outlets and do it. But right now there’s nothing to say yet.

Steve: I see okay interesting. It’s interesting how that works. So what else has worked for you in terms of marketing your products.

Dawn: Hmm

Steve: Had Instagram had an effect?

Dawn: I’m getting visitors from Instagram and I have definitely had some sales Instagram and I’ve only recently sort of started to crack the nut about Pinterest to and I notice Shopify has a lot of statistics and data that come through which is really helpful about where people are coming from. And so I can see now that now that I’ve sort of started to figure it out that more people are coming from Pinterest now, too. So, yeah, the problem is also one of the advantages of sap of eyes you could see where people are and because Instagram and Pinterest is a worldwide audience and right now I really can’t ship worldwide. I can see, “h that person’s looking at me from Africa. They’re looking at me from the UK and I really just can’t I can’t ship there. So even though I’m driving traffic to my website from these social media outlets, they’re not necessarily driving sales.

Steve: Okay, actually for people who haven’t watched your episode. What are some of the struggles that you have actually?

Dawn: Right. So I big struggle the one that I’m addressing now is that my products are while they’re light. They are far too large to ship efficiently. So and so shipping is ridiculously expensive even in the US but prohibitive shipping internationally and I have a lot of anecdotal demand in other words people reaching out to me personally through direct Messenger on Instagram and so forth. Could you ship this to me tonight? I’m in such country and I have to say no you’ll have to wait for the you know, the next product project. I mean it costs about 60 bucks to ship it to the UK, which is really outrageous. So that’s so the size is prohibitive from the point of view of shipping and it’s also prohibited from the point of view of being able to get retail space and really I can’t do FBA on Amazon. So..

Steve: Okay. So actually how much do you charge for a box and how much does it cost you?

Dawn: Right. So I charge $29.99 right now and that includes free shipping in the US and the shipping cost anywhere between seven and sixteen dollars per box to ship depending on how many zones I’m shipping a And then that’s another negative thing. Also. I wanted to mention about shipping out. I’ll finish your answer your question a minute.

Steve: Sure.

Dawn: But I can only ship to to the further zones through parcel select shipping which is an utter disaster and it’s not something I want to subject my future customers to so in order to. So Priority Mail. I need to get the box onto a certain size. So back to the the margin question the boxes cost. What did I say..

Steve: 99 oh, it’s cost you by 16?

Dawn: right. And so the shipping boxes themselves costs a dollar fifty to two dollars and then to make the boxes I think. Oh, I can’t remember the exact number but something around between 4.50 and five and a quarter. I can remember the exact amount but somewhere around there and it was 90 cents or something for the velcro that’s on them.

Steve: Right? So just curious how price-sensitive these cat lovers are. Like I know pet lovers are willing to spend lots of money for for products that will make their pets happy. I’m just curious how you arrived at $29.99 ?

Dawn: Really it was add up all of the costs and add a little of profit and let’s see if people buy it. And I do think I think I have had comments from people who are not pet owners I about the price of the boxes and I’m not sure if that’s a factor or it isn’t and I won’t know unless I’m able to get the price down a little bit.

Steve: You know, what’s funny is we have international customers and the ones in Australia seem to be willing to pay egregious shipping prices often times much more than the product itself. I think they’re just used to it. I guess..

Dawn: I’m part and I’m not sure if you’ve ever visited Australia, but their minimum wage is about twenty six dollars an hour there. I took that she was a barista at McDonald’s believe it or not loved her job as a true professional and she said twenty six dollars an hour to work in McDonald’s and you know, she can afford a house and a family and all I minimum wage in Australia. So I think that’s how come they can afford to have something shipped to them from the US.

Steve: Interesting, I did not know that

Dawn: me neither until I visited.

Steve: so okay. What were some of your other struggles and what are you struggling with right now? What’s going to happen going forward? Like what are your plans?

Dawn: Well my initial plan. So the very very near term would be to get some additional box designs. I think I don’t have enough to call it really a storefront. It’s really almost it’s almost a one product business, but it it’s a to product business and it’s I don’t think there’s enough choices for different people. So so my first challenge is I’ve got to redesign the Box in a way that it fits in to certain Dimensions that will allow me to ship not only nine zones in the US By Priority Mail at a reasonable price, but also to you know, especially to Europe and maybe even Japan and elsewhere where people are really cat crazy. So right now, I’m in the process of Designing. I think I shared with you at five minute pitch my new design and I’m working with the Box the packaging engineer at this moment to create a design that will be collapsible or packable nice within certain dimensions and within a certain weight.

Steve: Cool, I remember you telling me you actually shipped one of your boxes to Japan, right?

Dawn: I didn’t actually there was a customer that wanted one so badly and I told him it’s just too expensive to ship to Japan. He actually went and used a buyer’s agent someone who purchased from me in the US and shipped it to him. I think I know who it was. So I he was Japanese as well and his job is to do these kind of unusual things. And so this particular guy, he just owns a couple cats in Japan and he posts pictures all the time of my product. He really, you know, his cats really loved it and he really loves it.

Steve: Okay. Yeah. So clearly that guy would have been willing to pay lots of money to ship it. I would guess?

Dawn: he would be yes. I’m not sure how you know if he’s unusual or not.

Steve: So what are some other marketing methods that you’ve tried or in the process of implementing actually?

Dawn: Well in anticipation of offering a new product I am trying to just see if I can get one of my boxes up on Amazon. It’s there now. I gotta watch some more of your videos, Steve. I’m not doing something right. So I searched for it. I can’t find it. That being said I sold a couple through Amazon and one person bought one through Amazon and then went and bought three or four more through my website after that.

Steve: nice.

Dawn: So I don’t know somehow somebody else found it. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong either in my search or the creation of my listing. So it’s a work in progress, but it but it because I’m really not going to make a profit selling on Amazon. That’s not a priority for me at the moment. It’s just something I’m going to fiddle with as I go along in anticipation of being able to put this other product on Amazon.

Steve: Gotcha. Gotcha. So looking back with your business. Do you have any advice for the listeners who are kind of on the sidelines? Just thinking about starting their own.

Dawn: I would say well first of all, I would say take your course. I’m truly I’m not and I’m not just plug in next. I’m talking to her really I wish now and I said to you at the beginning of this that I’m really really frugal. And I want to see if I can do things myself and you do offer a lot of free materials which are helpful, but not the whole story. So I highly recommend if you have the money to invest in your class to truly start that from the beginning. So maybe you don’t make some of the mistakes that I made right from the beginning like in terms of having a product. That’s too large. That’s something I may have learned a little sooner from you if I’d started it and you know done the process in the right order here, but I would say the other thing is that I know that you devote a lot of your course to choosing the right Niche on the right product and I would say maybe you disagree with me.

It’s not so much about the product. It’s about the implementation and what you learn the starting a business like this is that’s what stays with you if the particular product that you’re trying to sell doesn’t work out that doesn’t matter because the bigger part is all the other stuff that you learn and you could apply that to anything so I would say just jump in and give it a try and don’t blow the bank on the first thing that you try and do I think there was somebody on Five Minute Pitch who had said something about starting with an $80,000 mold for his product?

Steve: Oh yeah yeah

Dawn: And that’s that was one of my criteria right from the beginning one of the reasons I chose cardboard because I have all these crazy ideas about things. Well, it’s got to be cheap. I can’t you know, first order of business is not to bankrupt the family.

Steve: Yeah.

Dawn: So don’t bankrupt or family, but just jump in and give it a try and everything that you learn can apply to something else. If in fact the one thing doesn’t work out.

Steve: Yeah, I would actually agree with everything you said I think one of the problems with when people just get started and they have no idea how to get started, sometimes on Amazon you can get away with just a good product right? Because Amazon is not really good from a branding perspective. And then once you get that confidence that you can get some sales and then you start your own website, then you know, it’s all about implementation marketing and that sort of thing and in fact, you know, I think I revealed this at seller Summit. I started an e-commerce store with my kids selling T-shirts. T-shirts completely saturated. It’s going to be all about marketing. So if you know what you’re doing on that front, you’re right the product Almost Doesn’t Matter. Long as you’re really good at getting the word out about your business. And as long as you have some sort of hook and some sort of story to get people to buy.

So Dawn, Thanks a lot for coming on. I really appreciate you being a contestant. I’m really glad we connected through the contest. I’m glad to have met you in person at seller Summit and I thought you’ve just done a great job and I wish you all the best with your business.

Dawn: Oh, thank you so much and thank you for saying that was a complete pleasure talking to you today.

Steve: Oh and on forgot if anyone wants to see your boxes, I where can I find you online?

Dawn: Oh, they can look at the cat is in the Box.com.

Steve: Okay, so The Cat Is In The Box and then everything related to purchasing and all that information is on that site.

Dawn: Absolutely

Steve: Cool. So if you’re a cat lover, I’ve actually seen her products in person. I’m not a cat lover, but just the design of the boxes. I thought was very impressive.

Dawn: Well, thanks for saying that to that’s that’s very nice to hear.

Steve: All right. Well, thanks a lot for coming The Showdown really appreciate your time.

Dawn: Thank you very much.

Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now, If you cut Dawn’s Five Minute Pitch finals presentation, you know that she’s a hard worker and I have no doubt that her business is going to totally blow up. For more information about this episode go to mywifequitherjob.com/episode272.

And once again, I want to thank Klaviyo. Klaviyo 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 or win back campaign. Basically, all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitherjob.com/klaviyo. Once again, That’s mywifequitherjob.com/klaviyo.

Oh, I also want to thank Privy for sponsoring this episode. Privy is the email capture provider that I personally use the term visitors into email subscribers. They offer email capture exit intent and site targeting tools to make it super simple as well. And I like Privy because it is so powerful and you can basically trigger custom pop-ups for any parameter that is closely tied your eCommerce store. Now, if you want to give it a try it is free so head on over to privy.com/steve. Once again, that’s P-R-I-V-Y.com/steve.

Now I talked about how I use these tools in my blog and if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store heading over to mywifequitherjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini-course just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com