This guy built a $1B+ brand in 3 years. The product? You'd never guess

zero two over a billion dollars and thirty two months it's man we're quite literally than just getting started where do you think is that gap to really jump from average or good if you wanna have the greatest thoughts of success it's by creating a new format new formats win you obviously spotted one really great opportunity i'm curious what other opportunity spot i think there's an idea that no one else is gonna be able to run out the a ten billion dollar business idea but you should just say it now and we'll bleep it out well we'll talk about that i think that's the biggest opportunity for what are the inputs necessary to get to a hundred million dollars in revenue for brand in three years here here's all say i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to from at all in in like a days off on a try here's here's three things i love for you to deliver one i wanna know the origin story like how the hell you have the idea and why did you have the confidence in the idea we're gonna go there two is you sent us a thing about your marketing funnel which like you know what does world class marketing look like in this scenario and then the last part i wanna r with you brainstorm on like where two from here you obviously spotted one really great opportunity i'm curious what other opportunity you spot yeah that's dead okay sweet dude i've been i've been taking groom for i don't know six six to twelve months now because it's like it's basically like eating candy it's like you open up a pack of gummy bears and then you eat them and then you're like i just had vegetables don't i hate gummy bears but i i think i just had vegetables maybe totally and so i wanted know where were you when you were like you know what what if we did this yeah so i'd like to describe myself as a entrepreneur who had short stint and private equity and investment banking so i've i've started three companies this is my third company and i actually didn't want to start a company i was on my way from boston at a private equity firm called summit partners and was leaving that investment firm to go get my nba stanford and i told myself look i just wanna have like a normal nba experience for two years i'm not gonna start anything maybe i'll do an internship in the summer and then it was like two weeks before going out to stanford at my parents place in in utah and just doing some work and i'm drinking a greens powder in my dad's office and i just remember looking up like super vividly in the in the corner of the room being like there's no way on keeping this habit past thirty days like i'll i'll do it because i always finished when i started but like i'm not gonna stick to this habit post thirty days and it wasn't just the taste for me it was like you know you got that weird like frothy sediment at the bottom of the drink and the biggest thing for me that i think this is probably unique is i i remember staring at the bottle sitting on the countertop on like the drying rack and i remember being and i'm sort of a person i remember just me like if i commit to this habit i've got like stare at that bottle on the countertop for the rest of my life right like there's there's just no way that's gonna happen and so that i got me thinking about hey how do i take a a comprehensive supplement nutrition and put it in some format i didn't know it gummy me at the time when i had the idea how do i put it in some format that gets people looking forward to it like they'll go to bed at night being like i can't wait to have that the next day when which is a complete pivot that i think to how people sort of think about supplementation to be like roll it into a blunt now yeah exactly look hey those smoke your greens well we'll talk about that i think i honestly think that's the biggest opportunity for founders like people just wanna rip on the formats that work but i i think if you wanna have the greatest odds of success if by creating a new format right so if if it's a blunt awesome if it's these little zen pouches that people are doing now and making those like focus so it's not nicotine great like new formats win did you think that i mean just it's it's man thirty two months to or a billion dollar extra it's man did you call your shot and you're like that's where we're gonna go or were you like who knows i mean what where was your mindset when you started it this is a bit shocking to hear but we've basically met the forecast that we put in place since the very beginning you have to appreciate i was i talked with like thousands of entrepreneurs when i was at summit at partners i i looked at the proprietary data sets i don't have them obviously anymore but i have very visual memory so i know the lt tv the cats of hundreds of brands into like for me it hits weird like i i could tell you i won't but i could tell you what like every big brands lt c and margin looks like all the brands that we know of today now i didn't really forecast beyond a hundred billion of revenue because that would be pretty pointless like i'm not soc that yeah there's a fine line between ambition and being just absolutely batch it so you're you're sitting that now i wanna ask you something about in between when you're like oh like i don't really enjoy this form factor what if there was another and you said you didn't have gum you know right away as like a not like you immediately had the fully baked idea but i'm curious like what were the either companies or products you had like admired because i sort of have this this thing which is like what you admire becomes a little bit of your destiny right your your your ad admiration becomes your destination and if you think about like a lot of a great great entrepreneur or steve jobs famously who did he admire what products admire and then you steal little elements of that they sort of bleed out into your final products years later anything with comedian and movie makers what were the products and companies that you thought were kick ass that you feel like inspired some of the result of g yeah look i i sat on the border observed the boards of great brands like rug doctor swatch brooklyn chu solo of puma twelve different businesses and so i learned a lot from the unique problems and frankly the recipes that worked for each of them i would say that the brand that i think we most closely resemble in terms of execution is doctor swatch is that deodorant it's the the cold process soaps so the bar soaps that for men i've seen like the marketing but i i think i have the deodorant but i i don't know what's the what's so special about it like is this something cool about it so what's cool about it is so they just sold the unilever like last year for one point five billion and in that business what's cool about it is one cold process up is more natural i would say so it's you're not getting all the chemicals and stuff in and it's a very clean product but because the branding the approach the partnerships they do i mean they've done partnerships with like harry potter star wars sponge bob all sorts of really cool like fun partnerships they've taken an approach where you as a consumer relate to the brand right it's so prior to doctor sq i don't even know what i was using probably using what i whatever my wife was buying and stocking in the the shower but but they were the inspiration for us i think that what they've done within the personal care space making it a joy for the consumer is what we aspire to do within in supplementation where i mean we all spend time on social media you get one at it it's like oh my goodness sean stan i don't know how old you guys are but you're blank years old and you've never heard of cr what the hell are you doing with your life like you're gonna die tomorrow and then you get a c what are you dealing with your life like you need to be taking cluster right now it does a blank percent increase in blake body metric and i and i i just think that on the way that we have approached and took inspiration from doctor swatch is to take that and make our supplementation a lifestyle something that people look forward to they feel like it resonates with who they are and and how they live their lives alright let's take a quick break this podcast is called my first million and it's probably the question we get asked the how do i go from zero to making my first million and so i did an episode little while back where i broke down exactly this sort of philosophy and frameworks that i would use so things like finding your white belt business or identifying your bear on the uni cycle advantage the core way that your two skills could overlap or why maybe starting a service business is better than starting a software business for your initial businesses to make that first million and so the team at helps hubspot has created a guide that took the stuff said in that episode they laid it all out for you you can get it for free in the description below just click that link and it's all yours alright back to the steps how much money did you raise to your first million in revenue and how fast did it come yeah month one and we did like thirty thousand of revenue a month two is already like two hundred thirty thousand so i guess we like in month two a month into the business we had already crossed the the one million run rate probably two and half three million at that point i i've never really looked at the business that way you maybe you've heard me talk about lt tv to c yeah but i i would say we burned we probably burned through like eight billion dollars of capital until we reach profitability that could have been less if we slowed down growth a little bit but just the way it worked out is we i think we've earned through about eight million dollars of primary capital before we hit profitability you you mentioned like focusing on lt tv to c for you what's good and what's great yeah i i think table stakes for businesses that need to be acquired you need to be at least three the best i saw well obviously this goes where we're at but during the covid era i would see brands in the four to five range you know those brands are probably two and a half to three times right now but what do you say lt tv are you referring to so l lt tv like lifetime value is for for a e com brand does value mean your contribution margin yeah let me describe that the way that i was looking it i use a three year period so thirty six months and lt tv is fully burdened gross profit meaning sam orders our product what is the what are the total costs stripped out of that value to get it to sam store so you've got product cogs you've got discounts returns you've got fulfillment shipping mint merchant processing fees like you've got all of that that gets it to the door that's your lifetime value over a three year period how much contribution gross property are you getting from the consumer over a three year period and you use three three years not because that's how long someone subscribe to groom you just said three years for everyone should use three years you can't do a lifetime yeah i think it i think it's like just a productive way of looking at it to optimize against i mean we obviously look at three months six months twelve months and try to make adjustments based on that but yeah i mean we've got consumers who are you know we're thirty two months old so we'd we haven't to hit that thirty six month mark but like there's very clearly going to be consumers who are around purchasing and into i guess quote perpetuity and you picked a name that if you had told me i would've have been like hey brother do you wanna win or are you gonna put a oo over one of the letters and nobody knows how to say and then you won i'm an idiot what the what what's the what gives so what i always say here is in sam botched ruins that the start said grunt which is totally fine what i tell people is what i tell people is i do not care how you pronounce our name as long as you're buying so like you can call it grand if you want you can call it g which is cracked it's grim but but did did you think it was a good name and you knew something none of us do or did you just not care about the name and how the hell you arrive at that name yeah so the word groom with an s i guess i can show you here with an s at the end actually doesn't mean anything in the german language the word gluten means green in german but when you throw an s on it there's actually no meaning to it and so when i threw an s on it it it just seemed to be like kind of fun and playful you've got this like natural smiley face it felt like something that we could brand over time really well and it's it's simple but you're right like it it at least in america very uniquely in america like seventy percent of consumers don't know how to pronounce it that'd be like your argument to the team like no guys it makes us ton of sense now it it may not make sense at america but like yeah do you know that's fine sean we had or we had this guy david on who runs a company called lexicon and his whole job is naming companies he's named sw for breeze son blackberry sean what do you think david would say about that name well it's hard to know right because he's got this little ai computer brain where he's like yes no and it's almost like a describing the taste of a wine and then you just have to nod along like an idiot be like yeah i i i sense the notes that you're talking about there i thought notes are for music but i definitely sense it and so you know i think it's hard to know but i would have guessed low right you're talking about like doesn't make much sense in america the market we're going after but you did it anyways what was runner up name or you know in the brainstorming process sometimes you start with like here's over we're definitely not gonna call it because it kinda guides you away from maybe some typical areas honestly like i hit it pretty quick so i guess i i didn't mention this i i served i grew up mormon so i served it to your mission in germany so switzerland in little austria so like i am fluent in german it's so when when i had the thought pretty like assignment yeah totally right it's literally called the alpine german speaking mission said yeah like you know someone else could have been assigned to like you know redding california or yeah totally that wouldn't would be too bad that wouldn't be too bad there's worse alright so you have the ideas how long did it take you to go from idea in your head to i know what the product is gonna be and i have my first batch and then i go for sale like what was that timeline like yeah so coming up with gum took about a day i i grew up you're gonna think it's crazy you know there's like big like i guess they call them like single day servings of sour patch watermelon yeah slices yeah yeah i would eat those gum one of those every day in college like a full four hundred fifty calories every day i've always been a gummy feed and so now i get to obviously have like a productive health gummy every single day and there's a ton of them that we sell i have a ton of ideas always circulating in my head and this notion doc i have and typically i sit on those ideas for about a year this one i was like it's so obvious i gotta do this i'm the right person to do it and so i started working on it immediately getting it to launch not to answer the question there i immediately like within a week of having the gum sort of connection said okay why hasn't somebody done this in gummy form right like you've got a ton of gum why hasn't somebody put comprehensive nutrition in a gummy and the big aha moment for me was the entire gummy industry is built around these sixty or thirty count bottles transparent bottles with a cap on the top that that is his gummy exists so i asked the question what what would need to change what would it need to look like to have gummy b comprehensive nutrition and then that's when i went down the path of like okay if it's a you know a pack how big the pack how many gum are at it what's the flavor of the gummy right what's the total important sam sam you've never taken the product right no i'm gonna buy it now though so the the way it works is the the is a good point you just brought up which is you don't like when we say it's a gummy you think it's a it's a gummy no a single serving you eat eight of these things so it's literally like having a pack hour badge kids which i think was you know seems fine whatever it but that's actually pretty non obvious and if i'm reading between the lines of our from understanding what you're saying you're saying one of the reasons nobody had done the comprehensive gummy was because the gum would need to be like you know four inches large to contain everything but what if we made it what if we made it where it's not a gummy a day it's a pack of eight we we exactly package them as little pouches of eight and that's how that's how we can do this when other people may not have tried to do this yeah yeah it's it's our packs are it's about a we go off of gram weight which is about twenty grams and some grams are smaller bigger than others but yeah it's a it's a full every gummy is identical in terms of nutrition it's sort of the total of the age in this case that make up the full desk i just think that it's insane that i asked you a question that i thought was gonna be ridiculous about like you pointing like babe ruth and saying like you know we're gonna get to this and you're like yes that was part of the plan i mean it's pretty audacious to say i'm gonna get to a hundred million in revenue in less than three years for the people listening what are the inputs necessary to get to a hundred million in revenue for an eco com brand in three years so it it doesn't have to be consumables i think everybody points at consumables these days and they're like gosh several it it's like it's a better business it's not necessarily a better business because if you're selling a a hard good like beds sheets or furniture your margins are gonna be worse it's gonna be more difficult to share like there's a lot of things in there but you theoretically make money on day one in supplements you don't you gotta make that money on the retention like that's a new lever you gotta pull to make the business work so to answer it directly sam i think first and foremost you've gotta have a good product and good product doesn't mean like make a better version of cringe like that's not gonna work for people what's gonna work is finding that product category that white space good product equals new white space so you've seen i'm i'm sure you guys have seen these like nicotine pouches that whip and like old of the world like i and and en energy it's basically looks like it's in but it's not tobacco or nicotine it's energy yeah it's like like caffeine and other things that like the nicotine pouches amazing not because i'm a believer in the product but amazing because now you're taking a new format the form factor that doesn't have competitors and so i think anybody looking at it and be like i'm gonna do it too like you might find a little bit of success but you're not gonna sell your business or you're not gonna be the winner here go find a new product format s guy i came out with these little lip who also by seen that that's created new oh you've got like do you know the product dose it's like the liver health product it's like these little shot classes it's like it's like a concentrated liquid that's another one i i wouldn't like a concentrated liquid of what literally like their supplement is a concentrated liquid for the liver so look up i think it's daily dose dot c is the website that's another product that has like a unique format another one for you you guys know mary ruth organics or row nutrition are h o u so those are like i'm not sure if we lip us but they're like liquid vitamins right like their approach is where the liquid vitamins i'm shocked there's no not more competition doing that like these are big businesses every single one of the ones i just mentioned is a big business doing really well so the framework of this is taking a thing that everyone knows or or many people know and just slightly changing the form the the the way you consume but everything that you've named so far has been a consumable correct because that's the space that i'm like most familiar with and people typically are looking at right now but like it would be the same thing like do you know how big cozy the earth is their whole thing was bamboo sheets right and and i don't if you ask me i'm sure other businesses sell bamboo sheets but like that's their thing and and like they're a big business as well and so i get i could give you examples across all sorts of categories obviously supplementation is the easiest for people to visualize wow so the step one you're saying is good product but let's say that less generically what you're saying is the right product and the right product is a category that's not already super saturated and you either either you take an existing category you change the warm factor to make it new or you find a new pain point new problem new supplement new whatever and you're gonna do it you you need some point of key differentiation yeah vitamins but your liquid your sheets but your bamboo yeah your you know your greens but your gum and you find that key point of differentiation which gives you new category alright that's step one exactly to be clear a couple that i've just seen recently and then i'll tell you the step two i've seen jelly beads is a form factor i've seen lollipop pops right like people are it do i think that those businesses are gonna be huge probably not like it's a little bit niche but like they're probably gonna be more successful than somebody making a gummy like us hey stupid good question yeah you started this by saying sour patch kids yeah how come know the gum are sour this the only one doesn't need to be like it's sour vitamins t tv tv we've we might we've might give you something like that on i'm a sour phoenix as well and i'm gonna hit that don't worry sometimes i wanna start the business and then sometimes i realize oh i know i'm just hungry and i just wanna eat that thing and i don't need to start and that this might be the category or maybe i'm just hungry wait you actually said something interesting you said it's too niche is there a what's your to get you to a hundred million dollars in revenue is there okay so you said take the form factor and then the second or i don't know if it's a second name but there there is a tam related thing here is there like a a threshold where you're like this has legs look like i'm i'm i'm a bit psycho right like all i've seen around me is business is getting to hundreds of millions of revenue quickly so like my gauge for successes in in the business i started the first business i started i literally sunset six months in who's in a hundred thousand of revenue and ninety percent eb margins and i sunset it because i said this isn't big enough like this is it but that's how i'm wired right like if somebody wanted to get to a five million dollar cash flow business and run that like that's that's massive success so i'm i'm not gonna like deter people from but i wanna know your yeah your threshold yeah my threshold well i mean my my sites are even bigger now right like i'm still working on g and new trucks and juice and these products you see behind me have more than just greens know happy to talk about that but i i mean at this point i'm looking only at stuff they can be one ten billion dollar outcomes somewhere around there you know that feeling when strategy is done the brief is written and everyone is aligned and you realize someone still has a sit down and actually create the content that someone is you and it's due tomorrow breeze assistant can help it works right inside of hubspot drafting campaign copy blog posts emails all in your brand voice all grounded in your actual customer data so don't just create content you create content that converts check out hubspot dot com the agent customer platform for growing businesses so let's let's keep going in your formula what's what's do we do step two or number two and this is the end of it is lt to c so if your if your business has an lt to c of three times plus you are golden anytime people talk about profitability anytime people talk about i'm not sure if you're familiar with that it's like marketing efficiency ratio i the way that you think about it is like if you're he's spent twenty percent of your marketing of your revenue on marketing then the inverse of that is a five right so one divided all you're saying is i want a machine where i can buy a customer for a dollar and i know that in thirty six months that customer will pay me back three dollars and stand to dump as much dollars i can into the front of that funnel as long as that's possible and i'd say the key here is most people i i don't know maybe maybe i'm just wrong but i think a lot of people think lifetime revenue they the lifetime value as just revenue and what you're saying importantly here is it's the you know total fully loaded gross profit so to get to three you're probably actually doing six dollars of revenue on that customer close to it five five to six to get three bucks of gross profit off that that correct whatever your margin is but yeah that's correct you've gotta do but if you hit that three times fully burdened gross profit lt tv divided by your c and that equals three or more you've got a business how did you know that groom was gonna be one to three i didn't i've i've seen enough to know how it might play out but we we came out with a c everybody in our company since day one knew one our c ceiling was that would result in a three times or greater lt the c can you say what the number is or no what when i first started i mean i can't really tell you but what i'll tell you is it's 2x x higher today than it was on day one of launching the business why it's not because we magically got better old lt tv it's because i set the c solo low to ensure that we'd be able to hit it so what does that mean then your ads need to be extra catchy in order to make extra catchy ads you need like a super good offer or a super good story or a super like you know of it it's kind of all of it and that that's where like i think this gets so difficult as people are like you know sometimes i see the shadow figures that are running these drop shipping companies and they're like her ads are bad like they're not even good they're so like non creative and that's because we're like a reputable company that doesn't say we can cure cancer you do these things that some of these shadow figures you like that's not creative that's just actually like bad to do as a human but like to answer your question like it's not just like creating good to get ads you gotta have the good offer you've gotta have the good retention you gotta have a good product right have have our product that people actually wanna take on like our amazon lt tv to c is phenomenal like in and that's on a platform where we're not advertising the way that you do on meta we're not like we you don't have your subscription portal in a certain way it's like a one click cancel button and and that's like leagues beyond what i've seen with other brands in terms of amazon economics d is one of these funny spaces like i i think i dm you i i read our d sean from like what's was called it would it would have been like in twenty twenty three like three months into the business you're asking about the landing page yes so three months of the business i was i think i sent you a compliment i was like hey i think your landing page is really great yeah i guess the interesting thing is you were really you quiet right because there's this weird paradox and i would call it the drop shippers paradox which is the sort of the louder somebody tends to be about their e commerce success i sort of in and i sort of proportionally increased my skepticism and i feel like you were very quiet and you built a killer business and then now once you've kind of like you know reach a big exit amounts of top sure you could talk a little bit more about it you're doing a little bit a one more time what do you think about that what do you see when you look at it at the landscape of like people who are are quite vocal quite loud on on d twitter in other places you know i i wanna i have sympathy for how others run their business and so i will say is like i've had chats with some of these people who are louder who are running you know these businesses that they their little shadow businesses is like you don't know what their business is but doing a hundred million of revenue or whatever and i what i've come to realize is some of these people just don't know yet that what they're doing is inappropriate right that the ads they're ronnie is per are inappropriate they don't really understand the consequences they're you know they're fist up and their friends about the lamborghini they just bought and and so what i would say there is like i think it's less about how loud people are i think it's about the natural evolution that we all go through as we learn what it means to be like a a reputable business person running like a a clean business and and that comes with time i i have to learn most of it through amazing brands that with the great executive teams that i learned from or are mentors and friends hand and i think for some of these people they're learning and it's gonna take a little bit of time so from the outside i look at you and i think well you seem really i i've only known you for thirty minutes you seem very calm you seem very well balanced you seem like a lovely person the success has been off the charts and i think well everything's perfect this guy just had it all of course that's not the reality so what has what has sucked about this journey you know it's funny the team we have this joke internally that i'm the chill guy we know and and it's like sort of kinda true like i am actually a pretty calm person and i think mistakes are all part of the learning like no business is perfect a perfect business is one that learns quickly from the mistakes that it makes and people aren't to blame for that what i'll say is you know i i could give you an example of actually like a really rough day we had on january twenty ninth of twenty twenty four and i'll i can tell you a little bit about that but i would say the hardest thing about building a business like this that folks just don't appreciate is just how difficult it is to build a team of all stars and more difficult than that unleash them given them the space to play and run and execute according to their abilities and that's really been our unlock is one getting amazing individuals i think if you look at our executive team if you look at our entire team right the hundred thirty people plus at this company think people would be like that is a stacked team they're not going anywhere we're having a good time like we've got a lot ahead of us that we wanna do and the culture here allows for them to take sell in a way that they wouldn't be able to do all can you dive deeper on that because people always say hire the best people and and all that and i say that too and but it's that's i hate when i give that advice or when i receive it because i'm not trying to hire the worst people like i am i am trying so what is the best people actually mean what is what what do you look for what attributes yeah you know what so funny about the same sam i've heard people be like oh well like somebody could be the best for your role and i'm like no no there's like legit people who are the best like like you're probably just not able to hire of if you're saying i'm like we got the best for this like narrowly carved out role so what i say like the best is what we're looking for is people who have confidence to make decisions right so everyone has the ability to be essentially a ceo and frankly i would not be surprised if we're talking five years from now and a lot of the folks here at g have started companies that are really successful because they've had that skill stat that repetition of making decisions as if they're the ceo and so i i would say that it comes down to just being like reps experience training and and whatever function if you're a marketing person a retention person if you're a product person and then the hardest part again then this is where i think the people listening to this who might be founders or ceos have to check themselves is how do you unblock these people how do you get out of the way to ensure that everybody together is building something massive i wanna ask you about your marketing because i think you did world class marketing like we said years ago like compliment first thing i ever sent to you was you have a nice landing page right like that's the highest form of of respect i give you i wanna actually open it up here let me screen share i wanna show you your facebook ad library and i just want you to talk us through a sort of a ten minute masterclass on marketing yeah so want you to tell me what you see because you know the average person will look at this they don't really know what to take i want you to point out what's interesting here let see if i can zoom this a little bit what's interesting here what to notice what to learn from that would apply to other people in their businesses is how to think about marketing the way you guys thought about marketing yeah i mean the first thing i see when you got back up it like what does it say poop more like one of their supplement brand do you know that's like being a little bit sassy with commentary like that now you see it a little bit more from these brands that are like just talking about their clinical all the time which nothing against clinical like we do clinical too and we we test our product elective well beyond what sort of required but like we just don't talk about it because that's not fun and they're like what i would say here is like these are fun ads right like this is like somebody sees that they're probably laughing a little bit like if you scroll down you know we spent some time on gl one as in and i'm really proud the day that we decided to do this because everyone around us and i i don't spend enough time on instagram to know everyone around us is like nature is oz or like they they'll say something like that which is like objectively wrong like you're not supposed to say that we've never taken that approach we are well we would say the best friend to oz ti appetite that bound whatever the sort of the gl ones are so you were able to kind of surf that way if you were able to hijack some of the momentum of that product and position yourself not as a replacement but as a ping companion we wanna do it why do you have an ali pop okay well is the gl the gl ones new crush ad wise that ali pop and then on it and so we're running a limited time offer for right now with ali pop so this is like a flavor it's an pop so this is this is cruel which i guess you can see right here i'm pointing to it in the video maybe people are on audio but we've got g sort of original and then you know every month or two months we do these limited time offer drops with in this case is all pops strawberry vanilla flavor you know the first one we did was like a gru smith apple like granny smith apple flavored we did a grinch sour bridge punch last year in november so we do these this again back to the whole like how do we make this fondly you tell me one of their self on the brand that's doing like drops and and we can get actually fun to to take the product each day so so it looks like you've got different angles so you've got yeah hey we're we're you know oz best friend you've got poop more you've got nurse you know the nurse here who's probably talking about their nut trained gas nurse jackie talking about you have these different angles and i'm guessing that the these each lead to a landing page that aligns with that message correct so it's like yeah five six different angles each to a tailored landing page that continues that message and then you're are you doing that just meant to find one winner or are you're like no we're gonna keep running five or six of these because there's just different markets of different customers who have different mindset and we're gonna try to get all of them yeah to make this super applicable for people you should test ads in high volume so find new angles test all over the place find what sticks with an eye towards being a good humid right don't don't say that you like are gonna make somebody sex better if your product doesn't actually do that i actually do the science validation if your product could help with certain things once you've identified at angle then seems to be running then you built the entire funnel around it so you've got you've got static ads that talk to that angle you've got e sort of h the camera angle ads that run at that you've got like more like cinematic type shoots that run at that angle everything that you're just plowing all sorts of ad concepts to or sorry add structures to that angle from there where people land is really important what people receive as a pop up is really important what people receive as email at sms is really important everything is tailored to that message so if you came in on a gut health ad we want everything tailored to hey you know sam just expressed interest and the guy how that great then sam is probably interesting in guy health let's give a pop up that helps them understand what about guy health is he interested in that pop up informs what messages we send on email and sms towards sam expressed concern that page is dialed for sam's and intent and then on the back end of that once people have purchased this is something that we're trying to put into process now is how do we talk to sam long yeah he may started on gal but how would how do we get sam to understand that there's so much more to this product than jessica got health and do that over time building on sort of the foundation of why this product was important most everything you're saying it's sort of like when i win right read the book kind win friends and influence people i'm like oh yeah this is obvious makes sense makes sense but the hard part is execution and it's it it seems like you're ruthless it kind way executing what's so i'm gonna ask a a bunch of questions i think you can answer in one in one go how many ads and landing pages per month are you putting out and i think you only said you had a thirty person team that seems like a lot of output for a relatively small team can you talk about like who's doing the work yeah we're probably putting out hundreds of ads a month cycling in and out just trying to find that next you know unlock we try to create new concepts pretty consistently so it's not just about ad volume it's actually structured around like how much of that is like business as usual ads that we already know or is it structured or sorry concepts themes that we know already work and how much of that is like we're trying to find new frontier of applicability in terms of the team you know when sean reached out to me in december of twenty twenty three saying hey nice landing baby that was me right like i was the guy they built that landing page we didn't use an agency i think i even said that in the the message because you asked that was me from the beginning and you know you you see our buy box that a place where you do that the cart which seen people ripped that over the last three years right copying that buy box and if they only knew that random dude named chad who's not like an e com expert you know broadly across d to c i i know quite a bit like i'm not an e com guy who builds these sites the whole industry's is mimicking this this format yeah it's really interesting to see today i think people need to test around and since then we found new formats that work but talking about the team we've got people across we've got like three folks on the retention team who do the emails sms who set up all the flows that allow for our consumers to have a good experience so they're focused on after order one what does that journey look like through order hundreds right we've got a large team doing paid of creating ads the actual credence we have probably four plus maybe five or six creative strategist who actually create the ads and then who we have people who design and do the video edits and then we have the people who actually manage the ad accounts right they're probably four or five of those who actually like are looking at the analytics evaluating passing back to the creative strategy saying here's what's working at a rate on that we've got comm team that's absolutely dialed the the velocity coming out of comm now so landing page designs iterations on the car check post purchase like all of that good stuff we're we're constantly iterating out i mean it's so fun to see right like it used to be me throwing up a quick website begins to that angle and now we've got like a full infrastructure around it still that's crazy just not seem like a lot of that doesn't seem like a big operation for creating hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue and hundreds of ads it it doesn't require a lot and i would tell people that they can do it themselves right you created a template in you know shout out to rep he's the platform that i used and i think he can do hundreds of millions of revenue on rep i think it's rep dot app is the website and it's a shopify plugin i mean it's such a good platform you can just create a simpler the only thing you need to swap out is like the headline whether it says guy health or it talks about pick your other ad theme substitute the i little blocks on the page with the new ad copy it's like it's not that hard like in a day you can create a completely new ad funnel that is gonna have incremental performance against the start of general landing page i gotta gotta clip that clip and make that mess already to see your face at a replica ad look and i have no problem they don't charge it i mean i've told it before they don't charge enough and it it it's it's stupid how much value you can get out of that and and i would say this about a lot of our platforms they're just getting a shout out because it's relevant of it here this is for the folks out there who have a business that does at least three million dollars a year in revenue because around this point that's when you're able to look up after being heads down for years building your company and you realize two things one you've done something great but just do a long way from your final destination and two you look around and you realize i am all alone i've out run my peers which means you're now making ten million dollar decisions alone by yourself and that is when mediocrity can creep in my company hampton we solve this problem by getting a room of vetted peers of other entrepreneurs who are gonna hold you accountable call you out on your nonsense and help show you the way because the fact is is that there's only a tiny number of people in your town who know what you're going through and who have been there and they're hard to find and if you can find them it's hard to have this explicit time this explicit place where you down where the rules are clear that we are here to help each other and to be one another's board of directors the biggest risk is not failing you have a company and it's working you're gonna be fine but the biggest risk is waking up ten years from now and saying shit i barely grew in business and in life and for people like you who are ambitious wasted potential and regret is what we want to help you to avoid we have made so many of these groups and we have a thousand plus members and i know this stuff actually works whether you work with hampton or you get your own group on your own but having a group like this of group of people you meet with in real life once a month it can change your life it change mind and i know it will change yours so check it out join hampton dot com what do you see when you look at average marketing versus world class marketing what do you think if i'm somebody who's got a brand or a company and i have a landing page got ads i'm doing all the things you said test creative i'm testing creative you said tesla i think i'm doing that what are the most typically missing when you either advise a founder or you go look at somebody else's brand and you're like oh man they're just not doing this one thing this these two things well enough yeah to really jump from average or good great have a better product is typically when it comes down to it's just like so on health because it's like you gotta cut your losses but like a lot of the people who are trying to like find these hacks they're doing it with like a a mailed in product like something they they like didn't we took a year to develop our product it's custom blends well how did you know that it worked because a lot of times when i take vitamins i don't necessarily know if it's working did you like get your blood tested at a bunch this is a beauty of this industries if you got a pup mad and are you familiar with pub med it's a public it's a where studies are right yeah all the studies are published there i mean if you put vitamin c in your product and there's thousands of studies about what vitamin c as sure maybe i don't know the precise outcomes of a hundred twenty person blind sample survey placebo controlled trial but like i can pretty much guess what the outcomes are gonna be based on the thousands of other published studies against vitamin c so to answer your question sam no i didn't prior to launching i hadn't done those tests but like i look through thousands of articles to land on what i believed the the right formulation would be for our product and that's also when i tested with consumers pre launches what's your perception of of this label what's your perception of this mini gummy is the size of gummy this flavor of gummy all that stuff what's on your ideas list but you're not gonna actually go do it so you can you can r with us here of brainstorming other brands other ideas that you think are interesting may not may or may not work but interesting yeah and also you mentioned that you have a notion doc if you if you're comfortable if you wanna pull up your bank balance we can also just do that tell you wiring instruction too on here here's what i'll say one thing that i that i disagree with is people say ideas aren't worth anything oh man do i disagree i i think ideas and we're so much in the right hands and in my hands they're in the right hands i believe and every founder should believe that about themselves and so there's certain ideas i can't share because i'm like guys like i i legit have an idea that years from now like i still got a lot i wanna do with gru like like actually there's a lot i wanna do with this business i'm not done here but like years from out i think there's an idea that no one else is gonna be able to run that there's a ten billion dollar business idea and i'm usually just say it now and we'll bleep it out and we yeah definitely give us like a code working or something we can we can at least give you credit for it here as well wait like what are the we're the wrong heads when when you see it you'll know you'll see it you'll go oh yeah this is a bill this is a big business idea so and and i don't think anybody's gonna do that in the meantime well i'm finishing my chapter here at groom and doing what i set out to do okay well what what what what are some other ideas that if in the right hands are great that that aren't your hands i had this idea one time it has nothing to do with consumer and i actually almost ran with it around the time i was studying g and i still think it's a good idea but i'm not gonna be the one to do it so i'm happy to share it right now there is no way to direct the money that you have coming in from like direct deposit so that direct deposit hits your checking account and then we've all gotta have the willpower to decide oh put ten percent in savings and put this against your bills and do this over here blah what if you become the essentially the distribution layer of ach transfers so it hits this distribution layer and before that person has to have the well willpower to decide what they're gonna do with it and and this is helpful for so many people on their lives right it it gets wired out to the the rent that they have it gets wired out to their car payment it gets wired out to blank over here over here into their investment and so what actually hits their account that they're spending against is five hundred bucks for groceries or whatever it is and i the technology exists to do this right it hasn't been structured i i can't remember what platform allows for but there's a platform that can facilitate what i just described to you so like this idea could be done tomorrow that's it great idea even whether it's for consumer or for businesses i have you ever read the book profit first now somebody recommended on the podcast and they go it was like the time when my girlfriend bought me the book the game before i went to college and we were gonna break up and i was like you need to learn how to talk to girls and i was like oh thank you i was like it was a gift but it was also a message and my friend told me about this book profit first i think it was a gift and a message and the message was hey you're running this business you've been doing it for years but you're not pulling out any profits and you don't know where all the money's is going it's profitable on paper but like you're not getting money out of this yeah and that's a very common business owner problem and there's this book called profit first which has philosophy which is basically you preset the budget so what most people do is they say i have this much revenue then they have all their expenses and then they it's kinda like surprise whatever's is left over that's your profit and you're usually quite disappointed with that surprise the better way what this guy advocates for is like you just set a budget for your p and l you say oh i'm gonna spend twenty five percent on op i'm gonna i need to reserve twenty percent for taxes so i'm not stressed out every tax season so just wanna put that and you ebay literally just create four separate accounts you create a tax account a checking account so automatically twenty percent gets goes in there and that's waiting for it's in a like a money market account until tax season either have your op x account and so now you're team has to run on a budget it's like this is how much you have to spend you don't get to just spend whatever and keep eating out of profits and you set a profit threshold where you say i wanna have fifty percent profit so it basically pre allocate to your as every dollar comes in fifteen cents will go to the profit bucket twenty five percent twenty five cents will go to the op x bucket and there's it's actually kind of a life changing idea pretty like forced it forces discipline you think you're running pretty lean until you actually have a hard cap on expenses and then you realize like oh actually there was way more fat i could trim i actually could have been this profitable yesterday i just i let it be an output rather than an input but but unfortunately there's not an easy way to do this it's a very relieved like set up seven accounts with your bank and they have to tell your accountant hey keep doing these sweep every two weeks have you guys sort of do you guys remember simple i loved simple it was really cool i i don't i think it's gone it got it was one of the very first silicon valley banking banks company yeah neo banks and it was i don't even think neo bank was a a envelope system where you like put digitally mud on to different options yeah and like i didn't i didn't make a lot of money at the time and i was like i wanna like fly home to saint louis the see my family and so like i said four months and so i automatically when it would come in my bank account the way it would visualize it it was still one bank account it was like well this is this is how much is left you know that you have three hundred fifty bucks in your spending account but you have another four hundred in your vacation account so like don't touch that money it was pretty cool so so sam the here here's what i love about this idea and sean you're bringing up actually why i think this is even potentially more compelling for businesses because if you're changing the way that the p and l works i mean venture capital firms went bat because now there's more discipline around the money that they're giving totally the the small founders who making five million a year who wanna pull five hundred thousand out they want it because now it's like oh i'm forcing myself into that discipline to pull five hundred thousand out every year like that's a huge use case that i wasn't thinking i think in terms of personal the problem with budgeting today is it's done i i grew up in a family where at the age of six i was in quicken and like i had to take every receipt scan it type it in back in the you know your mommy dad made you do that my dad taught be budgeting yeah on that's awesome and like we were still against dad and everything else but i like so it was awesome until there was an imbalance at the end of the month and i had to go search for the twenty since that was off is that like a mormon thing because i've i've i think i've bunch of mormon buddies who are very disciplined with their monthly budgeting yeah it might be honestly it might be something that's i mean there's a lot of like financial discipline in general but but to put put the headline on it to me what i love about this idea is it solves what i think sucked about the granularity of like wasting hours it could a month a week on like typing and all my stuff right and it also solves the other end really like people do they get to the end of the month was like i was actually a hassle to do that i change any of my behaviors based on it i don't know and then the other end of if it's like mint back before that got acquired to wherever and i think the other one today is monarch which i like monarch mono more money it's like it's helpful to see but like monarch is not really like a proactive platform right it's like i'm just like getting it about like i'll tell you how bad you're doing at it versus hey let me just fix it for you but you wanted to fix it for me solution i really wonder whether you know with agents or you know you take the popularity of like mercury or the kind of all the popular neo banks that are pretty product first yeah and they're more programmable i wonder if either somebody could build it on top of one of those banks or if they'll end up releasing something like this themselves i think you get acquired i i think if you run this business you're gonna be acquired for five hundred million to a billion in like two years if you execute this right like somebody out there listening right now feel free to send me a dm when you do it like this this idea the infrastructure exists to be able to do this if you execute it correctly you you are one that be a massive impact and millions of people's lives two you all have a financial outcome what would be cool is in if in twelve months we have to say hey everyone we did this podcast with chad here here's what he said and then we heard this clip that you just said and then we're like here's the update yeah because this is this is fantastic this is really cool yeah we we we do this segment all the time this is this is a top tier idea you you have a couple of quotes that you sent us are like kind of philosophies we always ask people what are your what are the philosophies you live either you think are not and not something everybody does or not everybody believes in you said one one of them i like you go access is everything and you explained how you didn't have a ton of access early on but you know through summit and stanford like can you explain your access everything philosophy yeah i think access and the privilege of having access in the world is something that when you don't have it surround yourself with people who do and do good work for them and you will get access every time and then when you do have it like the privilege i now have i see it as your obligation my obligation to get that back to others so explain what you what you mean by access what's the personal story where where where this kind rep resident resonates yeah you know like i'm a dude named chad i i worked in private equity what you see today would not have existed without people leaning in and giving me access every time incrementally and me doing good work for them so like if you go back i mean i was always curious on this because i think you get asked those questionnaires like are you are you middle income high income low income and like i was aware of sort of wealth but if i looked at sort of the income that my parents had and i've have seven they're seven of his kids so six siblings in in our income i think i was like bottom mid in class it's like how it was defined and i'm i'm not saying that from a standpoint of like a ashamed like i'm grateful to have lived in this area and seeing these people because i think you can solve a lot by just giving awareness to kids about what's possible it's like the grasshopper moment once they know it's like oh now you can go get it so i get i was recruiting for the big three consulting mckinsey bc g bane through a contact who if he put me in touch i didn't get it but i landed through another mentor this this giga la i did really good work at la and investment bank so in new york city one of the top premier investment banks working on mergers and acquisitions that mentor i'm still close to him i wouldn't visited him right so he gave me access and that access then landed me at summit partners and summit partners i did phenomenal work for them i deployed i i literally invested like thirty percent of that fund a five billion dollar fund like i invested that i sourced the deals that made them the money behind that i did really get work and there's this moment when i got into stanford that i was like oh man like should i feel bad because i i know how this works like i only got in like yeah i've had a ton of accomplishments added a yeah three point nine five gpa i've worked at great places but it's white dude named chad like should i feel bad about this so they got into stanford and and what i came to appreciate is like no i shouldn't feel bad knowing that the reason why i got in is because you know two people who are very close to the stand for folks sent a text and a nice letter of recommendation for me i shouldn't feel bad about that because they're not just doing that right they're doing that because i did good work for them i made their lives easier i earn their trust and so maybe i wasn't born into that access where my dad can send a text to stanford and say let my not my son in but you can earn that by doing good work for the people who do have that access and they're they're so eager to help you have that sort of accomplishment so that's how i think about access and it's part of when you know i gotta asked recently like what's your legacy you wanna leave on the world and i'm like you know like thirty three years old but the way i think about it is like i wanna give that that access that i've sort of like either been granted or earned over the last many years and i and i wanna ensure that more people have access to that who who spend their their lives working with me and put good work dude you're you're awesome you are so cool i think that when i was younger i met this really successful guy named scott be who was the chief product officer of adobe and an an amazing entrepreneur maybe a billion billionaire and he used this word with me that i never heard before this idea he used he's i'm gonna invest in you and you need to be a steward of my capital and i was like don't know what what is that word steward i'd never heard of that it's just like this idea that you need to be the vehicle that that protects and passes on like a little bit of greatness that that's kinda how i interpreted it and you are that person so my friend austin reef do you know austin reef he's the one of the morning brew yeah started and sold the company for hundreds millions of dollars when he was thirty years old i he was texting me about this new idea that he was working on a brainstorming and i was like do think it's gonna be successful he goes it can be successful if i wanted to be and i love that because what you and him both said something very similar you have the similar mindset but i find myself being around him and people like you and it's contagious yeah you know what and i've thought about whether i should be i've i've tried to figure out whether my impact on the world is more narrowly focused on the people who spend hours thousands of hours with me working inside of crude or if i should have more of an impact publicly trying to relay some of this message it's hard though you know like to relay all this these experiences that i've had in in a public forum that allows for millions to to learn but you're totally right sam like at the end of the day why why was i able to build what i built it's because i knew it was possible right like i saw it done many many times by others and if i ever had a question i could i could go ping those people and so network experiences awareness of what's possible i think there's a maybe a different way to say what you just said you know the way you just said it was kind of like hey i got i was pretty fortunate that these things happen and i did my part but they did their part this happens a lot with entrepreneurs as we sort of stumble and fumble our way to success then afterwards you can actually look back and realize like oh there it wasn't complete random it wasn't complete chance and in fact you could recreate the conditions of success more reliably knowing what i know now and so i would just point to three words that you just said the first one is exposure you really can't imagine what you've never seen your brain won't go anywhere if you don't have any exposure to things i i i was talking about this with ben my business partner about my kids i said my kids have never been exposed to so much in the world right like we literally keep going to the same resorts and i was like they've never seen affordable country they've never seen this i i started bringing them to just do adult stuff with me because i used to do kids stuff with my kids and now what i realized is let me just bring them along for life and kids actually love it they like doing laundry they like cooking they work out with me now in the gym every day they like going with me to to meetings they like you know they actually kind of enjoy that because they're getting exposed to new stimulus that they've never really seen before and even if they're five years old and they can't fully rocket it there's some part of it that just breaks some fence that they had around what the world is and it starts to poke holes and it lets new things in grown up i didn't know any entrepreneurs now i didn't know anyone in my entire family my mom has nine siblings my dad has four out of all of them there were zero entrepreneurs every single one of them was an engineer like typical indian family and so ever the the highest calling was you get a good job what's a good job a six figure job that has health insurance so that was all i knew i was always was exposed to if what was possible and then my senior year of college i took a class called getting rich and in the very first class you brought in a speaker and was a girl who started a t shirt company and then the next class you brought in a guy who started his own hedge fund and i just thought i looked at them and i why are these guys having all the fun this sounds awesome maybe i could do that instead i just finally exposed to the thing you know when i was twenty one years old and it changed the structure of my life had i not had the exposure it literally would have just not happened and so the first is exposure how do you get yourself in a position to see new things or help other people see new things the second is access and then you the way i would put it for you is earned access because you said something very casually you're like i did good work for them you know what i bet if we peeled back there probably is a lot there i bet you over delivered i bet you didn't get paid proportional to what you did and you didn't whine about it and these are my guesses you've tell me if that's true or not but the axis is earned through showing that you're somebody who deserves greater opportunities and greater access and you sort of delay the payoff of those actions and you just have faith that i'm gonna just i'm gonna kill it right now and i i trust that you know the ball will bounce my way over time and i don't need to immediately tit for tat measure what i'm getting versus what i'm putting in yeah i think i i i think it's true frankly i think you know i'm young i'm thirty three years old i think about the impact i wanna have on this world i think it's that first one exposure how can i facilitate exposure to everyone right young young kids how do they get exposure that honestly i think that's where my wife and i wanna make an impact is making it possible through some some effort in the next chapter of my life to ensure that the random kid who's six years old they're ten years old than a place that would never get exposure to this at least knows what's possible because if they know it's possible maybe they'll go after it themselves every time hey can i let me ask you a question that you might not feel comfortable answering when you're wired hundreds of millions of dollars what do you what do you decide to do with it where you invest the money and that includes like did you decide to give any away yeah tb on it but i one of the hardest things i have is i've thought about my my impact like it's the same as i don't even know if i'll invest in other companies and and it's not because i don't believe it's like what's the next best use of a dollar it's gonna it's gonna take a lot to convince me that it's something other than one i can go after and do and that doesn't mean it's always business profits centered or like i don't always have to make money like can i sam go out and make make an impact on the world by taking my own funds and building like something special out of it right that has an impact on whether it's mentorship exposure or whatever it is so tb i mean as you know when when you receive money you spend a lot of time thinking about deploying it you don't wanna rush into anything but but i would expect that the more meaningful deployment of my capital is gonna come through some personal effort in my life that i do to to make an impact so well first of all can me let me ask a boring question where did you invest it the the current money where did you invest just boring index funds is well you you know i there's a difference between siding and closing so you have to go through anti regulatory so we've signed but the closing happens as soon as it's been approved by government so you don't have hasn't the money's has not been wired yet bed i don't know what that i i'm not had a deal there's just large cool yeah i i my first acquisition they just v mode me yeah we've not i'm not i'm not had dealt with the with the department of justice yet so that's pretty cool that's funny there's a crazy this is a crazy or you know the company app oven yeah yeah yeah my my c founder was the c cofounder of app oven at the time so he's sitting next to me at the office and they'd signed this deal and i'm like oh my god you just thought they sold the company but i think one point two or two billion dollars i figured forgot which the what the number was but one or two billion dollars and i was like wow dude you did it he sold a company for a billion dollars two billion dollars that's amazing and i was like should we go dinners on you what's he's like dude we haven't got the money it's gonna be like months he's like if it's over forgot what the number is seven hundred fifty million a a billion dollars whatever it is like literally like the government you know the way he put it was like it's gonna sit on trump's desk until he stamps it the crazy thing was they sold to a chinese company so there was actually a lot of risk and so he didn't know this at the time he thought you know it's over well nine months go by a year almost goes by and the deal is still not approved but they've been running the company they've doubled revenue in that year yeah and so instead of waiting for the approval what they did was they went and renegotiate they're like hey here's what the two billion gets you instead now it gets you twenty five percent of the company instead of whatever eighty five hundred percent so they renegotiate the deal because the business had grown it was the best thing that ever happened app and so they took a minority investment got some liquidity it kept growing the thing it's now it like i was a hundred billion dollar company in the last last year right so it went a hundred x since the then a quick google so i haven't a had to read all this i believe it's a hundred and thirty million dollars is the threshold where the doj has to interesting one thirty you have to notify the doj and the ftc anything north of a hundred and thirty three point nine million dollars dear doj i'm rich already notified there's like an official form and then they they're just reviewing it as they should to make sure that it's not bad for the consumer dude that's cool do things for coming on man and congrats again on on building something pretty epic i remember when i saw the product it just seem like oh that's it i mean the best products actually are simple like that where the proposition is easy for the customer to understand it it makes sense in the world it was almost like hidden in plain sight i feel in in a way and you know to your credit you you ran with that you acted on it and you you built something pretty incredible of course thank you for having beyond my hope is that three years from now we're talking and you guys are like cheese dude we didn't realize there is that much ahead of you we've got so much this team wants to do and so eager here to to show the consumers what we've got for him new products new innovations new fun limited time offers what's the best thing on that shelf i should buy so have you tried the holly we've got some products here that are launching soon but have you tried the lollipop that's never had the original and i i didn't even try anything else i just got the original like subscription yeah you you may know this but we've got rooms which is the comprehensive of nutrition greens multi vitamin fiber we've got new trucks which is a nut product we've got immune which is like a almost like an immunity shot like the two ounce bottles but in ga form and then we've got juice which is this one right here which is like a pre anything energy product so i mean we've got like twelve innovations in the pipeline that's what i'm saying like it's so exciting we've we've like done something so big but like we're like eighty five miles into a marathon good man thank you so much for coming on you have an open invite whenever you want you're you're you're a wonderful guy we're we're so happy for your success and it feel makes us feel good to promote you so thank you for coming on it that's about i feel like i could rule where to know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days all on a roll less travel never looking back hey let's take a quick break to tell you about our sponsor it is a podcast that we want you to check out it's called d pod it's hosted by ramon barr and blame bolus and this is a podcast about all things direct to consumer d it's e commerce stores it's how you optimize your brand they're talking with founders marketers and the platform creators about all kinds of things that you need to know for d you know website conversion pay ads facebook ads consumer trends email marketing if you wanna know the stories behind your favorite brands this podcast is for you so check it out listen to d pod wherever you get your podcast