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- [00:00]
A
There's so many aspects of business and I thought that I would just learn what I liked. And when I found even that company was a failure, that early company, I realized that I truly love building things. I love. I just love building. And it became less about the end goal of making money or being rich. That's never been kind of my priority. I've always wanted freedom. I always wanted to have my own schedule, relatively. I mean, when you're an entrepreneur, you don't really have your own schedule. It sounds good, but you actually probably end up working way more than everyone else.
- [00:31]
B
Welcome back to Built Online, the podcast where we dive into everything online business. Here we explore the minds of of creators who are building online businesses to power their dream lives and ultimately transform economies. I'm your host, Cody McGuffey, and if you're new here, I'm the founder and CEO of Ever Be, a creator commerce platform where we believe that everyone deserves the opportunity to pursue their passions and to live life on their own terms, on a mission to make creator commerce accessible to everyone throughout the world, no matter where they are, and to make a positive impact in our families and our communities. And we believe that everyone that truly commits to a vision and pursues it with an undeniable force of will, that they will ultimately succeed. I'm really excited about today's show. Thank you for sharing your time with us. Before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to ask a quick favor for anyone that's listened to the show before. If you haven't already, please let us know if these episodes and these conversations are. Are helpful or not. Share your feedback in the comments and review it if you. If you would. It truly helps the podcast, it helps our team. It helps me personally understand what types of guests that we should have on the podcast that really just helps us improve the show to make it better. We need your feedback. We would not be able to operate without your feedback. So be sure to follow the podcast, subscribe to the channel wherever you're watching this. So you really never really miss out on that. That one nugget that can really change your business and change your life. Enough of that. Really excited to have you here. Let's jump into today's show. Jeremy, what's up, man? How are you doing?
- [02:02]
A
Great. Thanks for having me.
- [02:04]
B
Super happy to have you, man. Excited to hear your story. You have a. You have an interesting one. You've done all kinds of things in your life and your business life especially, and I wanted to kind of bring that to Light out of my own personal curiosity, but also hopefully add a lot of value to people listening. So excited to hear your story.
- [02:21]
A
Happy to hopefully kind of break it down, go through the history. I'm 39 years old now, so had a lot of entrepreneurial ups and downs over the years and hopefully some of my learnings and failures and successes can be helpful.
- [02:35]
B
That's awesome. I'm sure they will be for sure. And my job is to pull that out of you. Right. So I'll kind of give a little snippet and you can kind of fill in the gaps after this. But for anyone listening, Jeremy, he graduated from Boston University in 07 2007. And you've done a lot of cool things. Like you started the company, you've done all kinds of things, but most recent one is you built a company called swag.com and you were a co founder of that and which has now got acquired by Custom Inc. Which maybe somebody is familiar with listening to this in the print on demand space. And now you're working on some other things called Swag Space, which we're going to get to. But then you've done a lot more than just that. Maybe let's fill in the gaps from there. And what's your story?
- [03:21]
A
Yeah, sure thing. So I was actually a documentary filmmaker in college. That's what I went to a Boston University for. And I always wanted to be a filmmaker my whole life. I was one of those like artsy kids. So that's why I thought I wanted to do. And when I was about 18, 19 years old, my documentary won the Vail Film Festival. So I'm in Vail, Colorado. I'm on the top of the mountain. Half the room were these major actors that everyone's heard of and half the room were like more struggling artists, if you will. And it was like this weird realization of do I want to do this? Do I want this to be my life? And at that moment I said no. And it's a very weird thing for my family and friends and professors and teachers because at that moment I was still a junior in college and I just came off winning one of the biggest film festivals in the country. And I also realized at the exact moment that maybe that's not the career for me. So I finished up my college degree. I had no other experience except for filmmaking at that point. And I was trying to think what is my skill set? You know, what I've realized is that filmmaking is very similar to businesses. It's like you're branding you're creating a story out of nothing, you're telling something, you're trying to connect the dots and kind of move people in some way. So I thought, let me just start a business. I had no experience whatsoever. I started a T shirt company and I'll do the quick version of it, but I started a high end T shirt company. I thought that would be an interesting idea just to learn frankly what I was good at. Manufacturing, pr, production, building an e commerce website. Every single thing. You kind of learn about business by starting a T shirt company. And sounds relatively simple, but obviously it's not. And I launched that in 2007, 2008, the worst time to launch a company. This is recession. Know all the, all the businesses are shutting down. And that led me to another idea where I ultimately met up the guy David Peiser. It's actually a guy named Elliot Pizer who's the CEO of a company called David Peiser Sportswear. And they're a very large company in the promotional product space. So that's how I got introduced to promo when I was about 22 years old.
- [05:17]
B
What is promo for? Anyone listening? What does that mean?
- [05:20]
A
So like if you ever go to like a doctor's office and somebody gives you a pen or a mug and says thanks for coming, or, or you work for a company and you have a Facebook logo on a T shirt and it's this very not as sexy industry, I'll tell you that. You know, when I was 22 years old and I was going to all these trade shows, learning about the industry, I was by far the youngest person at those trade shows. But what I noticed is that it's a massive business. It's an over $20 billion a year business. Think of every single company in the world by swag. They want to give it to their employees, they want to give it to their customers, to the legion, all these different things, it's a massive business. When I was 22 years old, I noticed that the buyer was a 45, 50 year old office manager. They're a little bit older and I was this young guy. And I'm saying every single thing just didn't make sense to me. It was all transacted through catalogs, presentation decks, very manual process. But I said, maybe that's just how they want to do it. And I just forgot about it. I did that for three years, worked in that industry under MV Sport. Then I joined my brother at his company called Tipped Media. And what we were doing there was doing product placement super, super early with YouTube stars. This is, you know, pre, pre people making money, frankly. YouTube stars were getting millions of views and they were living in their parents basement. And what we did is we partnered up with big brands like State Farm, Colgate, Verizon, and got it into the YouTube stars video and made them a lot of money. And then the idea became, well, why are we just stopping with YouTube stars? Why don't we actually work with traditional celebrities and own their rights to their Facebook and Twitter feeds? So if they want to do deals or any kind of promotion through those social plat, we would have to be the de facto company that helps them and partners with the brand, does all these things. We built this out, we signed on a lot of celebrities, and ultimately that company was acquired by a publicly traded company when I was about 25. After that success, I started another business that ended up being a failure. You know, it was called Vouch. It was a social networking app based on what your favorite things are. And I had all these celebrity contacts from my previous company that I thought I could make the social media company happen. And I would partner with all these celebrities that would become like partners of ours and they would blast it to their social presence. And we ended up getting, you know, hundreds of thousands of users. It just never took off to where it needed to be. Frankly. Frankly, I built the wrong platform for the audience and there's a lot of lessons to that and we could get through that. And then after that I said, well, let me think about the swag industry that I was 10 years prior. Has it changed? And I noticed that the industry was just getting bigger. It was about a $26 billion industry at this point, but the buyer changed. The buyer is now a millennial. So instead of the buyer being 45, they're now 23 years old. How is that experience different? And can I build the right platform for today's buyer? Startedswag.com became the fastest growing company in the industry, scaled from zero to over $30 million in sales a year. By the sixth year, got acquired by Custom Inc. Who's the leader in our industry. So I've been doing swag industry in some ways or another for, you know, 75% of my career at this point.
- [08:17]
B
Insane, man. That's such a cool story and thank you for that. I was literally going through your profile as I was just like, as you were telling the story and it made total sense. Swag.com, you, you've probably learned a chunk of your experience in that eight year span of running building that company. And it Was this your biggest kind of hit or home run, I guess you could say of your career?
- [08:38]
A
Yeah, I like to think of my career. I've had five startups. Three of them have outright either failed, we lost people's money, investors money, or it was more of like a wash, like a break even or it's just like a more of a salary type of thing. That and I've had two exits at this point. One exit was the tip media sold for several million, swag.com sold for a lot more. And yes, but I definitely learned a lot in that space of swag.com, you know, we are a B2B platform. We're selling to businesses. So our clients range from Amazon and Google buying swag to a coffee shop. So it's anybody buying for 24 pieces of t shirts to millions of dollars of orders. And our idea was very simply, what if we can make it so effortless and streamlined that anyone can go on the site, search between 7,000 plus products, all curated and vetted by us, find what they're looking for, design it, buy it in a matter of seconds. We can allow people to kit up boxes where we do all the kidding, handwritten note cards. We could click a button, we could hold the inventory. Think of it as like an online swag closet. So like Amazon could buy $100,000 worth of stuff. Click a button, it's all sitting in our inventory. They can upload their CSV file of different ship to addresses, ship all around the world to different remote employees, best customers, leads, all these different things. And it's. If I had the idea of what I ultimately wanted to get to from day one, I probably would have freaked myself out. That's the truth. Like when you start a business, you can't make yourself overthink things and be like, how is this possible? If I said I was going to have with 20,000 companies that buy from us, if I thought I'm going to work with 20,000 companies and I'm going to have all this customization, I'm going have warehousing all over the country, I would be like, that's not going to be possible. That sounds like ridiculous. But what I've noticed is you kind of the same way. You know like when see you have a big sandwich and people say how are you gonna fit that in your mouth? You do it one bite at a time. You kind of have to do like one step at a time and kind of tackling the most important things. And then you look back one day and you're like, I cannot believe we've. This is what we've accomplished. And it's only possible when you look back. But you have to do it kind of step by step. And that's why what I've learned, I guess overarching, anything's possible frankly. It's just you gotta, gotta make.
- [10:48]
B
Break it down.
- [10:49]
A
Exactly.
- [10:50]
B
Yeah, exactly. You gotta break it down to like a small anything be solved. Right. As long as the steps are broken down and manageable and completely agree with this. I mean I think about ever be ever be's three years old now and we serve over 700000 people. And if you were to ask me three years ago of where you know, how are you going to serve? You're you need to, you need to build this thing to serve 700000 people, I would have probably just been like, ah, I just don't have the capital to like scale the infrastructure right now. Like I would have done it all. Like if you're, I couldn't have done it. I wouldn't have done it because I was just, you need to focus on the next 10, right? Next 20 or next a hundred people or next thousand people. And I completely agree and it's interesting about SWAG is I think about for from ever be perspective. I mean we have 40 employees and getting SWAG to them is challenging. I mean you're talking about different countries, you're talking about different addresses, you're talking about currencies changes. And I could totally see the problem that SWAG solved obviously. And so did Custom Inc. Really impressive what you built, man.
- [11:53]
A
Thank you. Yeah. And I'll tell you your audience something because when I was starting a lot of times and your audience, I know they're entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs, at least from my experience I've had a lot of ego. I don't know if it's ego. Like I think I'm the best. That wasn't the ego I'm talking about. But I thought I always had the right answer, if that makes sense. Like when you start something you kind of have to have this mentality that you have the right answer but at the same time you have to balance it with being super open minded. And I'll tell you when I failed Vouch was the social networking app that I started before swag.com that wasn't a success that you know, I raised millions of dollars and it ended up going, you know, nowhere frankly. We had hundreds of thousands of users but it didn't take off to where it needed to Be the biggest lesson I learned from that failure, as you say, is I spent like literally a year building out the platform, overthinking every single decision. Like what would the button look like? What happens when you swipe left or right? I would be obsessed with every single detail because I thought I had the right solution, the right answer. I knew what I was building. And when we launched the plot, the platform a year late, spending all that money, all the things that I built that I thought were really important, the customers didn't give a shit about. And it was all these other things that they said, well, can you build this? Can you change this? Can you do that? And I realized if I just got out of my own way, I could have built the right solution and listened to the customer and built the right thing for them. So with swag.com, i didn't want to wait. We just had the landing page, said coming soon and I started making sales. From day one. I would honestly just go and knock on doors of offices. I went up and down, we work hallways, speaking to as many people, maybe making a sale, maybe learning, maybe seeing why they wouldn't want to buy from me. But there's 20,000 companies in our industry that sell promotional products. How do I cut through the noise? I mean, one of the biggest lessons I learned super early is I thought that the right audience within the company would be the marketing team. Right? Because you think about SWAG as a purchasing power, right? Company buys, there's different divisions within the company that buy. There's the marketing team that's buying for trade shows and events. There's the office manager that's buying for internal purposes. There's a sales team that's buying for prospecting. And I thought let's go after the marketing team because the marketing team has the biggest budget. But what I found out is that speaking to hundreds of marketing managers, everyone's going after the marketing team. How does a swag.com a coming soon landing page cut through the noise? Frankly impossible. And when I noticed is that the office manager, no one's really targeting them, at least at that time. They're the gateway into the company. They don't have the biggest budget. Right. If you're an office manager at a company, you're and you have a 10 person team or your team, 40 person, they're buying for 40 people. It's not the huge, the biggest budget but what it does is it gets you in the company. Now every department of that company now sees in the label swag.com or made by swag.com or whatever our inner label is. And you're basically getting introduced to your future customers. So we went all in on the office manager, and we built the platform specific to that office manager buyer. We didn't worry about the marketing team until later. Now, obviously we do. With marketing teams and sales teams beginning, it was the office manager SWAG platform. That was it. And it allowed us to really grow really fast and ultimately get a lot of other departments in the company.
- [14:55]
B
I love that. Did you guys raise, Raise capital for every venture or which ones did you raise for and which ones did you not?
- [15:02]
A
Tip Media. We didn't raise at all. When we sold. It was. It was a very. It was. I mean, it was a couple million, but it was relatively small acquisition in the scheme of things. Swag.com, we did raise, but we raised less than 4 million all in. And by the last year, we were doing over 30 million. So we went. Swag.com is crazy. We went from 360,000 first year to 1.1 million to 3 million to 7 million to 15 million to 30 million that we got acquired. So we were growing over 100% every year, and we only raised when we knew exactly what we were gonna do with it. It wasn't like, let's just raise to raise. It was, we want to go after this new division. We want to go into fulfillment centers. We needed a little bit more money. Covid happened. We wanted to make sure we had enough money that, you know, God forbid everything failed. We had enough. So before COVID we raised, like, less than 3 million. And then we raised a million in Covid, just to be sure. And was crazy in Covid, where the whole industry dropped over 20%, which makes sense, right? There's no trade shows, there's no events, there's no offices. Our business grew by over 100% because we became the de facto leader in individual distribution. That was what our quick pivot was when we realized that everyone's working remote. Let's engage the remote culture and allow people to send swag and keep this online swag closet, if you will, and become kind of the de facto leader in that space.
- [16:18]
B
How many employees did you guys have at that time? And all that good stuff we had.
- [16:22]
A
During COVID we bet 70. And now we have over 100 at this point.
- [16:26]
B
Wow.
- [16:27]
A
I think we got acquired. We had about 100. Now we have like 130 or so crazy.
- [16:32]
B
And everything's on. Are they still remote?
- [16:34]
A
Yeah, everything. Everything's still everyone's remote. Our parent company, Custom Inks, they have a big, large office in Fairfax, Virginia, but their company is also remote. I live in Florida. Co founder lives in Florida. Most of our team still lives in New York. But it's, it's. Everything is remote.
- [16:49]
B
I love that, man. I, I, I, I value that so much because everybody's 100 remote too. Like, we, we were remote. First company remote. All remote, I guess you could say. And this is, I saw obviously the name of the podcast called Built Online, right? We built everything online. Like, that's the idea here. So we're just leaning into this, the new way of doing things. It's exciting because that gives, it gives you this, like, lifestyle freedom too. Can you maybe talk about why you kind of even wanted to be an entrepreneur to begin with? What kind of drew you to this? Because I didn't really get to piece that together. From your filmmaking story to entrepreneurship. I mean, that's quite the jump.
- [17:29]
A
Can I be honest with you? I didn't even know what an entrepreneur was, honestly. Like, I, my dad was a business person. He never really started businesses. He was like a CEO of a company that was more established. And so, and I was always a filmmaker. But I realized it was like this weird thing of I don't know what I want to do. I was lost. I think most college kids, when they graduate, you have a. I mean, unless you want to be a lawyer or you've always wanted to be a doctor. Most, most kids are kind of lost. You're kind of kind of figuring it out. And I thought after college, maybe I would get a job. Maybe, like, I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I thought instead of getting a job and learning one specific thing, if I could build something, I would learn exactly what I liked. That was it. I didn't know what I was good at. I didn't know I even enjoyed. But I thought, and I picked T shirt company because in my mind, I thought that was relatively easy. Because it sounds like, oh, T shirt company. Anyone could build a T shirt company. But under the hood, there's so many aspects of business. And I thought that would just learn what I liked. And when I found even that that company was a failure, that early company, I realized I truly love building things. I love, I just love building. And it became less about the end goal of making money or being rich. That's never been kind of my priority. I've always wanted freedom. I always wanted to have my own schedule, relatively. I mean, when you're an entrepreneur, you don't really have your own schedule. It sounds good, but you actually probably end up working way more than everyone else. I know. With swag.com, i was the head of customer service, obviously in the beginning, because we're a two person team in the beginning. And I'm doing like live chats with people overseas at 1 o'clock in the morning because no one else was going to do it and I didn't want to lose on sales. So you actually work way more. But I thought ultimately this is where you get true freedom. You know, as an employee, it's kind of hard to ever kind of get that escape of velocity where you have true freedom in time and resources. And entrepreneurship seems to be the way, but it is a challenge and it's not easy. And most time not an overnight success. And even with swag.com, people are like, I cannot believe how fast you built that company and sold it. But how I look at it, it's like this is a lifetime sport. I mean, you didn't. All the ups and downs, all the three years of raising money and the failures, and then starting from the beginning, there's a lot of lessons that you've learned along the way. You have to take those lessons that allow you to be successful later on. The worst thing is to fail and not take anything from it. So every single time, whenever I failed, I failed. As I said, three out of five times. I always wrote down right after like it was official. You know, you don't want to think about failure while you're in it. You have to make yourself believe failure is not an option. But sometimes it happens. And when you do fail to write down as many things on a piece of paper so you never forget the things that you've learned or that you would try to avoid the next time.
- [20:09]
B
I completely agree. Do you think that everybody should be an entrepreneur?
- [20:12]
A
Definitely not. I mean, it's a. Very. First of all, it's hard. I mean, it's not only hard, like it's. You have to be okay making very little money for probably a long period of time until you're successful. So you have to have some financial or you have to be willing to do on the side. I think if you have it in your heart that you want to do it, then I think you should do it. But you have to really want it. Because most of the time, what I've seen friends of mine, people want it, they think they want it, and then the first roadblock comes, they give up. And with entrepreneurship there's going to be millions of roadblocks.
- [20:46]
B
How do you know if you want it or not? How do you know if it's in your heart? Like, what's. Like, some signs?
- [20:49]
A
Well, for me, it was. It was. I tried to get a job with somebody I skipped over in those five years after I had vouch. I had the failure of vouch right before swag. I was burnt out. I was insanely burnt out. I just spent over three years of my life working like crazy, raising money, losing people's money. I felt depressed, and I was like, I'm over entrepreneurship. This was. You know, I was 29 years old or so. So I was. Been doing entrepreneurship for seven years. I was exhausted. Even though if I had that success, I had that sale beforehand, but I had. I just came off of a really hard battle that we didn't. It didn't win. And I got myself a job. And I'm telling you, this is a. This is a crazy story. I got myself a job. I was head of business development for this company. I don't want to say the company, but I was head of business development for this. For this company. And I went into the. Into the office, and I made it 30 minutes before I quit. I quit this first day. I got hired, and it was the craziest experience. I went in, 10 minutes in. I felt uneasy being there for whatever reason. Nothing to do with the company, just myself. And I called my dad and I said, dad, I feel like I'm going to quit. My dad's like, give it a day. Just suck it up for a day and see. See what happens. You don't even know if you're going to like it or not. I gave myself 20 more minutes, went to the CEO, and I said, frankly, it's not you, it's me conversation. Like, if you're breaking up with somebody. And I quit. And I walked around New York City aimlessly for hours that day. Like, what is wrong with me? I can't hold down the job. What am I going to do? And I realized at that moment that even though entrepreneurship is hard, even though most people don't succeed at it, and it's not an easy thing, this is what I'm meant to do. Like, I shouldn't run away from it. I should dive into it. So I think sometimes it just has to be a call, and you have to really believe in it. Believe in yourself, believe that you could do it. And I believe if you do that you might not be successful right away. You might not be successful. The second time or the third time. But ultimately, if you learn from your failures, you will get so much better that you'll put yourself in a position to succeed. Doesn't mean you're going to guarantee succeed because there's no guarantee, but you're going to be putting yourself in the position that you have a much better eyes than most people.
- [22:51]
B
It's interesting. It's really cool story. So I appreciate you sharing that. I think it's interesting because a lot of people listening to this right now, I mean, they're listening to this probably because they're entrepreneurial. I mean, you don't listen to built online, right? Without wanting to build something online. It's. But I think people are. Their confidence level is not extremely high. Of like, am I built for this though? Like, Jeremy seems so inspiring. He just like seems like he has God shied. It seems like God is just like calling him to be an entrepreneur. And I don't know if I really have that calling or do I or do I not, Right? Like, they're confused. And I remember actually that, that period of time too for me, if, like, am I built for this, though? Like, that kind of describes me, but I don't know, you know, so, like, what are some other things, do you think that would just give somebody the feeling that they are actually called for this thing? Is it just purely an internal feeling?
- [23:41]
A
I think it's internal feeling. I also think if you don't know, maybe it's worth giving it a shot because what's the harm at the end of the day? What's. What's the worst that happens? You fail. I mean, that's not the. It's not end all be all right. I think a lot of people get in their head that I don't want to start because I'm going to fail or I don't know if I have it. Who cares at the end of the day? Who cares? I think that's the biggest superpower of entrepreneurs is to forget what anyone thinks about you, forget what people say about you. I'll kind of break it to your audience. I know a lot of them are young entrepreneurs, inspiring. Everyone's going to think you're unemployed until you're not, until you're successful. That's kind of the gist of being an entrepreneur, right? And so a lot of times, and this is a belief that I have as well, why a lot of people take ego to it. You know, like a lot of entrepreneurs, I used to do this myself. I used to care about getting into Press, right. Because why? Not that I thought the press really moved the needle for my business, but it was kind of like validation that I wasn't doing this. Like I was doing something that people valued or why do people take funding? A lot of people take funding for the wrong reasons. They take VC because they want that validation of, Look, I raised $2 million, even though they don't necessarily need all that money. And I think as entrepreneurs, if you could kind of remove any sort of ego or any kind of outside noise that influences you in any way, just forget about it, do your own thing, learn as much as possible, keep your head down and see it. And maybe in a year from now, you realize that you love it and that you're able to grow and you feel passionate about it and then keep going. You know, I just, I think. I think if you can remove all the other noise, your life as an entrepreneur will be a lot easier.
- [25:09]
B
I love that. I completely agree with this. What? There's two more things I really want to cover. You actually kind of touched on it a little bit. When you walked into that first day of work, right, as an employee. You mentioned, like, you had this overwhelming feeling, or at least maybe I'm putting words in your mouth. But what I'm. What I'm hearing is that you just had this feeling like, this is not for me. You almost got like, sounds like you were kind of getting anxious or something.
- [25:33]
A
I'll tell you, I'll tell you, it's. I'll tell you this, the full, the full picture of the story, because it sounds kind of crazy a little bit, but when I was starting vouch, the office, the co working, this is like a little case, takes a little deep. But when I was starting vouch, we worked out of a co working space. It was on 18th street in New York City. And when I walked into that office the first, you know, I felt so much hope. I felt inspired. I felt like this is where my life changes. That was the mentality. I just came off of an exit where I just got acquired and now I'm starting this new business. This is where my life is going to really take off. And I had this amazing, like, you know, when you're starting anything, just imagine, right? And then three years later, we end up failing and we end up losing millions of millions of dollars of investors money. And then when I got this job, I went into the office, I was called into this co working space because that's where the company was based. And it was the exact same room as the office. I was. When I was starting vouch, it was. It was like, weirdly. God, I'm telling. It was like, weird situation where I walked into the exact room and I was sitting in pretty much the exact same seat that was my desk. And I was like. It, like, hit me right away. It was like three years ago. I had all this hope, and now I'm. I'm just. I don't say just an employee, but I was part of the. Part of something that I didn't really fully even believe in. And I'm like, how did my life get turned upside down so quickly? And it was like, this is not. It was like basically calling like, I gotta get out of here. It was like a really. It pushed me out of that door really quickly. And I felt bad about it, frankly, because I wasted everyone's time. I wasted the CEO's time. He's a great guy. You know, I did a lot of interviews with him. He probably picked me over other people, and I felt guilty about it. But end of the day, you can't kind of force yourself to do something that you don't feel is right for yourself.
- [27:14]
B
Yep, I completely agree with that. How do you maybe let's transition into selling a company? A lot of people listening to this right now, some of them actually had their exits. They've. They've had acquisitions or they've sold their company. You've done it a couple times now. Can we walk through kind of how your experiences has been selling. Let's call it just. Let's just say swag in this case, let's use one example. Sounds like it was a bigger exit. Anything you can share about that, to kind of walk somebody through that's never done it before, never sold their company before, but they would like to sell a company one day. How'd they go for you?
- [27:46]
A
I think the. There's a couple of things that allow acquisitions to happen. By the way, acquisitions are very challenging. They're exhausting, they're time consuming, they're stressful. I mean, it's a very challenging process until the end. I think the best advice I could give. There's two things. Number one, make sure your business succeeds. Because a lot of time when people get acquisition offers, they're so busy and stressed out. The actual fundamentals of the business don't grow or don't succeed as fast as they want it, and then ultimately gives the buyer some out or some doubt that they maybe could pull back or they could reevaluate or they could do these things. You want to give the acquirer 0 reason to ever have any doubt. That's number one. And number two, ideally it's good if you have another person who's interested in buying you. Because scarcity, or fomo, whatever you want to call it, actually allows deals to actually close more frequently. If they believe that they have the upper hand and that they're the only potential buyer who knows they could pull the trigger. They couldn't, right? Really depends on what they needed for. With swag.com is a very interesting thing because we were not looking to sell at all. We were going from 7 million to $15 million. We were growing 100% and customing reached out to us to kind of see how we're doing, you know, in our industry. It was very telling. We were on the Inc. 500 for back to back years, so we were the fastest growing company in the industry. And everyone else in the industry was taking notice saying, who is this swag.com they just started and now they're consistently on the top inc 500. So they reached out to us and at the time we also had about seven other companies reach out to us. But it always starts with a conversation. No one says, hey, we're interested in buying you. It always starts with, hey, it's great to meet other people in the industry. And you kind of read through the noise and say, well, why do they really care? But so we kept the conversation going and we spoke to Custom Inc. For over a year. Like it was a couple of months between their initial reaction, outreach to their second, outreach to the third, outreach, fourth. And they just kept following in our journey and they kept seeing every single month we were growing and growing and growing. And that made them feel, I would assume, like this is a real company we want to work with. Then we met Custom Inc. The team, the CEO, and we hit it off. You know, we thought they were great people, really smart. We shared a very similar vision. It's interesting, Custom Inc. Is very consumer focused and swag.com is very B2B. So we had a perfect synergy. We felt like. And it was interesting that Custom Ink, the majority of their products that they sell is T shirts. And on our side, the majority of the stuff we sell is like hard goods like notebooks, pens or mugs. So there was like a product assortment that kind of worked together. So everything kind of fit. Step calling them, talking to them, talking to them, negotiating. It's all these process to make sure. I mean, if you're selling a business, especially when you don't even want to sell, it has to make sense, right? The numbers have to make sense. You have to be willing to do it.
- [30:33]
B
Were you guys profitable at this time or were you guys not profitable at the time?
- [30:36]
A
We were profitable if we wanted to be, but our strategy entire time was every single thing. We make reinvestment technology. So, yeah, the business, the model is very profitable model in general, because we're not warehousing anything. We're only warehousing things if people first buy it. So it's not like we have to warehouse all these T shirts and then people buy it and then we have to hope to sell out. We only place the orders with our supply partners once we get the order, so we get paid up front, and then we owe our suppliers, like, net terms. So we have amazing cash flow. We're like a marketplace. We've just done a lot of the heavy lifting of figuring out who are the right suppliers to work with, where are the right products, where the right printers. And we spent nine years vetting and testing and making sure the quality is there. But once the order happens, we're funneling it to the right partners who are the experts at that kind of stuff.
- [31:25]
B
What's the revenue, mostly? I'm assuming this is the revenue was mostly on the markup, I guess from your supplier cost, your cost of the supplier, and then whatever your. Whatever you charge. Right? That, that. That's actually the revenue of a company like this, right?
- [31:39]
A
Yeah, exactly. So let's say somebody buys a t shirt for $10. We would pay our supplier $5 in printing and we would take $5. We also had money on the storage fee. So Facebook bought a million dollars with the swag and they're sitting in our inventory. We show them their inventory numbers and they pay monthly fee to hold inventory. Every time they upload the CSV file and they ship it to different addresses, we have a pick and package fee that we charge. We have shipping fees. There's all these other, you know, kind of ancillary things. But the bulk of it was what.
- [32:08]
B
You said, Beautiful, cool. And then for anybody that's like a nerd on like valuations and multiples, anything that you can share on, like that type of business. Like, what is that even in the market? Is it like, it's not straight software multiples of like 5x10x?
- [32:22]
A
No, no, definitely not. It's. It's actually relatively low multiples in general. We did not get such a low multiple. We. We're definitely more than the industry standard. The industry. This is the problem with our Industry because it's very fragmented and manual and a lot of them are not necessarily e commerce solutions. They're more of an agency feel, if you will, that once you buy one of those agencies, theoretically people like working with people. So if that person then retires, they could lose a lot of their clients and it's not as sticky. So the multiples that we were up against, and this is one of the challenges and how we kind of negotiated is you get very low multiples. It's like one times revenue at best.
- [33:00]
B
Got it right.
- [33:01]
A
And we didn't want that obviously because in our mind we were a lot stickier, we were a lot faster growing. We are unlimited scalability.
- [33:07]
B
Exactly.
- [33:08]
A
We could have gone from 100 million with the same team because we weren't doing the production, we were just the funnel, if you will, and the sourcing. So we were able to negotiate a different thing. But it was very unique in our industry because it didn't really exist. There wasn't any comps to kind of compare us to.
- [33:22]
B
I love that. That's super helpful too. I appreciate you sharing that because I think people here, they don't even understand what a multiple quite like really is yet. And they want to build this e commerce business. A lot of our folks listening to this are T shirts. Like your, one of your first, first ventures was like a T shirt company, right? They are a print on demand T shirt company or they are a digital product. They sell digital products online. But it's an E commerce type of function and they don't really understand what a multiple is. And I guess our job is to share with like well, your multiple is how your company is valued and when you go to, to sell that company one day and Jeremy, you can correct me if I'm wrong, you have more experience here. There's two ways, two main ways to value a company. It's one off of like ebitda, which is your kind of your profit essentially. And there's a multiple on that meaning like your $100,000 profits in a year times three, your valuation of that company is 300,000. And then there's the revenue multiple. So let's say you're not making profits, but you could, there's typically like a revenue multiple of a type of company. Let's say your revenue is, let's call it 900,000 and you have a 1x multiple on revenue, then that means you're company is worth 900,000. Anything else there that you want to like share to kind of make it simple?
- [34:39]
A
Yeah, I Think I think the most important thing, and this is like the overarching that multiples don't even really matter if you don't want to sell. So like, you control it, you know, like, let's say you're worth a million dollars, but you don't want to sell for anything less than 3 million, then don't sell for a million. Like, like be okay walking away. And I think that's the biggest, most important thing to have when you go into an acquisition. Know your bottom number, know what you're not willing to take below. And we had these conversations, me and my co founder, Josh, we were discussing like, how much like what we, like we didn't want to sell. And then we had all these people interested in selling. So we thought, well, maybe this is actually a good time because typically when there's a lot of people who want something, it's maybe the right time. It's counterintuitive. People think, oh, like if everyone wants you, then stay away. But in our mind, it was actually the right thing because then you could get people to bid against each other and that people were willing to maybe spend up or down depending on how much they wanted you or how much they wanted their competitor not to have you, if you will. So the, the number that, the multiple, we made it up because it was. If we didn't get the number that we got, we wouldn't have done it. So it didn't really matter what ultimately it was. It was just. This was our walk away number and that's the number we took.
- [35:45]
B
Cool. Very cool. Amazing, man. Well, I think this kind of brings us to the last part of the. Part of the show. Rapid fire questions. Are you ready?
- [35:52]
A
Let's do it.
- [35:53]
B
What's your favorite business book?
- [35:56]
A
It's not necessarily a business book, but it's from a, a partner, my, one of my old partners, Jesse Itzler. I don't know if you're familiar. Yeah, he wrote this song, he wrote the book Living with the Seal. And it's an amazing book about, you know, taking your level, your, your taking yourself to a different level, you know, Jesse Isler, a little background for your audience. World famous entrepreneur. He used to be a rapper in the early 90s. He was know he started Marquee Jet, private jet company, sold Zico coconut water to Coca Cola. He's one of the owners with his wife of the Atlanta Hawks. He's done marathons, 100 mile marathons, all these different things. I was a partner with him in the business that we sold to the public company, the YouTube idea. So he was one of my partners there. And I said, living with the seal. Check it out. It's unbelievable. It will get you out of your funk and it will bring you to the next level.
- [36:51]
B
That's awesome. I'm actually, I have the. The big. His big ass calendar. Yeah, awesome. Awesome. It's cool. Very awesome. And his wife, by the way, if somebody is listening to this, his name, her name is Sarah Blakely. Sarah Blakely. She's the founder of Spanx.
- [37:05]
A
Yep.
- [37:06]
B
Very cool. What's one thing that you wish that you knew before starting in business?
- [37:13]
A
A couple of things. Well, I said in the past, I wish I didn't have ego in the early days or I wish I was okay with failure. You know, in early days, you, you overthink everything. You write business plans, you over. You try to analyze how everything's going to play out. And sometimes you just kind of have to get out of your own way and just start. You don't have to have all the answers. You have to have the industry that you want to go after. If you believe in the industry, you, the idea you have today is not going to be the ultimate winning idea. Most of the time you're going to have to launch something and pivot and learn and all those things that you thought were right, be open minded to being told you that they're wrong if you see that data. Like, for me, I was so confident with swag.com that I thought was the marketing team and it was slapping me in the face and saying, it's not the marketing team. Go after the office manager. And I was willing to pivot. So, like, having that mentality of this is what I think, this is what I'm going to do. Totally. Okay, changing that.
- [38:03]
B
Love that. What's the worst business advice that you've ever received?
- [38:08]
A
Wow. I've had some bad advice. I don't want to call out names, but, you know, I've had some people in the past, investors, if you will, you know, tell me to hunker down when I saw opportunity. Like, for me, when you, when you're an entrepreneur and you're in it and you're living and breathing it, there's other people around you who don't necessarily know the business as well as you. I mean, they might be investors and they might give you advice. And it doesn't mean it's bad advice that they mean bad by it. It just means it might not be the right advice for you. And sometimes you have to forget what people Say and trust your instincts and trust your gut. So for me, there was many times where I was being told something to do and I was very proud to ignore it and just double down on my own intuitiveness and gut. And that allowed us to transform the trajectory of the business where everything dropped by 20, 40% in our business. We grew over 100 because I trusted my instinct and I knew better than they knew. And that's sometimes okay. You're so. I would say worst advice, it could happen. Not something specific. It's outside noise. You know your business better than anyone else does and you should trust your instinct.
- [39:12]
B
Love that. How many hours do you think you work in your business per week today?
- [39:16]
A
Wow. In the early days when I was just starting swag.com and I had legitimately zero money to my name and we had no employees and we didn't raise any money, I was working 15, 16 hours a day consistently. And that, that, that lasted for about three years. It was not an easy time, but a super rewarding time because I frankly learned every aspect of the business on how to do it, in my opinion, the right way. I was a delivery driver. I was the guy who rolled the T shirts. I was the guy who was talking on the phone with customers. I was the salesperson, I was building the website, I was designing the brand. I knew every aspect of the business and I gave it my all over time. That's not sustainable. So now I work like a normal person, you know, But I think when you're starting a business, you have to kind of be obsessed and you have to kind of take it from 0 to 1, going from 1 to 2 to 3 to 4. It's. It's a different kind of skill set. It's more management, it's more delegation from zero to one, you got to give your all.
- [40:19]
B
At that point, gotta be all in. Completely agree. If your family and your friends and your customers, partners, all had to get together and write an honest article about you, you couldn't be involved in this process. Right. And they had to characterize your traits of who Jeremy is. All the good things, all the bad things, what do you think they'd say?
- [40:39]
A
Oh, I think they would say, I'm a very honest person and I'm a very trustworthy person and I'm a giving person. I have the mentality, you know. I don't know if you've ever seen the movie. Jim Carrey movie. Yes, man.
- [40:50]
B
You see it? Yeah, years ago.
- [40:52]
A
Yep, years ago. That's kind of just how I live my life. Always. So I'm always just down. Like, I'm just always down. Like, if something's happening, I'm always doing it. Because in my lifetime, I find, like, a lot of people say no. And you should, like, you know, say no to things. And maybe that's true. Maybe in some aspects with business, you can't take every single meeting. But I err on the side of saying yes to things because you never know who you're going to meet, where you're going to learn, what idea it's going to inspire. And there's so many things I can look back now and say. I cannot believe this all worked out the way it worked. And it was only possible because I went to that one meeting that I didn't think about, or I met this one person who led me to this other person. And those. Those things just kind of transform your life. Not even your business life, but your social life. How many people have you met that you would have met or good friends of yours that you wouldn't have met if you didn't go on that surfing trip or you didn't do that trip to, you know, the football game in Michigan? All these different things. I just think about how I. How my life has kind of got me to this place and it's just become more of like a yes person. So, I don't know, I think just like somebody who lives life to the fullest.
- [41:58]
B
I love that. That's it, man. Thank you. Where can people find you, learn more about you, connect with you?
- [42:06]
A
Check us out@swag.com for swag production. You want your company, you want to order? Check us out for Swag Space. I know we didn't talk about it so much, but we, we could talk about quickly.
- [42:16]
B
Yeah, let's talk about that real quick. What are you working on now? Like, let's talk about that real quick.
- [42:19]
A
Yeah, very quickly. I, I started a new division underneath Custom Inc. Called Swag Space. What we do, it's very simple. We took all of the technology the last nine years, tens of millions of dollars of tech investment in swag.com white labeled it, and giving it for free to anybody who wants to sell swag. So, for example, let's say you're a marketing person who your clients want to buy Swag. They don't buy it from you. They buy it from somebody else. But you have that audience. They should buy it from you. Go to Swag Space, create a website. In seconds, upload your logo, your brand colors. You have a version of swag.com that has 7,500 fully vetted products. Your client, let's say your client's Facebook, you just did a logo for Facebook. You're a branding person. They upload their logo on one of your products. They buy it hits our back and we handle all production and give you 30% of the profit. So if you sell $1,000 worth of stuff on the site, you're making 300 in profit without doing anything, without touching anything. We are the front end technology as well as the backend supplier. If you're event planner and you need to sell swag to your audience, do that. If you're a graphic designer, you're doing logos for people now, you can sell them Swag, you're a marketing team, you could do that. If you want to just start a business and you've never done anything, let's just say you're super early and you want to have a site that looks amazing. We have people who've already created accounts who are doing hundreds of thousands of dollars of sales in the first couple of months of trying it because they're knocking on doors, they're going to restaurants and they're going to their local charities and they're making sales through this platform. So it's, it's really for anybody, any business person, you know, this is a business in a box.
- [43:48]
B
It's basically like it's swag.com essentially, except it's just duplicated that. Now somebody else can put their own, their own flavor on it.
- [43:56]
A
Exactly. Their own logo, their brand colors, their own URL. It doesn't even say swag space. They have their own. We have, we have some people who literally it in half an hour, created the logo, uploaded their colors, had a URL over. They have a business instantaneously launched, a landing page. We, we have all these things that you could do and it's complete for free to use.
- [44:16]
B
I love that, man. It's so cool. We'll drop the link below too. You said swag.space.com yeah, just, just swag.space node.com for that. Swag space. Perfect. And we'll, for anybody listening or watching this, we'll drop links in the description below or in the show notes. Jeremy, thank you man for coming on. I really appreciate it. It's been super fun.
- [44:35]
A
Thanks, Cody. Appreciate having me.
- [44:37]
B
Awesome, man. Talk to you soon.
- [44:38]
A
Bye.