Loading summary
Transcript119 lines
- [00:00]
A
Welcome back to the Operators podcast. We have a new concept we're going to run with you today. It is called help an operator out. If you've been listening to this show for a while, you hear us reference questions that we get that come from all over the place, their YouTube comments, the ECF community, Twitter, we're always talking about common questions that we get. So I said, well, screw it. Why don't we just bring people on to ask the questions directly? Sometimes I'm a genius. So, Garrett, welcome to the show. Garrett is here. He's got a cool brand. Garrett, you're going to start off by describing the brand and then, or just give us a bit of a history. And then we're going to jump into questions and things that you want to talk about. And Mike and myself and Curtis are going to do our very best to not be idiots and actually help you out. Curtis, I am so talking to you.
- [00:50]
B
Okay,
- [00:53]
A
Garrett, Garrett, give us a bit of a background, man. I, I, I want to hear about this. I've been like, I have a doodle. I have dog poodle. He's a dinosaur of a dog. I'd love to hear about the brand. How'd you come up with it? Where is it? Like, give us the whole thing.
- [01:11]
C
Yeah, yeah. Hey, everyone, My name is Garrett Yamasaki. I'm really excited to be here. Thanks for having me, Matt, and posting in the ECF community. Yeah. So we started We Love doodles back in 2018. And so we started as a blog. We sold no e commerce products, nothing. We just, it was me and a computer, and my wife wanted a goldendoodle dog. I was kind of doing research on SEO, and I was like, man, there are two major organizations, the American Kennel Club and Continental Kennel Club, that focus on purebred dog breeds. But there was really nobody covering mutts. And, you know, at the time, doodles are mutts. They're just poodle mixes. And so I decided to create a blog on doodles. And, you know, you go to Domain name checker and welovedoodles.com came up. It was 12. So I bought it and started blogging probably within six months. I knew this would be something pretty big. At our peak, we were getting over 2 million users per month to our website. And then, you know, 2020 came around, and I was like, man, we should try to capture all the margin. We're doing really well with ads, we're doing really well with affiliates, but why don't we create our own product and essentially capture all the margin we could see exactly what we were selling on Amazon. Right? You download your Amazon affiliate report. We're selling, I don't know, a hundred of somebody else's brushes per month. Why don't we just create our own and, and run with it? And so the E comm side really came around starting in 2020 and we started creating products. The first product we launched was a dog brush. And then, you know, we did over a million dollars in our first year. And I was like, okay, we probably have something here. So we started launching complimentary products to that dog brush. And here we are today, 2026. We just passed eight figures last year in revenue. So we are a very low eight figure company in the e commerce space.
- [03:13]
A
I can't believe you started a blog. So like, can we just start with what the hell were you thinking? So like it's 2018 and you're, you're, you're like, I'm totally going to do a blog. That was, that was it. That was the best you had?
- [03:25]
C
I was working in tech at the time. Um, so I had a full time job. I didn't even quit my tech job until the end of 2021. But you know, I was really into entrepreneurship. I knew I didn't want to, you know, essentially I wanted to start my own company from the very beginning. So I was just kind of dabbling. I knew blogging was kind of a thing back in 2018. You know, it's definitely dying, dying now. But yeah, it just, it came to me because I realized there was no competition and at the time I think I was at Google, so I did have a background in search engine.
- [04:01]
A
Okay, so you kind of like, so I knew like, yeah, okay, your, your Curtis is right. Kind of crazy here.
- [04:07]
D
It's super interesting, Garrett, because it reminds me of baseball lifestyle. And I'm, I'm actually kind of curious like, because they started the same way. I think Josh talked about, he posted every couple of hours for like 10 years in a row. And they built the community and then they layered on merch basically on top of that. But it's an interesting idea that you can establish whether or not you have product market fit by first producing content. And do you have kind of like people that want that content? And then you proved it even further by validating that you could sell products to that audience even if they weren't coming from you. And then the last step was actually like adding the product layer in a way. It's super interesting. I would not be surprised if that's not more of the model that you see going forward because producing content is like the lowest risk thing you can do. It's just your time. You don't have to deal with supply chains and POS and the capital and stuff like that. So super smart way to start a business.
- [05:06]
E
That's.
- [05:06]
D
That's awesome. And especially, like, I love that you did it while you were working, because I feel like it's the best time ever to start a brand where you can actually build something that has value even while you're earning a paycheck. Like this whole, like, kind of like, I've got to burn the boats, I've got to go in debt, I got to max out my credit cards. And I just don't think that's the way the world actually is structured today that you can. And. And because of that, you have a lot more kind of freedom and range of motion and in trying things and starting things until you find the right thing. So. Super cool story.
- [05:37]
E
I just want to say, Garrett, you're a brilliant, lucky genius in this whole thing, okay? And you're exactly what a lot of people are like. They're like, what should I sell? Going narrow, where people love something is fantastic and you can find a market and you can build it up. Now you're probably at that point where you're like, hey, I doodled the hell out of this thing for years and years and years. I barely crossed 10 million. How the hell do I get to a hundred million? I got to expand. So you did it right. You started narrow, and now you're saying, like, how do I get out there and get to that nine figures? Is that kind of why you're here in the. In the intense 10 minute research I did on your stuff before we started this? That's what I saw.
- [06:22]
B
Yeah.
- [06:22]
C
Yeah. I think that's the general gist of it. You know, I don't know if we can actually get to nine figures, the company that we have today, but we are kind of pivoting. I'm trying a bunch of things, but we definitely want to grow revenue or we want to cash flow the company. And that's kind of what.
- [06:37]
A
Garrett, can you give me a. My first thing is like, how many doodles are there in the US how many doodle families?
- [06:44]
C
That's a tough question, but I think there's like a hundred million dog owners in the U.S. you know, I. I personally think doodles are.
- [06:52]
A
It's gotta be the most popular, male, most popular.
- [06:54]
C
Everybody has doodle breed today, but none of the Pure bed organizations will claim it as their own. So there's really no known statistic on it. Um, you know, if, I don't know, if I had to guess, maybe 20
- [07:08]
A
million, 4 or 40.
- [07:11]
C
20 to, like, let's just say 40 million.
- [07:13]
D
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [07:14]
A
How much of your market do you think you've actually gotten to, like, what's like, you know, Doodle penetration. That's a terrible term.
- [07:23]
D
Never say that phrase again. We are now gonna get our YouTube channel shut down because of Matt's word choice. I had to.
- [07:34]
A
I feel like there's like six people that are gonna think that's pretty good.
- [07:37]
D
Hey, Garrett, how much of your total addressable market do you feel like you've reached? See that you do it, Matt?
- [07:42]
C
That's a better question. And that. That's kind of the question that I had for you guys too. I feel like, you know, we've probably, from, you know, a SAM perspective, I gotta say. Like, we probably addressed like 40% of our market. We. We are definitely up there for, like, in terms of doodle breeds out there, I feel like most people know of our brand. Most people have likely bought from us probably on Amazon. And so we are getting up there to our sam and like, I don't know if you want to include TAM as like, just dogs in general, because our products do serve all dog breeds. But in terms of SAM, we gotta be like, pretty high, like 30, 40%, which is like most of the market you're probably ever gonna capture anyways.
- [08:28]
B
Fulfill is the ERP built specifically for DTC and E commerce brands. Inventory, purchasing, warehousing, financials, all in one system, built for the way your operation actually runs. There is not an ERP on this planet, not one that has more direct 3 PL integrations than fulfill. They integrate with over 4003 PL locations globally. And most of you listening to this right now are either running your own 3 PL relationship or you're about to. And the second your 3 PL and your ERP aren't talking to each other in real time, you're flying blind. You don't know your true landed costs. You don't know your real margin. You're reconciling spreadsheets at 11pm trying to figure out where $40,000 went. I know because I am on fulfillment. The visibility we have now versus what we had before, it's not a marginal improvement. It's a different game. Fulfill is the only ERP I've seen that was actually built from the ground up. 4D 2C. And it's not some vive coded piece of crap. Believe me, those exist. Fulfill isn't one of them. Go check out Fulfill. Tell them Sean sent you.
- [09:24]
D
Well, one of the things you have going in your favor, Garrett, is you have basically like, I think three tailwinds simultaneously. Like doodles are the fastest growing dog breed. It seems like everybody, for a number of different reasons is kind of gravitating there. For my family, we, we have to have these cross breeds because my wife's allergies. You've got pets is just a, a dominant secular tailwind that people aren't having kids. And so they're having pets and treating them like kids. And then I really think that if you're, if you're paying attention to what's going on in Medicine man, it really seems like dogs and cats are going to live a lot longer. Um, there's some kind of cutting edge research like, and, and you better believe people are going to pay the money if their dog can live another 10 or 15 years. And all of that is just like another way that your, your TAM can expand is that more dogs, people caring more about those dogs, those dogs living longer. And so like it's, it's real. Like, I don't know, it's kind of like a double edged sword when you're like, well, I'm, I'm a really small percentage of my TAM. My TAM's huge, so I have all this room to grow. But I actually think you establishing yourself as kind of the gold standard in your category. Being the dominant player in a, in a good category with good tailwinds is actually a better positioning. Like saying, hey, I'm at a high percentage, but in a really great category. And then I can expand horizontally into other product types, but I also can ride the wave of this thing that's just a secular, you know, tailwind for the next 10 or 20 years is a really great place to be positioned.
- [10:59]
E
You know, Garrett, you're a really smart guy. You wrote a beautiful brief about like, here's some questions I have for you guys, but tell the people who are watching this. What in the hell are you on here for? Hey, you built a great a $10 million business. You're, you're at your home office. What are your questions? What are your goals? Why are you on here? To talk to the three of us. What do you hope to gain?
- [11:21]
C
Yeah, for me, it's just growing the business. Right. I've been a longtime supporter of the operators podcast. You know, Spotify told me I'm in the top 1% on the recap last year, really just trying to figure out how can I grow the business. If you, if we want to jump into the questions, my first question is definitely along my brand name. Right? So we Love Doodles is three words. It's 13 characters long. It's, it's really 13 characters in total. If you even count the spaces, it's 15 characters. Right. So essentially I don't like our brand name. We've, we're, we're really niche and that was a great position to start in, but now I guess I want to expand and you know, I bought all these domain names. Like we love retrievers dot com, there's other dog breeds that we've bought. But I just don't know where to go from here because I feel like we've captured most of our market and it's getting much harder to grow, especially on our biggest market market, which is Amazon. We also are on Chewy, Walmart, TikTok Shop, and our own Shopify store.
- [12:26]
A
How do you generate demand today, Garrett? Is it still largely organic? Is it paid? Which paid channels, like give us a sense for that.
- [12:35]
C
First, to give you some context, I think 60, 65% of our revenue comes from Amazon, so majority still comes from Amazon today. Next largest channel is Chewy. And then to be honest, we have not crocked cracked Shopify at like profitable scale yet. But that would be buy revenue, our third biggest channel, and then TikTok Shop and then Walmart at the very end, and then some retail.
- [12:59]
A
Is it safe to say you don't spend a lot of money on ads then?
- [13:02]
C
Like if you're talking about meta. No, it's probably like max 10, $20,000 per month, so not that much.
- [13:09]
A
Okay.
- [13:10]
C
We have not cracked that channel profitably.
- [13:11]
D
So Garrett, options that are in front of you are do you try to get into the other dog breed breeds or it's basically, do you go wider within the types of dogs or do you try and sell more goods and services to doodle owners? Is this basically like what we're talking about?
- [13:28]
A
Correct.
- [13:29]
C
Yeah.
- [13:29]
D
Okay, well let's, let's talk about that. Let's like examine each of those paths and, and why each one could have merits. From your point of view, what would be the advantage of trying to get into other dog breeds?
- [13:40]
C
I think we can very hyper target and resonate very quickly with these type of customers. So for instance, if we do expand to we love Retrievers, that is one of the top three most pop like largest dog breeds in the world by, by Volume. Right. So we would be able to hyper target and essentially like create products targeted for that specific dog breed. And I think we can resonate well with that audience. So it'd still be staying niche. And we, I, I personally don't see a lot of pet people in this space doing it that way. And so by targeting very hyper specific dog breeds, I think, you know, we, we resonate well with the customer and it's good product market fit. Like, easy to have product market fit.
- [14:25]
D
Okay, and what would be the advantages from your point of view of expanding within doodles and offering more goods and services there?
- [14:33]
C
I would say we have over 100 SKUs today in. We love Doodles. Um, you know, 20 of the products make up 80% of your revenue. And so.
- [14:44]
D
And what are the products that really kill it for you?
- [14:46]
C
Yeah, so the long LTV ones are all consumable. So we do shampoos, dog shampoos, dog detangler sprays, dog deodorant type stuff so your dog doesn't smell. And then we do dog brushes. Those are our core products and sells 80% of our revenue. Yeah.
- [15:04]
D
Cause I mean, when I look at it, my initial read is that this is more of a razor blade and kind of model where the. You're kind of based around grooming, which is somewhat contextual to doodles. I mean, for people who are listening, who don't own a doodle, doodles are awesome because they don't shed. But that's also the problem with doodles, because they don't shed their hair. You have to groom them, you have to detangle them. You have to, you know, like, there's certain kind of maintenance and upkeep that they require that other breeds don't, because they just shed all over your house and you get these big tumble weeds of dog hair. And that's not the case with doodles, which is also why they're really popular. So it makes sense to me that this, like you, you've built a brand around solving the problem of the fact that these dogs don't shed. And that requires maintenance. I mean, I think my very first impression here, Garrett, is that the consumable thing makes a lot of sense. And I, I would wonder, I think the very first place I'd want to dig is what other ways can you get into consumables with dogs? I mean, maybe it is a bridge too far to get into food with dogs, but, like, the first thing my place, my mind went was, could you sell. Yeah, can you sell supplements that are about A healthy, healthy hair, you know, and then it's like, can you start to walk down the dog's supplement path? Because as you mentioned, the consumable stuff is just from an LTV perspective. It's such a game changer. And like my dog, it's actually my current one Bisc. It's not a, it's not a doodle, but it's an, it's, it's a, one of those cross breeds that doesn't shed. And he gets these little like black marks by his eyes, like little tear marks. And so there's a supplement that you give him so that his tears don't leave these black, you know, kind of stains around his eyes basically. And it's like, and I'm on some kind of a subscription and I think thing costs $40 a month or something. I mean it's not inexpensive. It's probably, I'm spending a few hundred dollars a year on the supplement. So I do wonder if that would be the most natural, especially if you've proven that consumables can work, is like, can you gradually just expand that consumable suite? Is that a viable place to grow?
- [17:23]
A
My brands Pela and Lomi have doubled our support capacity without adding a single new higher. And that is because we moved to rich panel. Our CSATs are at an all time high. I think we're in the 90s now. 50% of our tickets are fully automated, which means the team can basically handle two times the volume without burning out or adding more people. And with their trustpilot integration, both brands went from a two star to a four star plus. Actually I think four, four and a half in like 90 days. And the migration was probably the easiest part. I was surprised. Rich Panel handled everything. Data, migration, automation, setup, training. We were live in just 14 days. That's insane. And they guarantee you'll cut at least 30% of your tickets in the first 60 days or you get your money back. Not bad. So if you want to be ready for Black Friday without scrambling to add extra agents, you should just head to richpanel.com demo tell them, Matt from operators or Sean or anybody, we all use this thing. That's why we're promoting it. Tell them that we sent you and they will take very good care of you. That's it. Let's get back to the show. Garrett. I mean the question I have is like what's the hesitation on either path? So like what, what's stopping you from going deeper in doodles and then, and then what is stopping you from going wider into other breeds.
- [18:37]
C
Yeah. So let me answer Mike's question first. You hit the nail on the head for consumables. We are starting a second company very similar to how you started Trevi in the supplement space. However, we're not going to call it Wheel of Doodles. We're going to be general dog and try to create niche supplements. Obviously we will market to the same audience for we love Doodles and start that way to leverage our current audience. But we are actively, it should launch in a couple months, fully launched, creating a consumable and supplement company there. To Matt's point, there's nothing really stopping us besides working capital. Right. So I should have gave a little bit of background on this. I am 100% owner of the company. It's fully bootstrapped. I, I didn't take any outside funding, so it's not like I have every. Basically, we have to be profitable, otherwise, you know, the company's going to go under. You know, I don't really want to take loans, but outside of just working capital, that's kind of what's limiting us. Right? So Today we have four full time employees and probably 10 or 15 contractors and agencies. And that's kind of the way that the business is run. But it's the, you know, it's heavy capital dependent if we want to have a product person and if we want to go wider and expand. But we're just trying, I'm just trying to get your point of view on what you think is working best and then we'll probably allocate capital towards that.
- [20:07]
E
Garrett, if you were my friend, and you are, because we had lunch together in Boston, Montana, did we not?
- [20:13]
C
We did have lunch.
- [20:14]
B
Okay.
- [20:14]
E
And you found out if we were friends, and we are. I would say the annoying thing to you, and I would say before you say, hey, where does my business go? I would say, as a friend, what the hell do you want? Meaning how much money are you making right now in the company? Is that nice? Is that good? And why are we expanding in Doodles? Why are we going bigger in dogs? Why new companies? Why all of these other things that we're doing right? Like, where are you and where do you. The owner, the bootstrapper, Everything is on your shoulders, buddy. Like, where do you want to go? Like, not just more, but seriously, like, how much do you want to bring in? Where do you want to go with this? Because that's really the goal. In three to five years, if you do these things, you want to be where you want to be you and your wife want to get there. Where's that?
- [21:04]
C
Yeah, I just enjoy running companies, solving problems, obviously. I think we all listen to nine operators to run at some point it'd be great to run a nine figure company and that's kind of the dream. Um, I'm still very far from there. Obviously. I, I know that I would have to pivot towards something else. So that's what, that's what we're actively doing.
- [21:24]
A
I, I guess, like, I don't know. Am I the only one that like, I, I would challenge that, Garrett, that you have to pivot to something else. Like there's load of doodles in the world, like a weird amount and like for you to be at just crossing eight figures with the size of the market, I get that you can't put like a total number on it, but like, I don't know, I feel like you gotta be brain dead to walk through the world and not notice that every third dog is a doodle. Like seriously, like every third dog is a doodle.
- [21:53]
D
But, but to also to push back on that, Matt. Like there, you know, there are TAMs for certain things. And you know what Garrett's really saying is they've got an awesome detangler brush, but it's a hard good. It's the kind of thing that's going to also come out of China. And so it's not like, hey, just triple your prices. Like there's just realistic constraints. I think to. I, I think that the insight of if you're going to get to that scale, you really probably can't get there by selling hard goods. It has to be consumables. I think that is just like a given. And you're obviously like thinking that way, which I think is the right way to think. The way that I would frame this, Garrett, is that I think the position that you're in is a superpower. If you allow it to be in, that you have real scarcity. And I think scarcity can force us to focus and to develop the superpower of discernment. I think what you probably need to do, it sounds like in part is you need to make some kind of small investments in some things and prove the concept and then chase the most promising vector with your capital. Because I think part of the point you're saying, I guess I'll take a step back. We talk about this some in, you know, kind of our, our chat groups. Sean's posted a couple things about this online, but if you listen to this podcast, it is so Counterintuitive. You, you think that, hey, if I've got a ten figure brand, I am crushing it. But from a cash flow perspective, it's actually quite shocking how little money can come out of a 10 figure brand that's growing because you have to pay taxes, inventory doesn't get written off against your taxes, your employees are getting paid no matter what. At this point, Garrett, you have to be drawing a salary from things. And so you've got a fairly high bar of how much money you have to kind of make just to cover your overhead expenses and any investment. And so there's just not, there's not a lot of like distribution money, especially if you, that you want to grow. And so like, I think the best motivation for growing out of the stage you're at, which it's like, hey, an eight figure business that pays your salary is awesome. We should never, never look down on that. But the downside is that your flexibility is really kind of constrained. When you're at the place that you're at and getting, you know, to twice your size, three times your size, probably starts to open up the world in terms of the investments that you can look at and in terms of the cash flow that can maybe come out of the company. So I think it's the right goal that you have, but you are constrained and it's going to cause you to have to focus. I've always loved the, the bullets then cannonballs analogy that they, I think they use in Good to Great, Built to Last, which is just, you know, in the, in the 1700s, these ships that, you know, you had these big naval kind of conflicts and the ships had a certain number of cannonballs. They were very heavy and they were very expensive. And so like when you got into conflict with another ship, you couldn't just immediately load the cannons and fire at it, because you could very easily. These cannons were not very accurate and you could just very easily like, you know, kind of shoot all your cannon cannonballs and be a sitting duck early on. And so what they learned is that you kind of aim the cannons. You put a gun on top of the cannon and you shoot. And if you hit the other ship with your bullet, then you load the cannon and then you shoot the cannon. And I think that that exact same thought process is what you're going to have to do. You're going to have to aim at some things and then shoot bullets at them to try and kind of figure out where you want to really use. You probably have the capital to really make a Push at one thing. So you could be right that going more general towards all dogs is just.
- [25:33]
C
It's.
- [25:33]
D
It's better. There's more, there's more potential customers. It's a larger tam. Or you could find that the, the position that you are in doodles and just selling more things to doodle orders, especially things on subscription, is the better path. I. I don't even, I can't even presume to know, but I think you are probably going to have to pick a path and you're probably going to need to experiment to figure out which path is the right path for you.
- [25:59]
A
Call me nerd all you want, but one of my favorite things is when one of my existing software partners, in this case North Beam, adds something that I historically would have had to pay separately for. Incrementality was broken and North Beam fixed it. So let's face it, most incrementality tests are slow. They're manual. One mistake can invalidate an entire test and waste thousands of dollars. If you've done it, you know, not anymore. So only North Beam Incrementality automates your incrementality test design and monitoring, letting you focus on insights and not logistics. They're the only ones who build the test for you using your MTA data. I love this. Northbeam continuously monitors your test in the background, making sure everything runs smoothly and maintains statsig. Once your test is complete, Northbeam then gives you actionable and precise results fed into your northbeam MTA dashboards. Finally, go to Northbeam IO and request a demo today.
- [26:55]
E
You know, Garrett, you have three things that are really, really strong right now. And I think the most important one is you said you love to run businesses, right? So, number one, you love this stuff. And guess what? That is your best lead right there. That's your strength. That is a superpower. Number two, you've already done it. You know exactly what makes you successful. You don't know everything. You just know I did these things and it got me to 10 million. That's awesome. You don't know all the things. But I think, number three, you don't have to go all the way into dogs. I would say, what about testing just the retrievers one, right? Like, stick with the name. I love it already worked once, right? Why don't you do the same thing in the same way into the retrievers, right? You're not going all the way broad. You're just hitting one little category and you're going to find out what happens on that. Maybe what Mike says is correct. Maybe Doodles need extra care. Better ltv or maybe retrievers does the same thing. And maybe you're going to learn something. But I'll tell you this. When you're bootstrapped, which I bootstrapped my company, right? It was all me and my credit cards, kiddo. It is. How can you test something as quickly as possible for the least amount of money to learn something? That's the game.
- [28:09]
A
Can I ask a little more on that, Curtis? Because what's running through my head for Garrett is. Is the next best move. And this might be a. But also, Mike, I'd love to hear you weigh in. This is the next best move for someone like Garrett to think, what's the. Like, what's the thing that I can do that will take me to 20 million? Like, how do I add an incremental $10 million to the business? Or is the next best thing the. What's got the longest term highest amount of like the highest ceiling? So where's the most tam? Like, I'd love to hear just like Curtis and Mike, maybe Curtis start. Like, how do you guys think about that? Because I think that's part of what Garrett is up to, like, up against.
- [28:49]
E
That's why I ask, you know, what do you want, right? Hey, would you be good at 15? You good, babe? 20 would be good at 30. Would you good be 40? And that's an always moving target, right? But I think that you have three leads and you're sitting back and saying, which one do I like the most? Do I go into something smaller like the retrievers? Do I go into all pet brands? Or do I go into this supplement brand which is similar to what I have? Those are the three things you have. Hey, let's add number four, something outside of pets. Now you're a business owner now you're realizing that eventually in the next couple of years, you're going to come up with another idea. And maybe you're the type of operator who could run two or three companies, right? So you're looking, you're sitting back and say, which one is the best answer? We don't know what the best answer is. We can give you lots of insights. How do you test one of these as quickly as possible with the least amount of money to give you some more information? What actions can you take to get you some type of feedback along with what your goals are and where you want to go? Is it 20 million? You could probably do that with doodles and retrievers. Is it a hundred million? You better go all into pets. Or you better go into two different areas.
- [29:59]
D
Here's the first thing. This is super unintuitive. When people are successful with a thing, they totally take it for granted and they just see all of the warts and they don't see all of the, the, the benefits. So you see the things about your brand name that you hate. You see the things about your category which aren't ideal. I mean, it's interesting. You've listened to 9 ops a lot, Curtis. I mean, Garrett, like, it's basically just each of us bitching about how our business model sucks. You know, like, it's, it's just the way that it goes. And I think that there's, it's kind of like the backup quarterback is always like, you know, your favorite player on the team because you know all the, the things your current quarterback can't do. And, and this is the nature of business. So here's the very first thing I'd say is, like, Garrett, you have a great business and you're not going to be able to effectively grow from here unless you first understand what you've built is awesome. And like, protecting that and maximizing that is going to be the most important thing. To fumble this away, the success that you have. Step one is to take for granted what you've already built and to neglect it or in your pursuit of better things, to not maintain it. And I think that you're feeling this sense of, I might be bumping up against the ceiling of what's possible with this thing. And listen, every business has a ceiling. Every business, some are just higher than others. And part of wisdom is kind of understanding what that ceiling is. So it may be that for you to experience more growth in kind of the revenue that your businesses are doing, that you have to launch additional businesses, you have to get into additional product lines. But certainly number one is, man, you've got 40%, maybe market share in like your category and hanging on to that and moing that when you think about public companies and how they're valued, it's a discounted future cash flows. And you've got a business that actually seems to have a really predictable future cash flows, which those are hard to come by. And so like, there's real enterprise value there. Never take that for granted. That's step one. Never take that for granted. What I've done personally in, you know, the first 10 years was like really just building simple, modern. And what I'm going to do over the next 10 years is I'm going to learn from the things that I experience building simple, modern. And then I'm going to use that to be, I would say, more deliberate about only engaging in games where I like the rules and I like how the board is tilted in my favor. And so some of that is knowing yourself. Do you understand your unique. You have some unique skills, I think, that other people don't have. Obviously, we talked about some of them already. But what are your unique skills? What are things you're passionate about? What are some categories or some ways to sell things that are weighted towards your advantages and where the LTVs look good or, you know, you have a particularly good understanding of how you can acquire customers profitably, whatever that is, and then choose to engage in those games. So for me, that's. That looked like, okay, I really have done the hard goods thing, and now I understand that the Internet is really more favorable to consumable products in general. Now, like on this pod, you've got Sean, you've got Curtis, you've got Matt, you got Jason. None of them are really doing consumables. So it's like, you can build great businesses and hard goods. I just personally was like, I want to build a business where, like, I can have a customer buy from me. I mean, like, I sell water bottle right now, and I'm sure you feel this with your brushes. I sell water bottle, and if I sell a good water bottle, you can use this for 10 years. I mean, shoot, you can use this. They could be finding these in the fallout style, apocalyptic, you know, future. Like, these things last forever. And so I might sell you one thing, and then you're just, like, super happy, and you're a happy customer, but that's all you buy from me for the next five years. So I wanted to get into consumables, and that's going to be the thrust of the things that we do going forward. But I also think what I ran into was a realization of, like, here's what's possible in simple modern. And I spent two or three years where I tried to pour too much money into that entity. And we had a whole episode about this. Like, my big mistake was I was like, I'm going to grow this entity because that's what I've been doing for 10 years, and that's what I do. And it got to a point where I realized, like, I'm trying to force feed capital into this thing that doesn't want it, and I'm actually running the business worse because I'm trying to do that. And so I'm going to deploy that capital in new ventures and other things. And so it's worked for us, I think, so far. So the very first best thing is dance with Hubronia. And if you can intelligently invest capital there, you're always going to want to do that first and never take that for granted. And if you can't, then you can look at playing games that are weighted in your favor where you can put that capital to use. But like you said, right now you're in a period where you don't have a lot of capital. And so there should be five to ten ways that you can think of that you might invest capital and you can run little micro experiments. And I mean, there's just no way you're not going to be able to find one of those vectors, which is a good investment of the amount of capital you have right now. That game gets harder as you get bigger because you have more capital.
- [35:27]
B
If you're a founder using AI for analytics, you know the trap. Claude+BigQuery gets you answers that are fast and wrong or slow and right, never both. The problem isn't your analyst, your data, or your tools. It's your business context gap. Sarah's IQ fixes that. Connor, who runs my marketing, cut his reporting time from 10 days to 45 minutes. IQ answers in plain English built on your business logic, consistent, deterministic, and fully transparent with the assumptions in SQL behind every answer. Same answer whether you ask, your CFO asks, or your board asks. And if you're a Claude user, the IQ MCP is ready to plug in today. Claude +BigQuery isn't enough. It needs your context. Get it at the Lincoln Show Notes or go to saraceanalytics.com to learn more.
- [36:13]
A
Listen, I mean, it's like Mike and Curtis are 100% right with everything they're saying. Where I am stuck is that if there's 10 million doodles in the U.S. like, like say 10% of all dogs and you have a supplement that you can give to just doodles. So, like, we have, we literally, you own welove doodles.com and you can get 50,000 doodles at 40 bucks a month. That's $24 million a year incremental to what you already have. Like, the numbers don't actually need to be like, you don't need millions of customers to generate like massive revenue. It's just what Mike is hitting on. It's like literally just category. So my, my first reaction when I saw everything was like, I, I. Where I get stuck is like, just sell. It's like more. It's a product category issue. It's not a dog breed issue. That's my first, like, you know, if I'm gonna fire a bullet, it's product category issue. I have all the fricking doodles. We talk to them like we got we 40% market share. I'm just selling them the wrong damn thing. I'm selling them a durable instead of a consumable. I think the second thing for me, like multi brand is really freaking hard. So like, as somebody who's done it, I don't recommend this path. It's, it's very, very hard. You do lose a bit of leverage when you go multi brand. So like, yes, you're selling to dogs, you still understand dogs. But I am sure there's a lot of nuance with doodles that like doesn't actually transfer over to all dogs. Right? And, and you're not running the, the same playbook again. So like, you're not going to have an SEO advantage in every other breed. Right? Like, that was a 2018 move. It's 2026. We don't even know if SEO is a thing anymore. Like, that's seriously questionable with AI. So like going wide feels to me very risky in terms of brand. And that's just as somebody who, like, I, I probably won't do that again unless what Mike is saying is true. Where like there's two or three things that if I can just rinse and repeat those, I can probably do that in any category I go into and I then have cash. So like, Mike has capital, he has resources, he has capital, he has very deep bench strength in people that work in his favor and incredible relationships with retailers. So like his omnichannel abilities, we've talked about on the show, like those three things that Mike has going for him you might not have. So to do what Mike does, to go wide in brand, you do need to say like, well, do the things I have. Allow me to do that easily.
- [38:52]
D
Well, and to your point, Matt, just to interrupt, to your point, we're going wide in one sense, but we're being a one note in two or three other senses. And that's kind of the key is it's like when we have like a real playbook at this point of like, we are going to be Amazon Channel first, we are going to do consumables and we are going to do it exactly like this. We're going to have this price point and this price point. And this is the strategy and and so, like, really, when you're thinking about expansion, any good expansion is going to be a repetition of something you're already good at in two or three areas. And so that's actually the primary question. It'll be novel in three or four ways, and it'll be the exact same thing you've always done in your two or three core strengths. So it's just worth. Really, the question is just like, what are those going to be? What are your, like, most core strengths that don't change and then the other things around that can change?
- [39:46]
A
You know, it's funny, like, we. The core of all this, Mike, everything we do in consumer comes down to products, markets, and channels, right? And. And brands is like, going into a whole new market, you know, like. Or not even. Like, it's a whole new category. You're not even expanding inside the things you have. So, like, to me, it's.
- [40:05]
E
It's.
- [40:06]
A
You have to sort of stack rank Garrett, in which of those is, like, easiest. So you've clearly done a lot of product, got a small team, but you've got a hundred products, 20. Then do most of the lifting. All endurables, like, and you got some consumables.
- [40:18]
C
That's great.
- [40:19]
A
If you look at Curtis, like, Curtis, your business, you went super wide and deep in, like, product first. Then it's like, TikTok shops. You've been talking about that on the show the last few months. Like, you added this channel and you added owned retail, and all that is getting bigger. Like, Curtis didn't go and say, like, man, I got a problem Leather. I'm running out of to do with leather, right? Like, he didn't go that wide out. He's just been going, I did, and
- [40:47]
E
I messed it up. I went into shoes too quickly, right? I went into shoes too quickly because I'm like, oh, what about the leather bags? I want to say three things, Garrett, that are very important. Number one, Matt said that Matt and I were 100% right. That's. We have never been more than about 70% right in all the things we say. Number yes. Number two, you are the perfect and the worst person for us to talk to because you're a smart listener. And if you have, like. If you go, like, don't talk a lot, Mike and Matt and I are just gonna tell you everything that's in our brain. But what I've learned in this process of us all talking is this. I am starting to come back to the thing that you have to own. Doodles. You have to own it even bigger. You have to own it 20x on TikTok, you have to own it on YouTube channels. You have to own it with interviews and videos of every celebrity who owns a doodle, who, every artist who does who, every family of every. Every lost doodle that was found by a young 6 year old and it saved their family parrot. And now everybody loves it. Like you should be the doodle king. I love in that idea. And then what Matt said is sell something on a more of a subscription, more of a long term basis where you can get your costs down and expand out. So that income, when you get to 20 and 30 million, you're not just paying the Amazon fees, you're not just paying the advertising you have to do on Amazon to try to keep that gummy. You literally become doodles. That's it. I absolutely love it.
- [42:28]
A
I agree with what Mike is saying. Garrett in that category matters. And everything has a ceiling, right? Like the Tam and Sam. Like those are real things. Like we talk about it a lot on the show where I'm just like, I don't know that I'm able to move is like with doodles you couldn't have a very big business just in doodles. Like there's a lot of them. People spend a lot of money on their dogs. There's a lot of channels, there's a lot of markets. There's like so many places to sell things.
- [42:59]
E
You, you start.
- [43:00]
A
You know what's funny, dude, you started out as a media company. You became an e commerce company. And media companies are amazing. Like, and Mike, you know what's hilarious is like we're talking about breadth versus depth here. And Garrett, the, we do a, our management call every morning on Wednesdays. Right before this we had our thing and what were we talking about on how to grow our business? It was like, should we go wider or should we go deeper? And ultimately we were like, no deeper. Even though Garrett, think about it, dude, we serve like what, a hundred thousand people who own E commerce stores, you know, like our actual quantity of humans who listen to us and buy in, like are valuable to our sponsors. And the things is very small. And we all sat around and we're like, now we could get a lot bigger if we just go really deep in this, in this little market we have.
- [43:53]
D
It's easy to want to expand into areas you know nothing about because you don't know why they're hard yet. You know, it's like, it's, it's very intuitive. I, I don't know all the reasons that this other thing sucks or why I'm gonna hate that industry, you know, and, but it's like I'm, I'll. You'll learn them, I promise if you expand into them, you will learn them. Like there are no, there's no easy money anywhere. Is basically like once you kind of wrap your head around that idea like that to make money you have to work hard and you have to be smart no matter what industry you're in. Because there's entrepreneurial people everywhere and they get into those industries when there is kind of like easy money to made and then it's no longer easy to be made. So what you're really asking, the question that you really should be asking yourself is what do you want to be doing? And not where do you think you can make the easiest money? Because what you're really doing is you're trading your time to make money. And so I would do that. An area where you're going to enjoy it. If you're a mercenary and you just chase where you think the easiest dollars are, you're going to find yourself to be very unhappy. So for me, one of the ways that I did this, Garrett, is I, I actually have kind of, I think a triumvirate of like requirements. One is I need to earn, I need to earn money. I need to earn an economic return on my time. One is, it has to be an interesting puzzle to me if it is just me redoing something I've already done. Unfortunately, at this point in my career, it doesn't matter if I can make money doing it. I'm not really interested because I'm not mentally stimulated by it and I don't get that enjoyment out of it. And then the third one is I have to do it with people I really enjoy. There are so many things that I see where I'm like, I could make money in that, but it does not fit the other two criteria of either this would be really interesting problem to solve or the people that I'd work with would be really enjoyable to work with. And so if it's not, I don't do that thing. So I would just say there are some non economic things that you should layer on top of this. This is how you like stand over your life and actually take high agency in my opinion. Is that like to me the saddest people in the world are the people who are just trying chasing dollars. It's like, what a terrible way to live your life. I'm just trying to maximize my income. I'M a mercenary. I'm going to, I'm going to sign up for whatever I think pays me the most. Like, terrible way to live. Don't do it. Anybody listening to this, reject that idea. The most satisfied people I know don't have the biggest bank accounts. They're the ones that are the most intentional about their purpose and how they, they spend their time. Ultimately what you're doing is you're exchanging your time for economic output and for experiences and you want to look at the holistic return on that and say that is something that I feel great about, the holistic return. And you do that, you're going to be successful. I think that's my biggest message to anybody running a business at your stage. And like, I'll just tell you another secret. You will not be happier at nine figures. You just won't. I'll just go ahead and tell everybody listening. There is not a point where it's like, oh, now I've made it to X revenue goal and, and now I feel different. And what I tell people this all the time that like the biggest gift that I feel like God gave me with simple modern and it's financial success is that I don't live my life now in the illusion that there is some kind of carrot out there, that if I got it I would actually be satisfied. Right. And that's really powerful.
- [47:09]
E
Garrett, he's absolutely right. You will not be happier at nine figures, but 10, maybe that's the key.
- [47:17]
D
Check back. Curtis will let us know.
- [47:21]
E
Most AI tools and software don't give
- [47:23]
A
you direct ROI every month, but PostScript does. I run two PostScript AI products at Ridge. Both show up on our P and L Infinity testing runs, continuous A B tests on our SMS automations completely in the background. It's driven $446,000 in incremental revenue. Not just attributed incremental, that's a 32x incremental ROAS with click through rates up 43%. Then there's Shopper, an AI sales agent that answers every inbound text in under 40 seconds. We're running 23x ROI on messaging costs alone. If you want SMS software that gives a proven ROI, go to Postscript IO
- [47:56]
D
and book a free demo.
- [47:59]
A
You know, everybody looks back at past decades as the golden years. You know, it's like I think they made a Midnight in Paris. Did you guys ever see this where like Owen will. I think it was Owen Wilson. He's like, I think that's the character and he's looking at like the 1920s. Every decade he would go back to, it was like, man, I wish I would have lived in the 30s. Those were the best years. Or I wish I would have lived in the like the 20s. That's the same thing with like business size or wealth. It's always like, there's always another level or category. There's always something better. And what I've actually noticed lately, Garrett, in a lot of my friends who have very large companies, like some are actually in the 10 figures, like they're up over a billion, man. They look back at the time when they were like $50 million. They're like, life was simpler. I wish I could go back to that time. Like, dude, we all do that. We all do this. Everybody does this. Like, there's, there's always another siren song in this game. I think it's actually, you can't, it's the thing that comes with being a founder is you actually can't be an entrepreneur without having that. That's, it's the, it's the double edged sword that we all have.
- [49:07]
E
Right.
- [49:07]
A
And that's why like, for me, when I look at like your problem set, I just come back to, I don't know, dude, I think there's a lot of doodles. I think you can sell them a lot more and I think you could have like, and it sounds more simple and I think all of us would probably agree with this that simple is far better to do than complex. Like adding complexity to your life on any dimension is typically a bad idea.
- [49:31]
D
Well, and, and I guess what I would say is to, to kind of hop on that idea, Matt, is to take on additional complexity. I would require a much additional, a much higher return. So like the, the fundamental idea of finance is simply that like risk and reward are inextricably linked, right? That if you want to get more reward, you have to take on more risk. And so I would think about it the exact same way that it's like, if I'm going to have to take on more risk, I must, I, I require a much higher return on invested capital to do that thing. So it's not just like, hey, can I get a 15 or 20% return on invested capital to get into a new category? I need it to be like 150% because of the amount of risk that comes from doing this total thing. And, and this is the muscle that you have the opportunity to build. Capital allocation is kind of the game when you get to the point that you're at. I think that's really what this episode is about is how should you allocate your scarce capital going forward? And the un. The discomfort that you're feeling is. That's actually a hard muscle to build, but it's actually the most powerful muscle to build once you have it, because it will really serve you for the rest of your life. But I would. I would point you back to thinking in terms of risk versus reward, and. And it'll be a helpful. It'll be a helpful guide.
- [50:48]
B
Yeah.
- [50:48]
A
No, Garrett, I actually think that what you. You, in the document you sent over, you sort of hit on this really well, because you actually asked, like, you know, you're talking about retail. Like, there's going into retail that helps revenue, but that the margin feels low.
- [51:02]
D
Right.
- [51:02]
E
Is that.
- [51:02]
A
I think what you said, and Mike's kind of saying the same thing that you put in your document. It's like, maybe that isn't the next best move because the return on invested capital isn't there. Right. So I. I'm with Mike. I think that, like, trying to. Trying to, like, put a capital allocation hat on is probably not a bad idea. Curtis, I don't know if you ever did this. I feel like. I don't know if. If you were thinking, like, allocation of capital with PLG or if you were just more. This feels right. Like, I, I, I'm still trying to get a read on you. If you're like, a gut feel like this is. I think this is directionally correct. Or if you're, like, much more calculated.
- [51:38]
E
You know, I went through different phases, and what I know works is my gut and my instincts. And Maverick said that to me once. He's like, dude, you have everybody talking to you. Your instincts got us here. Don't doubt them now. Right? Like, just continue to go with that. And I'm a big believer in exactly that. But I'm also somebody, and Garrett and everybody out there that's listening, when you know your gut says, this is not working with this employee or this product or this thing. Chomp that thing. Done. Just. Okay. Wow. Hey, that was a great learning experience. That's awesome. We learned that when you shut it down, you don't let it creep and creep and creep. I absolutely go with capital allocation with my gut. I put it out there. I don't call it risk. I just call it action. When you take actions, you can learn from actions. You can get feedback with. Even here. Garrett, you've been able to listen to the three of us talk, you know, and you've quietly listened to all of this Stuff that we're saying here, I tell my people all the time, you come into a meeting with me and you ask questions, you expect me to answer that I don't know the answers. But if we talk about this for a half hour, we'll all leave with a better understanding. I always say, this is the meeting. Let's not have meetings. This is the meeting. We're gonna talk this out and we're gonna come up with something. And through what I'm hearing with everybody else, my instincts are saying I have a feeling what to do with your business. What have you heard that's hit that we've said that gives you a little bit of a sense of what you want to do. What have you heard?
- [53:20]
C
From my perspective, I think it's stay niche. And I think Mike hits on a good point of thinking about return on investment if we're going to make a capital allocation. And I think, you know, I've always been very similarly aligned just from operator podcasts that I listen to with Mike. So, you know, what he says resonates with me a lot.
- [53:43]
D
I really like Garrett, by the way. I just want to interject here to say I really like Garrett.
- [53:48]
A
Yeah, yeah. Mike just needs anybody to pump his tires. Go ahead, Garrett, tell Mike how awesome he is.
- [53:54]
D
I mean, stop, Garrett, stop.
- [53:57]
C
I do have a question, though, for you guys, and it's kind of been bothering me a lot when we talk about scaling off of Amazon. And I know Mike did this with Simple Modern. You know, he went to retail, he did a bunch of other things. A lot of D2C companies, you know, we've been trying to crack Meta for about a year and a half, right? And it's kind of like, when do we call it quits? And, you know, if we're going to operate it at, you know, essentially a break even, we. We don't really want to do that. And the challenges that we've had is we have a relatively low LT or, sorry, AOV on our products, right? The bottle of shampoo is like 15 bucks. The Tangler, 16 bucks. A brush is like maybe 20, 30 bucks. Right. In order to make the unit economics work, we really have to go to bundling our products together, right? And it's just kind of like to get the AOV up. And it's been tough, and I don't. I don't know when to call it quits. But, you know, every kind of D2C company that we work with that's been successful has made Meta work, work in some capacity. I feel like, we're. We're really not there.
- [55:02]
D
I think that you're probably just right. It's probably just not the right channel for you. And this is something that I've had to come to accept with my business, is that every business is predisposed to be successful in some channels and not others. And, you know, we. A couple episodes ago, we talked to Sean and he was talking about what's going on with Ridge. And they're doing great with rings. For example, like, they're selling like 14% of the engagement rings. Sold them in, but there's no way they can ever take that to wholesale. Nobody is wanting to sell Ridge rings and wholesale, so they have to do it through D2C. And in kind of conversely, D2C is not good for selling $30 water bottles. It's just not like, it's like, it's great for wholesale. It's just not great for D2C. And I think that when you're banging your head against the wall, like, I've started to think about it this way, you know, there's the famous axiom that, you know, past results are not indicative of future performance, but I've kind of taken that and flipped it on its head. The best predictor of what's going to happen in the future is what's happening today. Right? I mean, it just has to be like, what you're experiencing today has to be the single best predictor of what's likely to happen tomorrow or next year. And your experience on Meta has been, we are banging our head against the wall. And it's not so much like you said, you're. You're probably running it around, break even. So it's probably not that you're destroying capital in an obvious way, but you're sucking up a bunch of your mind share, trying to pursue something that's not bearing a return. I would definitely say, hey, pivot to trying through the physical world to grow your distribution, right? Is there a way by going through groomers and doggy daycares and veterinarians to grow, you know, the, the brand footprint? Is there a way with wholesale accounts like Petsmart, you know, to. Or Walmart to. To grow the footprint? That customer acquisition is the name of the game. And I think to continue to grow your brand, you have to grow customer acquisition. And you've tried Meta for long enough that I think you have a pretty clear now there will be people that'll be like, mike doesn't get it. I could do it for you. But, like, if you haven't you're a very smart guy. You grew the business on content. If you haven't figured it out up until now, it's most likely because your product is just not well suited for that type of distribution. What you should do is say like here's another way of thinking about it. Product market fit is when it's easy, right? So like when I'm trying, when I'm having to push really hard to get something to work, you know what that tells me? I don't have really good product market fit here. And when the market seems to be pulling it out of me, that means I do have product market fit and that's where I should lean in. An easy way to think about growing your business is where is the place where the market is the most important, Pulling product out of you and lean in there.
- [57:53]
A
That's product channel fit. Mike, like what you're hitting on, which
- [57:55]
D
I think is really important. I guess that's right. Product channel I'm using. It's really important, right? That like in that there are certain channels that are just going to be easy and there's certain channels that are going to be like squeezing blood out of a turnip. And I also, the other thing that I'm probably the most omnichannel of the the sellers on, on the show and what I have learned is there's really a push and pull that when you optimize for one channel, you make it very difficult for yourself and other channels. So for example, we were at a place at the beginning of this year, especially with tariffs, where it's like, do we really lean into higher price points and shrink our business at Walmart and Target and potentially some of our Amazon business? Or do we lower prices up our velocities in those channels but make it just about impossible with our adult products to acquire people D2C. And when we looked at the numbers of our business, it was like very clear. But like it is trade offs, right? Like each of these channels require different strengths to be very effective in that channel. I have yet to see the product that is perfect for every channel. I guess I would say it that way. It is like, you know, like all the wholesale accounts want to get Hexclad, but Hexclad doesn't want to be in those wholesale accounts because it would require them to make compromises that would undermine their D2C business or their Amazon business or whatever their Costco road shows. So that that's probably my general channel advice is that like you should look at what you have a track record of working of working for you channel wise. And then I would focus my efforts on saying again, it's like don't try and go wider. It's a siren call to be like, I just need more channels. It's a much easier to say how do I drive more throughput with the channels that already work for me. If you're scaling an E commerce brand today, ads alone aren't enough. After Sell focuses on the one moment that every brand already owns after checkout and turns the post purchase moment into more profit. Monetize every order with post purchase offers and thank you page experiences without disrupting checkout or hurting conversion. Enterprise grade tech used by Gap, Ticketmaster, Macy's and Target. Now driving results for brands like True Classic, hexclad, Ridge and Jones Road. I would know this is the reason I ended up buying three pans from Hexclad instead of two. After sell has already generated over 1 billion in additional revenue for E Commerce brands. Revenue that doesn't require more traffic or higher cac. So check out After Sell and tell them that the operator sent you.
- [60:23]
A
I think Curtis, you and I are Meta heavy people and I could argue with Mike, but where I would agree with Mike. I think Connor McDonald actually posted about this recently. He said it really well.
- [60:36]
C
Garrett.
- [60:37]
A
Meta is trench warfare and the people. There's a lot of loud voices that will praise Meta. Sean's one of them, I'm one of them, Curtis is one of them. Like a lot of us have built big businesses on Meta, but the reality is we are weirdly obsessive about it. Like we don't think about anything else. Like we just obsess over ad creative, that channel, how to make it work. And if you actually look at like any one of our businesses, if you could just sit and listen and watch some of our group chats. We suck at a lot of other things too, right? Like we're watching this past week Sean posted in our one of our groups, like to Hudson from Comfort, he's like, hey Hudson, I'm just like you. And he had like his best TikTok shops month ever. And Garrett, it was like a laughably small number for John, right? And like they're amazing at what they do. So Mike is. I'm gonna go with Mike. Like I think you know, Meta is, is a game where like certain categories don't work there for sure. But I also think it's more of an entrepreneur and a team thing where it is trench warfare. You really need to be obsessive to make meta work like it requires a level of effort that is insane.
- [61:48]
D
So one of my favorite kind of ideas is that the time that it takes you to disrupt an industry is directly proportional to the amount of time you could be disrupted in, right? And so we all want fast growth, but by definition what fast growth means is that we could be quickly disrupted. And if you can be quickly disrupted, how much enterprise value do you have? Right? So, like, think about this. The reason why meta's so attractive is you can scale really quickly and you can grow really quickly, but what is the inverse of that? That it can go away really quickly. And what Matt is saying is not a bug, it's a feature. Like, if you are going to depend on digital marketing in the meta marketplace to drive your brand, you are signing up for every week. You have to be completely on the ball of the trends or you are cooked and you are disrupted. And this is the reason, by the way, that VC is generally like, I'm staying the heck away from this category, that it is very rare. You'll see so many brands, they have these meteoric rises and falls because they, they catch a, they catch a current on digital that, that works for them. Like they have a particular kind of strategy with influencer or whatever. And it works until it doesn't. It works until everybody copies it and the arbitrage is gone. And so like with your brand, you actually have, I would, I would call it a superpower of like, listen, if you can get in a bunch of BET offices and they're pushing your product, bro, that is so much harder to disrupt than Meta. That is so much better, like from a, like an enterprise value, mate. I'd take that, you know, seven days a week.
- [63:25]
A
Yeah, boring and slow, but super moated, like really hard to rip out.
- [63:30]
D
This is why, you know, they, they say there's riches and niches because of the fact that you're able to build this kind of distribution layer that is going to be very hard for somebody to disrupt because, like, are doodles going away? No. Are vets going away? No. Are people going to spend money on their dogs? Yes. Are, are there going to be major, you know, improvements to dog brushes in the next 20 years that are going to change the way you brush a dog? Not very likely. And so it's literally like you can get in and just be the choice for the next couple of decades. Don't take that for granted.
- [64:06]
A
Again, Curtis, what say you on this, this particular topic?
- [64:10]
E
Who says riches and niches? I've never heard that before. But I actually wrote it down, and I think I'm going to start saying it, even though I don't know what the heck that thing means. Here's what I. I'm just. This is. So when you get a bunch of people talking something through, you just come up with new things that you've never thought about before. And what I'm thinking is this. I love Meta because Meta allows you to go from here to here really, really fast. And that's what all these D2C guys want. Mariana and I were in Miami, meeting with all of these people around this big table, probably 30 entrepreneurs every single one. I'm like, what do you sell? Supplements. What do you sell? Supplements, bro. I sell supplements. Like, the entire thing, right? Why? Because they got it. They thought they could get a low cost of good, high average, and they could slam it with Meta. That was their whole game. They were in there for money. You own doodles. You started writing a blog. You started with a media company, and it took off. That's your deep. That's the pool you want to wait in. That's just. I'm just getting. The more we talk, the stronger I get. Mike's right. Choose the channels that work. Yeah. You don't have time at 10 million to deal with the channels that aren't. Keep getting the best channels that work. Get back to the media company more and more and more. I'm not talking 2x. I'm not talking 5x. I'm talking 10x. The media that you're doing. From blogs to substacks to TikTok to YouTube. To YouTube. To YouTube. Babies and dogs. Babies and dogs. I have on my algorithm three things popping up right now. Okay? Three things.
- [65:48]
C
I'm so scared.
- [65:49]
A
One is terrified of what people's feeds look like.
- [65:52]
E
One of them is the Ukraine war, about how drone warfare is, like, taking over and everything. It's stunning how the Ukrainians have done such an amazing job over four years. Okay? One of them are the sad puppies that are lost along the side of the road, and they're all dirty, and they take it and they clean it up and they go to the vet, and then they show it. Six months later, it's happy. Literally. That is half of my feed, and I can't look at that and not do it. Kids and dogs. Kids and dogs. YouTube. Now, it's not your natural channel, perhaps, Garrett, but I'm telling you, become that media. Become all things doodle. Then when you're actually in there and you're talking to that vet, they're like, we know you, you're the. I love doodles. I want to live.
- [66:38]
D
The point you're making, Curtis, about top of funnel is interesting because top of funnel is very different, Garrett, than, than bottom of funnel and demand capture. And it's interesting also because like, you started the business with basically a top of funnel awareness building mechanism with the blog. So it's an interesting idea that could you intelligently invest some money in top of funnel awareness in some ways potentially. Uh, and, and like. But the thing that we've learned is if you're going, that makes the most sense when you're omnichannel, right? When you are in a bunch of physical retail in. In addition to your D2C because you just have more ways. It's like rain is like what top of funnel is. It's like if. If bottom of funnel is like a fire hose and the top of the funnel is like rain. And so you just need a lot of surface area to catch the demand if you're going to do it that way.
- [67:33]
E
And he's got it. He's on Walmart, he's on TikTok shop, he's on Chewy, he's. He's on all of these things.
- [67:40]
A
He's on Amazon, he's in a lot of capture places. Yeah, you're right, Curtis. He is like you, Garrett. You are in like all of the best capture points from a, from a digital channel perspective. So I think Mike's got a good point.
- [67:50]
E
I'm not going to talk philosophy. I'm going to talk something that actually happened in our business that I'm incredibly excited about. Okay. I have some video people. One of them is called Skater Boy, one of them called Emilio, one of them Nancy, and they make these videos and they take pictures that are down here in Mexico. And I said, guys, I mean, not always be here. You need to create some income for yourself. I said, why don't you try this TikTok. TikTok live. Okay, just start shooting. Just start shooting. Just start shooting. I said, it's going to take you longer than you think. Took them one week, two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, five weeks, six weeks. Didn't see any gain. Yesterday I sat down with them all of a sudden, last 24 hours, five, six thousand dollars they brought in on TikTok live. Now they're excited. Now they're going from little two hours to four hours. Now they're getting other people to come on and they're starting to do them. They think they can do a million dollars this year on it, just off of 24 hour feedback on what they're doing. And I believe it, the numbers play out. Why? Because this type of funnel, this stuff can take some time. But you want to become all things doodle. What's your strengths? Get into that. Deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper. That's what Matt said. I'm getting excited, man. I don't even like doodles and I'm getting excited about this.
- [69:04]
D
The one other thing we haven't talked about, Garrett, just worth mentioning since we're kind of coming to the end, is that the other advantage of being in a niche area and kind of moating is that you, you should be able to drive higher margins. You should be able to drive some operational efficiency even if the growth isn't there. If you can produce the same amount of revenue with less opex, then you, you know, you grow the business that way. And this is like, when we think about growth, it's so easy to be like top line, top line, top line, top line. But it's like, you know, what pays, you know, you know, what produces distributions. It's bottom line. And so if you can find a way to do the same business with half the OPEX boom, you, you just, you know, dramatic. I don't know what that would do to your ebitda, but it probably would increase it appreciably. So that's another thing to think about. And it's the other reason why like mode of distribution and owning an area can be really valuable because your margin profile can be quite a bit superior.
- [70:04]
C
I was just going to say last year, yeah, we, we did look at everything and I think one of the biggest points for more profitability was lowering our cogs pretty much across the board, especially for our liquid products. So I feel like we're pretty not, let's say 80, 90% optimized there. But that, that is a really good point. I think last year all of our distributions basically came.
- [70:28]
D
Yeah, and it's, it's just a point. Like example is every year you're trying to say what's the part of my business that's the easiest to grow? And some years it really isn't top line. It's, it's like looking actually at your internal cost structures. And I've always, I mean like, I've loved the idea that you want to focus on an area where you have the most agency and control. And the place where you have the most agency in control is what do you pay to your suppliers, what do you pay to your people? You know, These things, you get to basically decide those things. And so anyway, like, I, I. When in doubt, you can always look at that. We had a similar thing with Simple Modern, where I. At the end of last year, I was just like, man, we've just got to negotiate a new world with our supplier, and we have to go to them and say, we need these numbers, but. And we can't do A or B, but we can do literally anything else you need to get to these numbers. And we were able to probably add millions of dollars to the, you know, to cash flow by working collaboratively with our supplier. So I. I would recommend that to everybody that, like, you, you can't necessarily control the market and the demand piece. You can just kind of go out there and try and compete with for it, but you definitely control. You have complete control over what happens within your company.
- [71:39]
E
So, Garrett, this is a new thing that we're doing where we. Somebody comes on and they say, hey, here's my business. What do you three think about this thing? So we need to have something in about a year from now where you come back and you say, hey, that Mike nailed it. Matt was. Matt was pretty good, and Curtis was the down. Something like there like a 1, 2, 3. You kind of got to give us that because we're throwing a bunch at you. Here's the thing that I know with every business owner, you've spent years doing this. Every decision you made, you can justify. You can say, I did that because of this. Of course you did. So we all make rational or what we think are rational decisions in order to break into something new. We have to hear different ideas. We have to become comfortable with it over time. We have to take small actions and feel comfortable until we feel comfortable enough to take that risk. Because that's what you do. You ask people, you get information, you weigh, and you balance it. And so Word has given you lots of different thoughts for you to say, what do I feel comfortable taking some type of action, getting some feedback until I go more into that? So hopefully some of this stuff that we're throwing out there is helping you, because I'm excited and it's helping me.
- [72:57]
A
Garrett, any final words, man? Anything you want to ask or talk about or. You good to go on your way and tell Curtis he's an idiot? In a year,
- [73:06]
C
I'm good to go. Thanks, guys. I really appreciate it. It's a lot of food for thought. I took a bunch of notes, and I'll have to replay the episode as well, too.
- [73:15]
D
Yeah, this is great. Garrett. And I think you're right where a lot of the people that listen to the pod are. And so congrats on what you build. We do too. Little congratulating, like. Like, it's awesome to start anything. It's incredible what you've done, and not just because. Because business is more than just making money. It's like you are serving, you know, just, like, millions of dog owners. And, like, that's awesome. That's like shopping.