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- [00:00]
Podcast Advertiser
How the hell did you guys do what you've done?
- [00:01]
Matt
I lost $5 million overnight and major retail in Australia went bust.
- [00:05]
Sean Frank
Do you think your 25 year old self would have understood that or would he told you to go off?
- [00:09]
Matt
I went and reverse engineered all the people that actually made heaps of money. I'm like, surely heaps of people lost a lot of money and went bankrupt. When you actually do the research, there's a ton. And then I convinced myself at the time because I lost this money, I'm going to be successful because all these other people lost heaps of money. So it's like my rite of passage in order to be ultra wealth. The difference between authentic money and inauthentic money is that has some kind of inherent meaning to it where you actually do the act without needing any money or gratification in the so there's this
- [00:33]
Phil
concept of like never build on somebody else's land. Aren't we all doing that? Aren't we all 100% building on Zuckerberg's land?
- [00:39]
Sean Frank
Then you're like this, I'm going all in on digital brands.
- [00:42]
Matt
Can't control what you look at, but you can always control what you see. Life's just a game of perspective. You can't connect the dots looking forward, only back. All that matters is what story you're telling yourself at the time as to why that happened.
- [00:53]
Mike Beckham
Welcome to the Operators Podcast. My name is Mike Beckham and we are proudly brought to you by Fulfill, After Sell Rich Panel, North Beam, Sarah's analytics and Postscript. We are a community for entrepreneurs that are building things and if you want to be a part of this community, you can listen to the podcast. But you can also go sign up for our newsletter. A ton of awesome information in there. We also partner with E Commerce Fuel, a forum for you to connect with other entrepreneurs that are building businesses where we can learn from one another. So without further ado, onto the pod.
- [01:27]
Fulfill Representative
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- [02:07]
Phil
Okay. Welcome back to our listeners, our fellow operators. Today we have a friend of mine. I've known Matt for two or three years now. Matt, or yes, another Matt. And he's got a really strange story. He has bounced all over the damn map of building companies. I think you're really going to enjoy this. We're going to talk about how this guy has gone from losing 5 million bucks doing something that we're all very familiar with, all the way to building a pretty substantial company today, and now even turning around and saying, how do I go from just making money to having some impact? We're going to cover a lot of ground. So I want you to stick with this episode. Sean and I are going to kind of just pepper Matt with lots of questions. And to start it off, Matt, why don't you introduce yourself, Tell us a little bit about your background. Like, where did you start? How did you get to where you are today? And then we'll kind of like, take the conversation wherever the hell we feel like it.
- [02:57]
Matt
Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me. I think it's the first podcast that I've been on that I've actually, actually listened to, so that's cool. So I've been in business for, like, last 20 years at the age of 17, and I pretty much done anything you can think of, not by, you know, having some sort of strategy. It's just like whatever made sense or whatever made money. The time I did it, like, as an example, you know, I was getting my tattoo removed. And I guess during that process, I thought I could do it better. So I just have started my own clinic. But where I guess I am today stems from this one business that I built called Inspire Brands Group. And what I used to do, I used to develop brands and sell them to mass retailers. And I started that business when I was about 21 years old. And the way I got into it was that I started importing other people's brands. And during that time when I was trying to import other people's brands, there was one brand in particular called Maktivia. And that Mactavia brand was like, max show of the Year award, whatever. I saw it online and I applied to get that brand, but then the owner of that brand wants come visit our operation in Sydney, which I didn't have any. So at that time, I literally went to my account, I said, I need to borrow your office for a day. And he's like, what do you mean? I'm like, I need to borrow your whole Office and your team. I'm going to rebrand it. I'm going to take off your plaques, put on mine and I'm going to introduce this founder of this material brand to the whole team and make up roles for the whole team. And so he let me do that. I remember one time when we're actually one of the officers, I said to the guy, I'm like, this is our finance department. It was like three or four people in that room. And the guy turns around and goes, why do you have three or four people for finance, for import, wholesale business? Like it's a lot. I'm like, yeah, we're crushing it. A lot of invoices send out. So that's how naive I was at the time. But funny enough he bought the story, gave us the rights with that first product that got into retail. And soon after that I kind of started putting other brands but started seeing that I had constraints of much margin the retailers wanted and I started saying the brands that I was importing didn't really do anything that I couldn't do myself because prior to this I've been to doing a buy entry buying trip in China at the age of 18 doing some watches. So I was familiar with China and at that point the first brand I launched the headphone brand during the whole big doctor Beats era. And the way I got into retail with that headphone brand was that I did a deal with Sony Music in Australia where I gave them 10% of all sales and they became like my influencer army. And they would do promos for me, they'd put the headphones in video clips and with that kind of, I guess collaboration, I got into a major retailers exclusive deal and that kicked off me and building my own brands. So I developed like any brand that I thought was cool and had opportunity at the time. But what I did, I created like hyper niche brands. Like I had a brand for sports headphones, I had a brand for drones. I had actually developed, you know the words world's first flying Angry Birds toy because I had a license to that. I then started doing license like Easter eggs for Manchester United Liverpool. So that was a great idea. So I had this like relationships with these retailers and I started creating brands left, right and center and bringing products until I was about 25 years old. One of the retailers went bust. I lost about 5 million overnight which forced me to pivot and from that moment then I said I'm going to take all my next brands Vex consumer online. First brand was skywalkers. Did about $2 million in its first four months from that brand, people started to take notice. Like, how did you do it? A friend of mine who owned Elite Subs in Australia asked me to do his marketing because he saw what I did for Skywalkers. We took his supplement brand from 500k to a million dollars a month in 18 months. That formed, like this digital agency. And from there I kept trying to spin up brands, sold some, close them down, until, yeah, five years ago, I launched Kill Skincare with my sister. And it was the first kind of global brand that we started. And we might do close to nine figures this year. And yeah, we got better. I think one of the fastest growing skincare brands in the world recently.
- [06:37]
Sean Frank
Matt, one thing you said before we got started is you, you left Sydney, Australia, because you didn't like the hustle and bustle and people being too money focused. You moved to an undisclosed location in Europe, but then you ended up making a company that makes a ton of money. So is that just irony or was that like the focus the whole time?
- [06:56]
Matt
It's that lesson of really creation. You know, when you detach from the outcome, it just comes to you.
- [07:01]
Sean Frank
Okay. Yeah.
- [07:02]
Matt
The less you care, the better you do it.
- [07:04]
Sean Frank
Well, I think you're living proof of that, man. So, okay, how does a young man with great skin make a skincare company? So you should give us the background on, on the company real quick.
- [07:13]
Matt
Yeah, so I was in. Great show. My sister was in Australia. She kept sending me all these skincare products to try, like literally post it notes, morning, night routines, and as a guy into anything. But I was into biohacking. And she got to Croatia and believe it or not, like people in Croatia were calling me like, Benjamin Martin. Whatever I was doing was working. I was like reimbursing my aging. It was all because of biohacking stuff. Nothing to do with all the skin care. And she walked into my room and showed this massive LED industrial panel. And then she really wanted one. And when I told it was like five grand, her heart sunk. And for her whole life she wanted to start a brand, particularly in skincare. And that's when I thought, like, this probably good entry point because I believe in the technology, I've been using it. And at the time we actually thought were the first ones to ever think of a mask. And then we went online, was like 15 brands. But that was a great entry point because I think it was like a light bulb moment that a lot of these, I guess, clinical treatments aren't accessible to everyone home and that was kind of the mission of the company, to make it more accessible to people like my sister. And that's what we kind of started.
- [08:11]
Sean Frank
Sean here tell you about Saris analytics and Sam Ridge is profitable every single day. And we've taken that super seriously since we built this business. We track contribution margin by day. We look at the SKUs we sell every single day and we have to do this manually up until Saris Olympics came out. We take all of our SKU level data, we build it into the data warehouse. Everything that goes into making a true P and L I get on a day to day basis. Seres Pulse gives you clarity so your COO and your CFO and your CMO start speaking the same language. Contribution margin shifts teams away from hoping profits survive the season. To manage them in real time, book a walkthrough with the Saris Pulse team today. Click the link in the description and thank you Saris for bringing you this show. I mean, great category. I mean, you know, you mentioned 15 brands. I know Omnilux is a player in the space and we've seen other players. I think it just shows that like what looks like a red ocean is actually a great place to build. There's obviously a bunch of demand for, for these products. Right. And like you said, they work, man. So what was the first year like?
- [09:13]
Matt
First year was, was a struggle. I mean I think if someone asked me to sell the business or do my capital back, I would have taken it for sure. It was a struggle at any point, but they like was high. You know, I think anytime you're selling a product AOV of 350 or above, it requires a lot of education and so quite a lot of brand building. And we had to create some sort of associations with our brand to demand a high price point. So until we got the mechanics right in terms of influencer marketing side, it was a struggle. It only really took off probably year two or year three. Year two probably is where we had our light bulb moment when we actually went to another category. And because we went to another category, we found a product that we could acquire more customers with, that brought more attention to the brand and that's what really helped us. Yeah.
- [09:57]
Sean Frank
And so if I'm getting, getting ahead of stuff, maybe tell us where the brand is today and then we can work backwards.
- [10:02]
Matt
Yeah. So this year we'll do close to nine figures or on track to do that.
- [10:07]
Sean Frank
We.
- [10:07]
Matt
So we started about four or five years ago. We're in multiple product categories at the moment. We're in LED Water filters, microneedling at home and in the normal serums and stuff like that which released our hair growth helmet. So that's where we're currently at. Yeah.
- [10:19]
Phil
And everything's kind of like built around skincare mat or is it something else like as far as brand goes?
- [10:25]
Matt
Yeah, it's all around skincare. I mean like, like anything. I think the mission of the company kind of changes as you know, you develop and things what we thought were going to be D1 but not year five around this crossroads now where we're trying to understand what we even stand for as a brand and that's probably the hardest thing to enter in so many product categories and probably too early to be honest. But we just want to stick to that narrative of bringing clinical treatments to home because that's what we're kind of best at. I think we're really well classed in building distinct products in the market. So like look at our mask, look at the micro infusion. Even water filters we have a patent on. We kind of use these five different elements to create distinct products. We always try and change the design, we try and change the style, we change the materials, change the experience. Then we try and add some emotional benefit we call like distinct pentagon. I think because of that we've been able to go into product categories that are trending but stand out enough to where we can get influence on board because our product is unique enough for them to want to pay off our brand for. A lot of other brands enter the market doing OEM products and I think they struggled in terms of getting influence track.
- [11:26]
Phil
If you go back to the start, the. You said the first year was hard and that was just when you were selling the.
- [11:32]
Matt
The led. Yeah, the mosque did.
- [11:35]
Mike Beckham
No.
- [11:36]
Phil
Did you ever figure out or ever crack like some way to sell a higher AOV product? Because yeah, like I'm. Dude, I've played in the 350 plus space. I think Sean, you've got some things that are up there. It's.
- [11:45]
Matt
The more.
- [11:46]
Phil
The more expensive it can get more difficult.
- [11:48]
Matt
Right.
- [11:49]
Phil
Particularly with matter.
- [11:51]
Matt
Yeah. I think the hardest thing is especially in the early days because you're got cash constraints. The attribution you're. They're measuring the product off is too short of a window and only. So this year we probably changed it to look at clicks and deterministic views over a 60 day period which we're now looking at a lot longer window because we have probably the cash to do it and we have probably the confidence to do it where you know, year One we didn't. And spending into something like meta on the mask was kind of a scary, scary activity. And that's why we relied more on the influence at that stage. But the influences is a lot longer tail approach.
- [12:21]
Phil
Right.
- [12:21]
Matt
So today we're seeing it work, but we're just looking at the attribution window as a lot larger.
- [12:26]
Sean Frank
Was this your first foray in E commerce? Did you do it straight to brand builder?
- [12:31]
Matt
No. So I used to build brands, consume brands and sell them to mass retailers until, yeah, one day I was like 25 years old. I lost $5 million overnight. Major retail in Australia when bust. And at that point I said, I'm not going to direct to retailers anymore. I'm going to build direct consumer. And the first brand we built was called Skywalkers. Went from like 0 to 2 million 4 miles. And at that point I was like, all right, this is probably a better play for us. And that's when we started building the whole digital team.
- [12:56]
Phil
Oh, dude, you were, you were old school wholesale bnb and you had a retailer go down and that's how you lost money. My, my. Sean, I don't think I've mentioned this. My business partner, he, I mean, he wrote a book partly about this, but he was selling toys when Toys R Us weren't big enough. It's like not an awesome time.
- [13:18]
Sean Frank
Yeah. Matt, Matt, what, What retailer took you down?
- [13:22]
Matt
They call them Dick Smith in Australia. Have you heard of them?
- [13:24]
Sean Frank
No, no. But, you know, I, we, we have a, we just have a friend lose $7 million off of Joanne's Fabric, which is like a fabric store in America. And they, they of course went bankrupt because who the hell is buying fabric? But it's like a hobby store. And yeah, what sucks is there's just no recourse to that. Like, you buy your products and you, you're not a creditor. You're at the very, very bottom of the stack. Everyone else gets, gets paid before you did you get clawed back at all. I don't know if this is Australian law, but if you do get paid, like even like six months before the bankruptcy, the creditors can come after you for the money. And so like, not only, but not only do you lose all the open accounts payable, sometimes they try to get more money out of you and it's just. It's a messy, best messy business.
- [14:07]
Matt
Yeah. Yeah. It's actually funny you said that. That's exactly what they tried to do, but for whatever reason we kept fighting it. They kind of forgot about it. But that's exactly what they tried to do. Like I couldn't believe it the day that my accountant told me. It's like, all right, so they owe you like 4mil plus that meal they paid you like two months ago. They can actually go off that as well. That was like reality broken.
- [14:25]
Sean Frank
Yeah, it's a stupidest thing on earth, man.
- [14:28]
Phil
So okay, I gotta ask then like the. You went from traditional like retail wholesale, right? You got bit there you go direct to consumer. So there's this concept of like never, never build on somebody else's land.
- [14:42]
Matt
Right?
- [14:42]
Phil
But aren't we all doing that? Like aren't we all a hundred percent building on Zuckerberg's land or, or TikTok or like how, how do you, I mean I'd be curious how you both think about this, but Matt, how do you think about this?
- [14:54]
Matt
I mean concentration, risk is real and you just do your best you can to diversify as much as you can. I think even with cure today despite. I know and I know Sean says it a lot like we could probably invest a lot more in Meta earlier but because I had like PTSD from what happened, I was so advent to not get spending on metal. So we try to make long channels work like we make channel like Google work I think a lot better than other brands and I think the influencer side and our TikTok shop is giving us a nice distribution curve across all the different platforms. So we're not really reliant solely on Meta.
- [15:24]
Mike Beckham
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- [16:10]
Sean Frank
What I love about the Cure brand is that you guys are doing basically five different product verticals and they're also compliment like they all just really help each other. Like you know, no, I haven't done anybody else to shower filters and light masks. But like if you have a hair growth like mask, you know, sheriff, like shower filters are going to help with that. So I love how it all works together on this idea of building on other people's land. I mean this is the biggest problem with retail is that like you get a po, you're all excited, you're like, you're like, oh, this is going to build, I'm going to build a real business with these partners and it's so easy for them to screw you. Right. And then like, you know, when you digital world, Amazon's very similar, it's like they can ban you at any point, right. Once you get to Facebook shopify, you control more of your destiny and it's just understanding you're always going to have to use partners but then putting, putting your trust in partners that have the balance sheet to back you up. Right. You brought up Influencer a couple times. I mean that's rather new. Like you're a legacy brand builder, you were building, you know, retail brands, then you go digital. How'd you embrace Influencer?
- [17:10]
Matt
I mean, so when I was 21 years old, I built my first brand of headphones when I was bringing into like the retailers. That's when Beats took off and I was like, how long cut through when I've got all this brands coming through? And what I did, I actually did a deal with Sony Music at the time where I gave them 10% of all my sales and every single artist was to promote my headphones in their video clips, in store appearance appearances. And that's how I got into retail early on. So I was doing the Influencer marketing piece on a different kind of scale. Yeah, like 15 years ago. So it's kind of a natural progression for me. It's a lot easier today. But yes, I was very familiar with the whole process. And then like in my mind I create this thing called brand impact units where I essentially look at like the reach that we're spending in terms of advertising dollars. What associations are we transferring and what trust are we giving a lift on the brand based on our spend. So I'm very much thinking about what creatives are doing what besides acquisition. And that's why the influencer part for me, when I'm trying to pair a certain associations and create mental real estate in the consumer's mind is critical, especially for skincare, it's all about trust. It's all about for us, the clinical level. So I have to use influencers to associate that trust and transfer it to our brand. For me, UGC and stuff like that, trying to build trust and associations or skincare brand wouldn't cut it in terms of trying to build the brand at the same time. And I feel like if we went the whole UGC route we were just like putting pill trying to find the next angle, you know, the next acquisition channel consistently without building that brand. That's the way I've always kind of thought about it.
- [18:39]
Sean Frank
How do you overcome the cost? Every time I talk to a female first or skincare beauty brand, the cost of influencer is just crazy. Right? So was it, was it because you started so like in the TikTok era it was just easier to work with TikTokers or like, you know, typically you're probably getting quoted $300,000 for videos or whatever. So how are you overcoming that?
- [18:58]
Matt
Yeah, it's insane, I think having amazing gross margins. But also we didn't really use TikTok until October and I think just the agreements we had working with creators on a long term deal, like we'd spend like maybe 3,400k one creator a year. But we're able to consistently test new angles with them through dark posting and whitelisting and eventually will become profitable. It's very hard I think when you're engaging on one influencer and you're expecting the first angle they're going to use with them by your white listing to actually work. Like anything takes iterations. So for us having that I guess timeline to be able to test new angles with them was what saved us, you know, because we might not hit it the first one but we normally hit, you know, second or third for sure.
- [19:39]
Phil
Where's the conviction come to do that though? Like the, I guess that's, I, I, I don't know Sean. Like that sounds great in hindsight Matt, but at some point you have to sit there and say like I'm going to just start spending money on these creators. And to Sean's point, when you're selling to women, these creators can get very expensive.
- [19:55]
Matt
Yeah, yeah.
- [19:55]
Phil
Where, where, where did the conviction to say like, you know what we're just going to do? Like we're just going to go all in on like this person or these people and we're just going to test a lot of stuff and it's expensive. But I'm like I'm really, I have, you must have had high conviction that it would work. But like where did that come from?
- [20:09]
Matt
Yeah, I mean it came from starting at the bottom and working the way up. You know, we didn't pay $300,000 the first year. We paid 2,000 5,000, 10,000, 15,000, and you slowly work your way up. And the good thing is that as you're working your way up, you've already proven all the angles and essentially you're going to give almost the same script to another influencer. And because they have a different avatar, different audience, you know it's going to work, you know it's going to hit. So by then, by the time we're spending a lot of money, we had proven angles, we had proven scripts, and we're proving landing pages and offers where the risk for us just wasn't as high as potentially other brands.
- [20:41]
Sean Frank
And what I was going to say was you actually talked about two things, like, you know what, you have dark posts, whitelisting, partnership ads. Typically when people talk about influencer, they're talking about trying to get a return on those on the post, right? So like having your influencer post and like drive traffic from that post to your website. And I think that's basically all but gone in the modern era, right? Like it's really like you're paying for the brand rights to the creative, then you're going to run it on yourself. And if you can build a system that does that at scale, you do just unlock new customers, you have best performing ads. But like it's influencers as creators, not as, you know, media units. Right. Actually trying to get impressions out of them. And I think you guys were early to that because I think people are just waking up today.
- [21:24]
Phil
But okay, can I ask you both this? I'd love to dig in deeper here because I think that people listening to this, I see this on X all the time. I see it in questions that I get. If you're, if you're advising somebody to run this playbook like Matt, you made mention we started at the bottom. What does that mean? Does that mean you start with smaller creators? Does that mean that you try to do deals with larger creators where like there's upside, incentive, like how do you tactically, how would you both approach that Right now for some, like I'm a new brand, I want to start working with influencer creator. How do I start at the bottom?
- [21:57]
Matt
You start at the bottom just by going after like the smallest creators essentially. And you try and find the avatar that resonates most with certain UGC that's already working, right. And just doubling down on that avatar angle, but for a whitelisting kind of influencer. And we're doing tests now with a sort of report yesterday where sure, our return on ad spend is higher with the Bigger creators, we're measuring people 100k and over and 100k under, but the costs are also higher. And our actual net is actually very similar in terms of the reach and I guess the profitability we get from creators under 100,000 over 100,000 in the end once we net out all the cost. But the reason we go for the bigger the creators is more for the brand perspective, not so much the acquisition perspective. So I think anyone can go to creators with 10, 20,000 followers and still have similar results to what they'll have if they have a big creator.
- [22:46]
Sean Frank
Totally what we have found is that like, it's really hard to make the bigger names pencil out. But I think your question was, if we're starting over today, how are you building a brand with and engaging with influencers? You know, I wouldn't start a brand without an influencer today. I think it's like, it's just an unfair advantage. You should, you should add to it. And if I go to, you know, here's website, they have six doctors on there, right? Like, it feels very much like, hey, this is a clinical product with stamps approval on it. And I'm sure that really helps, dude, like I want to buy this stuff because here's another seven doctors on this homepage, like all telling me how great it is. And I wouldn't sort of brand without those relationships to start. But look, I think, I think, I think there's a great nugget of a journey. We got, we got, we have to tell this story. Okay, so you are, you know, finding ways to sell indoor retail when you're very young, right? 20 years, you're the youngest guy walking into, you know, Kmart, which is still popping off in Australia, right? And you're getting those deals done. You get burned bad one time and you're like, hey, I'm going to go all in on digital. I'm going to build out some great digital brands, right? What were the first ones?
- [23:51]
Matt
The first one was Skywalkers. It was the hoverboard movement. And it was funny because. Yes, because it's funny because two years before that I had a Power bank brand in mass retailers and it was, it was going nuts. It was called Juice up and it was like had a point of sale next to the counter and it was something like 10,000 units a week or something like that until a customer dropped one of them and it caught on fire and I had to do like a national recall on TV and stuff like that. But what that maybe to be is like an Expert in batteries. And I had a PhD in batteries. So when the hoverboards came up, my batteries were the safest. And I was on the news again for all the right reasons because my hoverboards were the safest in Australia. So that brand took off and went, yeah, did like 2 million the first four months because of all the product development stuff I did and the knowledge I had before. But then it was clear at that point that, yeah, I pretty much had to just keep developing brands and going direct to consumer, I guess.
- [24:42]
Sean Frank
Okay, so are you just focused on the local Australian market? Are you dropshipping from Hong Kong to America, or are you just focused on Australia?
- [24:50]
Matt
No, at that point I was just in Australia market. Yeah. So I had that brand. I had a sports equipment brand as well as supplement brand. I was just focused on the Australian market. I think I was just too immature in terms of an operator until like five, six years ago. I'm like, I'm just putting myself in such small opportunity. Vehicles like this doesn't make. It doesn't make any sense. And I think what made me realize that is when I have a digital agency as well. And my friend Davey, you guys probably know David Fogarty, we're doing the media buying for him back at Woody, when they were like a 4 mil up until 250 mil. And then when I saw what he did, that was kind of like my Eric Banner, the four minute mile moment. I'm like, you know what? I actually build one big business instead of having all these different 100 small brands in Australia. And that's what led me to.
- [25:30]
Sean Frank
Gabe's a legend. He's out there, he's helping people, you know, all the time. But what you did with the brands. So, like, you have a brand doing, let's call it, you know, you have five brands doing $10 million a year in Australia. Do you just shut them down for a little while? Do you sell them? Are you taking profit distributions off of them? Or is it really just a grind? You're just launching new ones. They're shutting down. What's going on?
- [25:50]
Matt
Pretty much launching and shutting down. But I sold probably three of them. I sold three of them. But also in the midst of all this, like I had licensing brands. Like, yeah, I was always like an addicted entrepreneur. I had the license to Umbro, the fitness apparel. So I was manufacturing, wholesaling that for like 10 years. I sold that business last year. Like, I had retail shops, I had tattoo removal, laser clinics. I was kind of doing everything. Like, nothing really made Sense. And I was just, yeah, just starting businesses, selling them, starting them, selling them, buying them, closing down. It's just like havoc.
- [26:19]
Sean Frank
Yeah, it kind of seems like a rat race, bro. It seems like you're doing like a million things where like, if you could put your focus, you'd have a billion dollar brand right now.
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- [26:52]
Phil
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- [27:15]
Matt
Well, that's what everyone always told me. And then I guess that's what kind of happened with qr. As soon as I focused on one
- [27:19]
Sean Frank
thing, a client went, all right, yeah, okay, cool. So I want to dive in all those other random businesses you had. So like how do you, I mean, if you're 20, did, how did you get into, you know, the brand building into wholesale? Did you get to go to China and you're like, oh, I could do this. Or like, what was, what was the unlock?
- [27:36]
Matt
Yeah, my first buying trip in China was 18. Another business I did, I was doing licensed watches for a couple of brands. That's another whole story. But the first time I got into import wholesale consumer goods, I got the rights to a product called Mactibia. You guys heard of it? It's like 15 years ago, used to wirelessly protect your PC to your TV. TV before Apple Airplay was around. So I got the rights to that and I set up a website, got the rights. And the guys like, or the fans like, hey, I want to come and you know, see Operation Australia. My operation was in my Audi A3 with my subwoofer like, you know, I had no office, nothing. So I said I was the marketing manager and I go to the accountant, Look, I got this guy coming to Australia, I need to take over your office for Nate. And he's like, what do you mean? I'm like, I need to take over your office. He's not. Come work whenever you want. I'm like, no, I need to change the signage. I need to use your whole team. I need to make up roles for everyone in your team. So when this guy comes, I introduce him to the whole team. It's like, all right, whatever. So this guy flew in, picked him up, brought him to the office. I remember once I went to a room, I said, this is the finance team. There's like three people in there. And it goes to me, three people in finance. Pimp called wholesale. That's a lot. I'm like, we're doing a lot of audits. You know what I mean? I had no idea what I was doing. And they tried. And then I went to a third party warehouse that was my warehouse, got the rights to that product, got into retail, and then soon enough, I was importing a couple other brands. It was like probably three or four different brands. And then I realized, like, I've been to China before. These guys are doing nothing that I can't do. And I really didn't have the margins to give to retailers that they wanted. So then I started developing brands. And that first one was a headphone brand that I. That I mentioned. And then what I kind of realized was that all I have is literally the packaging. The traffic's in the store. All I have is the marketing tool, is the packaging. I can't afford anything else. So then I started creating, like hyper niche brands in every sector. Like, I had a sports headphone brand, I had a drone brand, I had a power bank brand. All separate brands. Because that was only compete. And that kind of strategy went well. And the retailers loved it because I gave them heaps of margin. The packaging was beautiful and, yeah, valuable to the end user.
- [29:31]
Sean Frank
Okay. And then Obviously, you lose 5 million bucks, it blows up. Does that, does that basically set you back to zero? You mean you're 25 years old with that, your whole nest egg for like, like you. You've been grinding for like eight years at that point. But, like, how much of a reset was that?
- [29:45]
Matt
It's probably like 80% of my net worth at the time. Yeah, yeah, Ground zero. But at the same time, I had that hoverboard company, at the same time I lost that money, the other one took that hoverboard company took off. So that's what kind of fuel the next stage of investments, I guess. Yeah, I was lucky enough.
- [30:03]
Sean Frank
Hands very full. Okay. So you, you start, you start growing up these little brands. You have a digital agency you're basically doing everything. I think. Did you say you have. You had physical, tattoo remove clinics? Like, you're, you're in brick and mortar Retail too.
- [30:15]
Matt
Okay, yeah, because. Because naturally, you know, I went to go get my tattoo removed and I went to the best place in Sydney and I walked out. I couldn't put my hand in, in my T shirt, how much, like, they ruined my arm. I was like, I can do this a lot better, so I'll just start my own. So that was like, the thought process behind that.
- [30:31]
Phil
How are you? Are you fighting this itch every day now?
- [30:34]
Matt
No, no. My life's so much better. Less anxiety, less stress. It's amazing.
- [30:40]
Phil
So there's no pull to say, like, you go into a business now and you're like, I can do that better.
- [30:44]
Sean Frank
You're.
- [30:45]
Phil
You're, you're actually got. You develop the no muscle.
- [30:47]
Matt
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm a big, big better of the no muscle. Yeah, I love it.
- [30:51]
Sean Frank
Okay, so you had. You had about two dozen things, and then what was the actual switch to go all in on the skincare brand? Right? So, like, there's you doing a million things. I mean, it's only five years old or ever. So what were you doing in 2019? What. What did your life look like then?
- [31:06]
Matt
Yeah, 2019 was that. It's like five years ago. I actually took three years off from the ages of 28 to 31, and now we launched his brand. And truth be told, I launched another brand at the same time. I had a civic playbook in my mind. I launched a company called Football Supplements. And this was supposed to be for my sister. This was. I wasn't supposed to be involved in this business. I launched Football Supplements, had football summons dot com. That was the brand name. That was Domain. I had, like, Athletico Madrid. I was a sponsor of. I had Barcelona players, I had Real Madrid players, and there's just no product market fit. I lost, like, one point, I don't know, $5 million trying to start that brand. After 18 months, I closed it because Cure was taking off. Football subs was, like, declining. And I jumped on the Cure skincare bandwagon. But, yeah, at that time, I thought that was going to be like my $100 million brand, but it wasn't. And Skincare One was doing better. So then I started helping my sister.
- [31:56]
Phil
It was the thesis, like, so you. It was like the whole influencer thing. So the supplement company had all the soccer players, you got secure skincare doctors. Like, that was the same. That was the thesis yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [32:07]
Matt
And I like white listing with the big clubs, and they've never done that stuff. I thought, oh, my God, no one knows this. I do. It's like five years ago. I can white list of Arsenal and athletic and Madrid has to work. Turns out it doesn't.
- [32:17]
Phil
I'm actually surprised that didn't work.
- [32:19]
Matt
Me too. I was still surprised.
- [32:21]
Sean Frank
Yeah. Yeah. So I'm not. I have seen a lot of people waste a lot of money, like, in. In sports niches because they just assumed, like, oh, my fans are gonna love this or whatever. I know. I know a brand that, like, they gave, like, you know, Messi, like, a million dollars for ad rights and photo shoots. And they're like. And they had, like, a collab with them. They're like, yeah, we sold 300. And it's like he posts on his social. He has like 50 million followers or whatever. They sold 300. It's just. It's the dis. The disconnect there. But, yeah. So, Matt, my question was, like, yeah, 2019, the three years you took off, what were you doing? Because you were. You were doing everything on earth. You got burned out. You took three years off. What was that time? What was that monk mode like? What was that time period like?
- [33:01]
Matt
Dude, that was a moment for, like, self discovery. That was a lot of traveling. I got my skydiving license. I put all the businesses, like, under leadership and actually made more money without me, funny enough, but. And I just, literally just traveled the world. Did, like, spiritual stuff, psychedelics. Try to understand, like, what do I actually want to do for the rest of my life? Like, because at that point, like, I still made good money. It wasn't like FU money, but I made good money. I thought I should have been a lot happier than I was, or I just wasn't, whatever reason. So I just went on, like, an internal spiritual journey during that time. And I said I wasn't going to do anything again unless there was certain meaning attached to it and the football stops. Like, I used to be an aspiring football player. I thought that the reason I didn't make is because I didn't understand, like, the nutritional side of things. And that was one of the major reasons. So I wanted to, like, help that for other football players. That was kind of the play there. That didn't work out, but. But yeah, that's why I didn't want to start anything else unless it meant something to me, because I was trying to. I wanted to, like, make money that authentically. And I think the way the difference between authentic money and inauthentic money is that has some kind of inherent meaning to it where you actually do the act without needing any money or garification in the process. So that's what I was trying to find.
- [34:06]
Sean Frank
And what would be FU money? Like what. How much money were you looking for that whole time?
- [34:11]
Matt
That's a great question. Like 100 mil. Yeah.
- [34:15]
Phil
That's a very big number.
- [34:17]
Sean Frank
You can, you can, you can do.
- [34:19]
Phil
You can say those words long before you get to 100 million.
- [34:22]
Matt
I know.
- [34:23]
Sean Frank
Also, you're living in Croatia, man. I'm pretty sure, I'm pretty sure you could do it for like 15.
- [34:30]
Matt
Yeah, I know. But you know what? Croatia is actually more expensive than Australia to middle impression. People really will be shocked to hear that. Yeah, people be shocked. So I was, I think I was telling Matt the other day, like, you can't get loans past $500,000 personally. Personally. So anything I buy, I have to buy in cash.
- [34:45]
Phil
Yeah. So your cost of living in Croatia could be lower, but the, but at like in dollar terms because, like, you don't have access to the financial instruments that like other countries.
- [34:56]
Matt
Yeah, but not even like my penthouse was like 4 million U.S. it's not cheap. Yeah, it's not that cheap.
- [35:04]
Phil
In a population of eight.
- [35:05]
Sean Frank
Wow.
- [35:05]
Phil
Biggest Croatia.
- [35:06]
Matt
What? Eight people.
- [35:07]
Phil
Million people.
- [35:08]
Matt
There you go. Oh, yeah. That's expensive. Yeah.
- [35:10]
Phil
I thought Canada was bad. Geez.
- [35:12]
Matt
Yeah, it's gone nuts here.
- [35:13]
Sean Frank
Yeah, but that's, that's New York prices.
- [35:16]
Matt
Yeah.
- [35:17]
Sean Frank
But, you know, I think I have some bad news. Everyone I know that has over 100 million, they say the FU number is even bigger. So I think, I think it just keeps going up.
- [35:24]
Phil
Never enough, man.
- [35:25]
Matt
It's never enough. That that was back then. I mean, like, my burn rate personally is like €35,000amonth. So I think my, my, my concept of like how much I need has drastically changed.
- [35:36]
Phil
Yeah.
- [35:37]
Matt
Yeah.
- [35:37]
Phil
I think that comes with age, too.
- [35:39]
Matt
Yeah, I think so.
- [35:40]
Sean Frank
Maturity. So I think, I think we're starting to get pieces of your whole story together. Right. You're a young hustler. You're doing, you're doing like a million different things. You, you figure out this niche. I'm going to make OEM goods, basically. I'm going to buy them in China. I'm going to get some sort of brand on it and make it beautiful. I'm going to sell it to these retailers and for a while, life's good. You're doing as many of those as possible. And then you get punched in the face one time, and it takes down 80% of your net worth. Then you're like this. I'm going all in on digital brands. I got Facebook ads working. I got hoverboards. I got. You know, I'm going to spin up four or five of these. I'm on a digital agency, and that works for a couple of years. And then you. You have a big aha moment. You see that somebody could sell stuff outside of Australia, and you're like, I have to do that. So then you scale it up, you take a couple years off, you come back and you're like, look, I want to do something that actually I would do for free. Like, I want to actually go out there and help the world. And you're like, I'm going to do supplements. Because I. I wanted to be a professional football player, and I just needed to do this one little thing, and it doesn't work. But life. Life's funny, man. You know, it'll. It'll. It'll rob you with one hand, it'll give you gifts with the other. You end up. Because your sister wanted, you know, LED lights, you end up having this amazing brand doing $80 million a year right now. So I think things worked out because I think the skincare brand is beautiful and it's totally crushing. Matt, you have something to say?
- [36:59]
Phil
I want to, like, did you. On all of these things? Were all of them bootstrapped? Was everything out of your own pocket?
- [37:06]
Matt
Like, if you've ever taken any.
- [37:08]
Phil
Any investors, anything like that?
- [37:10]
Matt
No, no, definitely not. And there's, like, no chance in Australia that's going to give you a loan for anything. Like, I remember even throughout the. The period when we're selling to retailers, I had to factor invoices to get paid, like, three months. It was, like, excruciating because, like, no one in Australia is going to help. You know, the financial institution there is not helpful for small businesses. Yeah.
- [37:29]
Phil
I don't think Americans realize how amazing their system is compared to every other freaking country.
- [37:36]
Matt
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I go, okay, that word. Purchase, order, binance. I'm like, bro, what? Like, this does not exist in Australia. Like, it's crazy. Like, I remember having to. So at one point, like, I went to my parents, I'm like, man, I've got this order from Dick smith. I paid 30%. I need the 70%. Like, just let me extend your mortgage. I'm not risking my house on you. Whatever. So then. And then. And the contract we had, it was 30% per annum as A return. That's how desperate we were. So the first person I shopped it to is like, I'll mortgage my house. 30%. Yeah. And that's what we had to pay for like years as an interest rate.
- [38:10]
Phil
Wow, that's worse than loan sharks in like.
- [38:13]
Sean Frank
Yeah, we can man at Yeah. I think 30% illegal in America. You know, it has gotten a little bit better. I think there is more like private equity capital coming into Australia, but the multiples are still worse. So like, if you could become a global brand, try to become a global brand. I think like the tools we all use, it's like look, if you're in Australia, you're running ads on Facebook, which is an American company, right? We're using the same social media, listening to the same music. Try to get as global as possible. And like, it's just not that hard, right? If you're going to pick a market to sell into, obviously America's the best market. And then like, if you're doing that, you might as well go everywhere, right? We have a great Australian business, but it couldn't support the company, right. And when I meet Australian entrepreneurs that get stuck inside their one little market helps to Canada. Happens to Europe too. You got to just, you got to just go abroad, dude. So let's talk about that with, with Cure. How are your sales breaking out? You've grown super, super fast. You said you just launched on TikTok in October. So how did you get from zero to $80 million faster than most people?
- [39:13]
Matt
I think it comes down to our creative strategy. You know, I think we have a very creative strategy machine. You know, we have this thing called a spherical scaling system that we built internally. So it's like the first stage is angle architecture where we take the use case of the problem and we combine over avatar. But super, super hyper personalized. Like, you know, someone's got acne. It's like a teenager has hormonal acne and that's like one angle. And then we look at the awareness levels of the ad. So is it unaware? Is it problem aware solution aware product where most aware and we actually modify our spending based on where it sits at that awareness level. So we create an unaware ad. We're happy to spend more into that unawareness ad and then as you go up the funnel will spend less and less. So it's that sophistication and then scaling with formats I think allowed us to, to get to this because I like, you know, I'm the coaching company now where I coach equal brands and that's the only thing I keep preaching. It's like angles and offers, angles and offers. And I don't think you have to really think about anything else until maybe you get to, you know, multiplayer fingers.
- [40:12]
Sean Frank
Hearing you say that, it's no surprise you're running a great brand. Because for a long time, like this is like during COVID brand founders were just people who really liked their product or whatever. Like, and the people who are surviving now are amazing marketers. And to be a great marketer, it is all about creative right now, right. You know, there's a debate about if it's. If you could have too much creative, right? But it's like, no. If you're trying to scale up, the more angles, the better, the more individual pieces of content that are unique. People hear that, they just end up shooting the same video 10 times. And it's like that doesn't help anybody. It's like you need to have, you know, you need to have 50 different ways to sell to 50 different people. And if you want to scale, each one of those gets a thousand bucks a day, right? But when you add up 50, you're at $50,000 a day in scale and you do that over and over again. So no, it does not surprise me. You're crushing it. So let's talk about getting over to tick tock. Like are, you know, you're not a tick tock shop brand or you're a certain shop brand first, obviously you're going to crush over there. So what was the delay?
- [41:11]
Matt
I mean, we got on there. When was it? I think we had some issues in terms of getting, I think it was October. We started actually scaling. We probably got on there may, but we could didn't get approved at the start because we're like invasive with the needles and stuff like that. So eventually new SunLink we got approved and we scaled pretty aggressively. I think we'll number the one the top 10 terms of TikTok shops in like October, November. But once we started actually looking too deep, we're making any money from it. And the more you dig deeper into it, like some weird thing happened where we used to get say about 30%, 40% of our revenue was organic. And that made it profitable for us all of a sudden like a switch in October, zero organic revenue. Once we tripled aspect. So all of a sudden we're in the negative. And ever since then we haven't been able to really bounce back and we're still trying to work it out. Asking the TikTok shop reps they can't help us. And that's like the game we're trying to play now is trying to see if we can actually make it profitable. We're doing holdout tests with work magic at the moment to see if that actually incrementally helps other channels. But at the moment it hasn't really been proper to invest more in. And everyone talks about this whole incremental effect around the channels. We haven't seen, we haven't seen it yet.
- [42:17]
Sean Frank
I definitely agree with you that there's no more organic revenue. It's like we were, we were talking to, you know, best in class brands and they're like, yeah, 90% of the revenue is going to come from GMV Max campaigns. It's like, okay, so you're going to be. It's, it's just, it's just a new way to get ad spend out of us and commission and whatever else. Right. But bummer on here about the halo. Everyone promises the halo, that is what like this mythical thing everyone has been talking about. But hopefully you find it. Hopefully you can find that holdout. And if not, you're crushing on meta.
- [42:47]
Matt
Yeah, exactly. We'll see. You'll stay in 10 days time.
- [42:49]
Phil
I want to talk about how. So you built this company with your sister, right? What is the division like? How do you guys split up? Who does what and how do you actually run the company? Like who, who is running the company like and how does, how does the whole organization work? It's like all of this sounds awesome. That's a lot of growth very quickly to be bootstrapped. So like operationally you got to be buttoned up.
- [43:14]
Matt
Yeah, I mean, she's offense. Sorry, I'm offense, she's defense. So she's everything product related, I'm everything marketing related. And the only time we butt heads is because obviously she's trying to build a brand and no one really knows what a brand means. And you know, if we advertise in a certain way might not be on brand and I think that's the only time we kind of butt heads and that's hard. But apart from that, I think it works great because if you actually get a hand on our products, I think our products are literally world class. I think she spent a lot of time and done an amazing job on it. But yeah, that's where the troubles lie in terms of what brand is and how do we still scale while protecting a certain brand image, which we don't really know how to quantify, dude.
- [43:55]
Sean Frank
Well, Taylor's oldest Time, man. You're like, no, I want to run the, you know, Black Friday offer ads in October. She's like, no, it's bad for the brand. Going back to the product, being best in class, what you guys have done is something originally talked about is putting soul in something, right? Like, you know, we. We have any commodity. Could we get into, like, like our luggage business, right? Like, we have to make it really appealing to people. And like, you know, you can't really win on features all that often because it's like a luggage is a piece of luggage. It's like where it's going to be just as light as everybody else and just as durable. But you have to, like, make it look like it has soul and then, like, people will actually end up purchasing it. You guys have done a great job with that because so much of the LED mass market looks like American Psycho. It looks just like horribly designed, like scaring kids or whatever. But you guys actually, like, make it look elegant. And I think that's a huge part of your success, is like, the aesthetic angle. So your sister did a great job on that, man.
- [44:49]
Matt
Yeah, she did, yeah. Yeah, she crushed it. Yeah. The distinct products that we make is definitely a big, big marketing play for us. Without them, our job would be hard in itself.
- [44:56]
Sean Frank
And you could see this business being five times bigger just because you have those different product lines, right? You could have serums on subscription, you could have the micro needling on subscription, and then you have these big AOV products to really, you know, get people in the door. And you talked about that early on. As you said, you had a high air view product that, like, you were trying to scale and it was hard. But then you found this second product line that got people into the brand. What was that second product line? Was it the mask?
- [45:20]
Matt
No, the second product was the micro infusion. It was at home. Microneedling. Yeah, yeah, that was. That's our main acquisition product. And that's what really helped us. I think when you're trying to decide products always have to have a purpose, you know, I mean, once by acquisition, one's for aov, maybe once for ltv, the filters were clearly an ultimate play for us. We're actually potentially looking to go into. We are going to test telehealth as well for skincare as an LTV play. So we're just trying to really angle our marketing towards, yeah, different pillars to make sure we can scale the business profitably. But I think just on that, in terms of product development, for everyone listening, it's not as hard as people think. Like, honestly, you can go and get a product design agency to design, like, the cosmetic look and feel of your product fairly cheap. Like you look at some of our water filters. I think the one there's some of the most beautiful ones, especially the faucet one probably costs like five grand a design. And then you take the design, you go to the factory and use the factory's engineers to actually bring to life. But I think a lot of people get stuck with product development thinking, this is really complicated part. But if you're just looking to redesign it in a certain way, it's not that expensive.
- [46:21]
Sean Frank
Well, we should unpack all that. Because you hear about agencies for everything, right? For email, for paid social, for media buying, for whatever. Uh, but yeah, you're totally right. There are design agencies, but they will help you make new products. And yeah, you can spend just like any other. You could spend $500,000 to make something and you spend five grand and what it comes. I, I think you, you nailed it. That you should design something independently and then you bring it to a factory who's actually going to make it, and you have them engineer it. Because where a lot of times people make mistakes is they have the designers and engineers working together and they're going to engineer a product that is too hard to make. That happens all the time. And then you bring it to a faxer and they're like, this is not how we make it. So I think, or we can make it, it's going to be 3x the cost or whatever. Right? You can get 95% of the esthetic with no increase in cost if you bring your designs over to the engineers. But if you say this is the final thing that has to be engineered, it'll be five times as expensive. We see this happen all the time.
- [47:16]
Matt
Yeah, 1,000%. 1,000%.
- [47:18]
Phil
Unpack that a little further. So if you're saying to somebody who wants to develop a product, don't start at the factory, because they're going to be looking at it from an assembly and an engineering perspective. You want to start from industrial design.
- [47:30]
Sean Frank
If you go to a factory, we've all been to China, we've all seen, we've all been to the Canton Fair. Maybe this is changing over time, but typically Chinese factory partners are very bad at design, right? Like, it's almost like a joke that, like, typically the way a Chinese designer makes something better is to just add more features. And how often do you see something that just does a million things you're like, dude, nobody wants this. It's just. They're just like, it's the platypus approach. They're just, they're going to keep putting more stuff on it, right? So you. That's why buying off the shelf products, they all look the same, right? And they're, they're floating out of the graphic. So you want something unique, so you design something. Okay. And design is just the aesthetic look of it, right. And you have a function or idea of how you want it to work. But then you go to a factory who actually makes that product, right. And you say, hey, whatever you're doing, it needs to kind of look like this at the end. And then you work together with them to engineer a product that actually works with their supply chain. They have the inherent knowledge of how to make the thing anyway. You don't really know that. And then together you built something that looks beautiful. And like, you know, our luggage is a good example of this where, you know, we could have just done an away clone. We could have just done a model Monos and away are the exact same bag. Right. We wanted to make a different one. We would add metal to it. So we have a design and then we go to a factory room. It has to kind of look like this. But we don't engineer that product. You know, we work with them to engineer it. So that's, that's the tip for everybody.
- [48:49]
Phil
You've also, you've spent quite a bit of money on product, though. Like, I think to what Sean's saying, like, you guys, you and Christina are not afraid of investing in product development.
- [48:58]
Matt
No, I mean, for the mask, it pro costs us 200 grand. 250 to start with. Because we also built an app, so we have a customizable feature. In terms of where you want the treatment. You can have different anti aging under the eyes or acne of the chin, whatever. We probably spent a couple hundred grand developing that mask at the start. Yeah.
- [49:14]
Sean Frank
Also mold fees, right?
- [49:16]
Matt
Yeah, Molds and stuff like that. Yeah, dude.
- [49:18]
Phil
Tooling is. Tooling kills.
- [49:19]
Matt
The molds do kill you. Yeah, yeah. I mean, she designed some new packaging recently, which is beautiful, but the molds for the packaging cost us like 80 grand, which I was shocked about.
- [49:29]
Sean Frank
Yeah, yeah, put it in a box, bro. But you know, at least, at least there's no sizes, right? It's only less than 20 skis in the whole business. Yeah. Because the, the killer is like, you know, shoes molds are so expensive because it's like you have to. Do you want to do half sizes. Okay. It's like, you know, 250 grand. Are there any categories you've avoided? You've done so much stuff. Is there anything where you're like, oh, that's too hard, I shouldn't do that. Or like, in retrospect, would you have any tips to like products you should definitely not do?
- [49:59]
Matt
It's a great question.
- [50:00]
Phil
Ours, Sean. The answer is ours. Like that's always the answer.
- [50:05]
Matt
Yeah, Look, I don't know. I think the only thing you shouldn't do is stuff that you don't actually like. I think the older I get, especially I think with AI coming into play where we're going to have abundance of resources everywhere, I think it's more important than ever to actually do something you love and sell something that you actually like, no matter what that is. I think you can make anything work if you like it and you want to do it for a long enough period of time.
- [50:25]
Sean Frank
Dude. Except for football supplements, apparently.
- [50:29]
Phil
Yeah. Just not that I was going to say. I have a further question on like how you guys are running the company because you said you're offense, she's defense, you're marketing, she's product. Where does like operations, supply chain, like finance. Where does all that roll up to me? You okay?
- [50:46]
Matt
Yeah, yeah. I still run that part of the business. I just have a lot more experience in that, so wouldn't make any sense. And I think her sort of genius and what she loves the most is making products. And I don't think it makes sense for her to do anything else.
- [50:57]
Sean Frank
But that I 100% agree. Typically I say there should be three business a product person, a marketer and then an everything else guy. Kind of seems like you're the everything else guy and the marketer. So maybe at some point you hire and everything else got a COO or somebody else.
- [51:11]
Matt
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [51:13]
Sean Frank
And also the reason why the COO is the easiest one to hire is just like it is. It is the most transferable across brands.
- [51:19]
Phil
Right.
- [51:20]
Sean Frank
Like you don't want to hire a bad marketer because they'll kill your whole company and you can't hire a product person. But you know, shipping stuff from warehouses is more or less a commodity. You know, skill set. Love my COO though.
- [51:31]
Phil
So Matt, on the, like the, the brand and where it operates now. But I would like to know more. You've talked about sort of like meta advertising. You talk tick tock. What other channels are you selling in? How many markets are you guys selling it? So to get to this number that you're at now like, like talk to us a little bit about like the, I guess like the supply chain of this company like channels where you're shipping product to all of it. And how the hell do you do that?
- [51:56]
Matt
Because I think the biggest challenge is my sister wants to sell everything to everyone at whatever cost because she just loves like she's so passionate about it. So we're pretty much selling globally 80 of our marketplace in the US and you know the big English speaking countries, probably another 10, another five in Europe and then we have warehouses in the US UK and also China and we ship from China to the rest of the world and and all that stuff. Like it was such a headache tonight before but we recently we no year and a half, two years ago we jumped on the fulfilled bandwagon and that made everything so much easier because first we just couple of headcounts and our business sometimes when we sell out of certain bundles we weren't able to actually mix those bundles and fill up certain gaps in our product line. But still on the back end we could. So we never we were out of stock where before we'd have to always go out of stock. But because fulfill and they're like back end engineering we able to create different bundles on the back end where the customers wouldn't see the website would stay the same and allow us to keep selling. So that kind of helped us you know, sell more products to more people in all these different markets. And if someone was out of stock in a certain warehouse we could route it to another warehouse and ship directly from China. That allowed us to keep up with the growth that we're having because we're scaling that quickly. As you guys know you sell pretty quickly sometime and you don't really forecast too well. And that system actually allowed us to be a bit more yeah lenient with our forecasting.
- [53:23]
Sean Frank
And if you have five product lines and five warehouses it's like do the complexity gets insane right when you add in bundling. Are you doing any wholesale as well or any Amazon?
- [53:32]
Matt
We just started probably Amazon properly in October as well. We were just so under resourced I didn't realize what it took to actually win on Amazon we had one like you know we had one guy doing PPC a bit and this and that. But in our category now we have like a team of like seven or something that we have like a mini fractional team and that's what's changing and for us just investing a lot more resource into making that, that channel work.
- [53:54]
Sean Frank
I mean you're hitting on all the good points about a Fulfill right order management system, order routing. Eventually you do demand, you know, planning, demand, capture, and they're like, how do you make sure your stuff from China shows up at Amazon on time? Because Amazon's not your warehouse. You can't control it, you can't overstock it. Like you have, like, especially, especially if you start doing, and I recommend you do this, Amazon in the uk, Amazon in Canada, Amazon in Europe, like they're going to give you 50 square feet and it's like, how do you make sure it always is full all the time? What's up, operators? Welcome to the Rich Panel ad read. Rich Panel has been a sponsor for over 12 months. I've been a paying customer for over 12 months and guess what, I just renewed the pay again for another year. We have cut our SaaS bill in half and automation dropped our cost per ticket by 70%. Our CSAT has also improved from 80, which is still really good, to 96%. Best in class. All powered by Rich Panel. I told them last year, hey, you guys need to do the same thing with returns. And now Rich Panel has a returns portal. It's built to cut down your tickets and convert more refunds into exchanges. They do the heavy lifting, data import, self service, retention flows, team training, all of it. And they'll be live in two weeks. If you want to save 30% guaranteed on help desk and now returns, book a demo.
- [55:12]
Matt
Also, like with the Fulfill at the moment, we'll try and build our own AI inventory forecasting system and we probably spent a bit of money on it and then Fulfill launched their code version which is actually better than what we're trying to build for the last four months anyway. So that's also kind of helped us manage everything recently.
- [55:27]
Sean Frank
You should let the technologist to technology, bro. You're a great ads guy. Your sister's a great, you know, product builder. It's like that's our zone of genius. We should just focus on that stuff, man. Mine is podcasting. That's what I want. That's my. So
- [55:42]
Phil
it's before we're retiring from operating and we're just gonna, we're gonna podcast now. So Matt, can you, you then you've been building brands, you've done a lot of things and I think Sean, you wanted to go there but like now you're sort of like training, coaching, you're helping other, other operators. Like what? Why, why start that? Why get into this new business? Like you've been so focused on cure Scale, the one big thing and now you've got this other thing that you're kind of like running alongside it. Is that, does that have purpose? Like what's the, what's the reasoning? And then tell me more about it.
- [56:15]
Matt
Yeah, it's more for impact over profit. I think at this stage of my life, any extra million that I make won't actually impact my life at all. You know, I think my basic needs are met, my lifestyle is met and I just almost build at the moment so I can coach. Literally. That's how much I enjoy the coaching thing. I think just at some point you need to add a layer of contribution into your life when you get sort of psychological development. And that for me is the coaching and has been so rewarding. I think we've coached like about 150 different brands the last six months alone. And yeah, just like, man, I can't believe this Christmas I was getting like presents to my house from clients. So that whole reframe of like they're painting me and then they're sending me presents was like mind blowing. That alone, I think that that's what drives me today to actually grow cure so I can be a better coach.
- [57:02]
Sean Frank
Well, dude, you're definitely a never enough guy, right? Like even though you've, you've, you took the three years off like you fat, you found purpose in your life. You did the mushrooms. It seems like it's still like it's never enough. You got to be doing lots of stuff. What, what's the difference between coaching and like your agency business? You had an agency business. Is it, is it really just you're not doing the work. It's all just like helping people get in the right frame of mind or you explain what the coaching offer is
- [57:26]
Matt
and then the coaching is all about like actually not just from a mindset perspective, but helping the whole e commerce business from every department. I think from the agency side was all done for you. It's done with you and agency side which focused on media buying and Facebook. In the coaching business we have everything from playbooks and how to product development, branding. We have mentors, each single discipline like CRO people, we have Facebook people, Google creative strategists that come every week and show the latest creatives and help you with the system. Like everything you possibly need in terms of mentorship and guidance. Ecommerce brand we kind of COVID So I think the service is very different because as you know, like when I was trying to build the brand, that's why I even reached out to Matt for help. Early on, I know what I was doing as the brand was growing. I was just trying to find people who did what I've done before. And especially in E commerce, there's so much to do. But more importantly, it's about someone telling you what to do when, the sequencing of it. Because I think a lot of brands just don't know what levers to pull when, and that's the main reason why they're not successful. They're just focused on the wrong. So the coaching is really important, I think, to realign brand founders as to what they're doing at what point, and providing them with the right resources and playbooks to actually upskill them.
- [58:32]
Sean Frank
That's cool, man. And you've done 150 brands so far. And what's the name of it? You can, you can do a hard plug right here. How do people sign up? What's the coupon code?
- [58:41]
Matt
Eco mark text mentioned word operators to get under all this gap.
- [58:44]
Sean Frank
There you go, bro. That's awesome.
- [58:47]
Matt
Yeah. Ecomarktx.com.
- [58:48]
Sean Frank
yeah, please. You. You're going to say a couple more things, but I, I'm curious. I want to know more.
- [58:52]
Matt
You want to know more? I mean, it is what it is. Like, it's. It's a monthly subscription. There's no contracts, there's nothing else. Essentially, you know, if you don't like what you're learning, you can leave. And so you like 599amonth, literally, it's just there for impact over profit. People come in, they're like, why is it so cheap? I think that's the reason why some people don't even join because they don't understand why it's like 599 and have like 14 mentors there. But it's as simple as that.
- [59:15]
Sean Frank
Look, it's kind of the reason why we do the podcast, right? Like, I, you know, people joke about how many sponsors we have. And look, this podcast makes a ton of money now. Millions and millions of dollars. I was trying to do it for free. There's one guy on the podcast, not going to name him Jason. He wouldn't listen to it for free. He's like, we gotta, we gotta get sponsors. But it's just because I love, I love brands, bro. It seems like you love brands too, right? Like, being a young guy, you know, 20 or whatever, I would love to buy him. I think you were the same way. It's like, it's cool, man. I love, I love stores, I love brands, and I love everything we're Building and in the age of AI great time to be building a brand. Everybody on earth is building tools for us right? Like fulfill has a hundred great engineers. They're going to make Claude work great for E commerce. Saracenal Linux is going to build my data warehouse. I can just show up and be like I have an idea for a new color. Like that's, that's my job basically. So Matt, you want to add to that?
- [60:03]
Matt
Yeah, I, I, I agree.
- [60:04]
Phil
I think that part of the reason we do a big part of the reason we do the POD is it's nice to be helpful. Like it feels good like we get a lot of feedback. I mean to say that though the flip side of this is the reason I was excited to have you on Matt is probably like one of the more acute pieces of feedback we get is we don't make enough content for like people who are kind of starting out and early on. So I think this has actually been really helpful to have you on. So like here's the journey and here's how I do things and like here's some frameworks to actually help you and then it's cool that you're actually doing that like the E Comm architect thing to like actually help people because it is a, it is a. We have had this criticism for sure on this show is that we stay a little too up level up market but yeah I think Sean hit it man. Like we do this to be helpful. I think the, the like we have too many sponsors. The business makes a lot of money. I, I don't know my, my view is I just don't believe that people value free right? Like I really don't. I think you, you said that like your program is pretty low priced. People almost get turned off by like if something is free or too cheap it must be bad. So I, I, I think like our this is sort of my rant on like operators. I think by us building a good business around it is just going to make the content even better and that that's net benefit to the actual audience. So like suffer through the sponsors they are funding the, the increasing of the collective knowledge of E commerce and brand building and I think that's a good thing even though I find it annoying too sometimes.
- [61:34]
Sean Frank
Dude, hell yeah. I mean fulfill brought this, this amazing story to us today. Thank you Matt. Thank you for Phil. So Matt you are on record saying that you think any company not using AI every day is being irresponsible. How are we using it right now? How are you getting the most effective AI tools.
- [61:51]
Matt
I think at the moment we have this philosophy, we want to build the people to build a business. So self leadership is a big component of our philosophy at our company where I do leadership trainings every week and we have like this internal university. So at the moment we're literally just upskilling everyone to use AI themselves. We're also hiring a head of AI that starts in a couple of weeks time. But we really want to empower everyone to find solutions on their own. Because what I started to see when I went to every single department is that you can use AI as a use case in so many different ways. Like for an example like Account 1 yesterday where we have all these influencer content coming in and we have one person doing pre reads and trying to make sure that the content is filmed correctly. So now we're creating an app that the influencer has to upload to get approved before it gets to our team. So there's all these intricate ways. We can save a lot of operational stress. But I think you need to be at the level where all the information is in order to come up with these ideas. So that's why we're trying to empower it all. So I kind of use it.
- [62:48]
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- [63:34]
Sean Frank
Dude, a million percent agree with that. It's like saying people like aren't using the Internet in like the 90s or whatever. It's like, dude, it's going to be the next technology. Just get your hands on keyboard. You have a rule that says one business at a time. You currently have two businesses. So how hard of a rule is this?
- [63:53]
Matt
I mean, I call the coaching business more of a hobby than I do a business at the moment. But I think focus for me was, was a game changer. You know, when I had 13 businesses at once, I was probably struggling to generate significant profit. But the moment I focused on one, we grew up pretty quickly to 80 million four years. So yeah, for me, focus is a big thing.
- [64:12]
Sean Frank
I mean it makes a ton of sense. You were probably doing 30 million across 13 brands and I can do 80 million off of one. Focus is a beautiful tool. Last question. You're 25 years old, you just lost 80% of your money. Okay, you just lost $5 million. A huge punch in the face. You can go back in time. What do you tell your 25 year old self?
- [64:32]
Matt
You can't control what you look at, but you can always control what you see. Life's just a game of perspective. So you can't connect the dots. Looking forward early back. So no matter, all that matters is what story you're telling yourself at the time as to why that happened. Literally. Stories are like operating system of the mind.
- [64:48]
Sean Frank
Do you think your 25 year old self would have understood that or would he told you to go off? I just love
- [64:56]
Phil
$5 million.
- [64:58]
Matt
You know what I think, I think he would have because you know what I actually did at that time, I went and reverse engineered all the people that actually made heaps of money. I'm like, surely heaps people made a lot of, lost a lot of money and went bankrupt and stuff like that. And when you actually do the research, there's ton. And then I convinced myself at the time because I lost this money, I'm going to be successful because all these other people lost heaps of money. So it's like my rite of passage in order to be ultra.
- [65:21]
Sean Frank
Well, yeah. Well again I think it all worked out for you, Matt. So thank you for coming on. Thank you for sharing your story. Thank you for Phil for making the intro. So for Phil, the ERP I use, I'm doing my order management and if you want to talk to Matt, he has a coaching program. The link is in the show notes, you can click there. He's on LinkedIn, you can hit him up and it's incredibly cheap. Only 600 bucks a month and you get to talk to him and he's going to help you make ten times more money. That's a Sean Frank guarantee. So Matt, thanks for being here. Matt, thanks for hosting. I'll talk to you guys later.
- [65:49]
Phil
See you boys. Thank you.