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- [00:00]
Host 1
Ladies and gentlemen, my fellow operators. Today we have a real treat for you. I'm going to set this up properly because it's a banger. If you have ever wondered what it's like to sell a company for over a billion dollars, if the GLP1 craze, it's all it's cracked up to be. If you can really run a holding company of brands, scale to hundreds and hundreds of millions in revenue, expand into all the major global markets and finally get to that headline grabbing exit to a public company, well then today is your day. Our guest has done all of this and he is going to share all of the frameworks and models that got him to where it is. Welcome back to another episode of Operators Titans, brought to you by our friends at Applovin. Today we are talking with Tim Doyle, the founder of Eucalyptus. My God, I learned so much from this one and I think you will too. I like to kick these things off with a little bit of like, let's just get into it, something practical. I read this thing that you have a, what you call a salary cap. I gotta be honest, only heard about this in sports. Never actually heard a founder have a salary cap. Can you please educate Mike and I on what the hell this is and how you think about it?
- [01:10]
Tim Doyle
I mean it comes from sport, right? Like if you think about, think about NBA teams and you think about like the soft cap and the hard cap and the, the various things that they have to worry about in order to build a roster. I find that if you take the same approach to talent, you. Let's take OKC currently, right? You have a certain number of young players that you're trying to bring through. You have a certain number of vets, you have a certain number of stars, you have a certain number of kind of three and D kind of players that you're getting value for money out of. And I think like too much of talent is kind of focused in a different way where it's like, how do you hire the best possible person that you can get at all times? And it's like, how do we build a team of all superstars? And the reality of building consumer businesses, or at least resilient ones, is that's not really feasible. You're not anthropic, you're not open AI, you're not meta. And so you have to think about like, where are we making investments for superstar talent? Where are we making investments for talent that can really grow? And then where are we making investments for talent that will just perform the job really well and you've just got
- [02:10]
to be intentional there because I think
- [02:11]
like, particularly in the era of like venture backed consumer, which I've like worked a lot in, it's really, really easy to get enamored with the idea that you need 250 software engineers to build the next version of your product. And in reality like you know, the, the margin profile and the subscription profile and the retention of businesses like mine and businesses like, you know 95% of consumer businesses just don't support that style of hiring and that style of kind of bet. And I guess like discipline is really, really important and I think talent is a really good place to start. And, and, and being intentional about where you're investing in, what type of talent I think is really, really key to getting the best possible team that you can.
- [02:48]
Host 2
You can make an argument Tim, that that doesn't really work for anybody. I mean look at the SaaS companies, like none of them have made any money and now there's a reason why like Anthropic is just the undertaker because everybody's looking at them and they're like wait a second, you know, you guys couldn't really justify all of this stock based compensation and overhead before, but now you really can't. And so like I think it was probably always true. We're just in an era where it's increasingly obvious how true it is. I did have a question though on the salary cap. So is the idea that you're like we're not going to spend more than X on headcount and our goal is to allocate that as efficiently as we possibly can. Is that the idea?
- [03:26]
Tim Doyle
I think like, like that's the simple version of it. I even try and go a layer deeper and think through like the bets we're making. So like one of the really hard parts about building a business like ours is you kind of have to find us curves because you know the core products atrophy over time in terms of their unit economics and their retention and all the things that natural gravity in a consumer business. And so when we're going to invest in a new thing, whether that's a new brand or a new condition. What is the type of talent and, and size of talent bet that I'm willing to make in that space? And sometimes it'll be a technology bet, but other times it'll be like a creative and marketing bet. It's very rarely a media buying bet but you know it's, there are types of talent that fuel certain types of bet and and allocating and building a roster around those types of talent, as opposed to getting a misshapen one where you've got, you know, an engineering superstar and a creative superstar when you might not need both, is a really, really important discipline that we've been able to build over time.
- [04:17]
Host 2
I love that analogy, Tim, because what you're saying is, like, if you have a football team, it doesn't matter if you have three all pro running backs. It's a redundant, and it's not even actually really helpful to your team winning more. And that the idea of, like, you're trying to balance your talent across different disciplines, where you can actually get the most out of it. And I think we've all been on a team where it was like, man, you had an abundance of riches in one or two areas, but then the bottleneck were these other areas where you didn't have nearly enough talent. So I think that makes a ton of sense. Like this kind of talent balancing thought process.
- [04:47]
Tim Doyle
I think a counterintuitive part to that as well, which is as a founder, I think you should probably hire away
- [04:53]
from your own core skill set more
- [04:54]
than you hire into it, because I
- [04:55]
think you've got to be.
- [04:57]
One of the things that I like, got really wrong early on was this idea that you should hire out of your own job and so you can kind of focus on bigger things. Like, I've always been a media buyer by background, and so my job has, like, under time is a pressure in the business. Whether that's kind of the end of COVID or, you know, when we had drug shortages, like, what has actually created a margin of safety for us is my ability to do my own core skill set at the best kind of possible level. And so it's kind of counterintuitive, but you want to be hiring away from what you. The role that you need to play in the roster.
- [05:29]
Host 1
When you're talking about this, like, talent diversity and salary cap or this building a roster because you guys, you're like multi market, multi brand. How did you think about teams within the organization then?
- [05:42]
Tim Doyle
I think, like, probably with not enough discipline would probably be the honest answer. I think, like the. The Bezosian kind of two pizza teams, I think we probably got a little bit enamored with, to be honest. Like, it was just not really in my kind of circle of competence originally to kind of size engineering bets. And so I guess, like, this is maybe getting ahead of things, but like Eucalyptus is largely commodity physical products with a differentiated service experience that relies on differentiated technology. To deliver that. So you can, you can size the engineering bet however you want. And I think we got too enamored with too many of these bets being too large and so lost discipline. And we actually had to cut 25% of our staff at one point, which was an extremely painful experience. But like formative in the, in the sense of ensuring that we got to a point of discipline when we made bets and, and sized teams appropriately and knew what the purpose of the team really was and how we were trying to differentiate and, and what was important because once we, when we had lost sight of that, it was, you know, it was, it was super painful. And we just like I looked at the P and L from those times and was like that was a disaster. And so, and so to get back to that discipline was really important.
- [06:48]
Host 1
I find it's like you're a media buyer at by trade, right? It'd be like how I describe you. I'm. I've s. I'm similar. I still live in meta accounts. Like I just love this stuff. Also totally agree on the higher away from you thing. I don't think that gets talked about enough. So I'm happy you said it. I am very interested in where the media buying background comes from and I in particular, it. It looks like you started out in politics or like actually running like a political machine. I want to, I want to hear a bit more about this.
- [07:18]
Tim Doyle
So I'm kind of loosely analytically trained. Not analytical enough to be a proper finance student, not creative enough to be a proper creative. And so caught between those two worlds. And then Facebook pixel comes out in maybe 2014 approximately. And then it just turned out that analytics had arrived in a field where they were historically none. And so you didn't have to be the most analytical person in the room. You just had to be kind of analytical enough in a creative landscape. And that suited me to a T because I'm pretty comfortable in uncertain numerical spaces. I'm good at sizing and kind of predicting and doing probabilities in worlds where they're not very like, I'm good at attribution, for example. And attribution is obviously still to this day very much a mess. And so that suited me well. And then I was working for a small consulting firm doing kind of digital transformations which were very hot at the time. And an Australian election got called randomly and we got staffed onto rebuilding the website for the left leaning party in Australia. And I guess I got in there and they had no one to buy digital media because buying digital Media wasn't that big of a thing. But Facebook offline custom audience match had just come out, which was like a unique and hilarious period where you could upload data offline data sets and match them fuzzy, match them to Facebook with like remarkable accuracy. Which was really pertinent for political parties
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because they had these huge voter rolls
- [08:49]
that were obviously disconnected from the Internet. But they were extremely rich data sets cause they had all the phone calls they'd ever made to those people. And political parties, I think in the US and in Australia are exempt from spam laws. So what you had was this moment where you could upload the entire country target extremely effectively because for the first time you could do that. And then you also had the pixel for like events that you would never have had historically. And so political advertising changed pretty fundamentally in 2016. And so the Labor Party election was in June, which was really interesting. And then two other reasonably significant historical events happened soon after Brexit and the first Trump election. And I think actually like Facebook, I mean it's well known that Facebook played a big role in, in those two campaigns. But I think people often talk about Cambridge Analytica being the driver there. But what actually was happening was offline custom audience match was really the moment. And that being available around the world kind of changed how political campaigning was done forever. And I was like just lucky to be in the main line of that happening. And that really kind of created a couple of years worth of work that was super interesting. While. And then the other thing that was happening was, and this was really, really big in the Trump campaign was this idea that you could upload like kind of clips, like what is modern, modern clipping, but, but from actual political coverage. And then because the Facebook newsfeed ad is so natural and organic looking, you could upload clips as ads and then they would be incredibly effective pieces of advertising. Much more effective than typical political advertising. And so, um, yeah, it was just right in the middle of a storm. And I guess like the lessons I took from it were firstly like real time, trustworthy content moves the needle so so much. And like that was big news for me in 2016. And then also the nature of advertising in a fee driven world was just going to be much different than it had ever been before. And so, you know, luckily for me at the time, it was an opportunity I saw a pretty clear ride and was able to kind of take forward in my career.
- [10:54]
Sponsor Voice
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- [12:01]
Host 2
I'm curious what you think about the kind of tactic based insights that you'll see at a particular moment in time and how important you think those are. Like do those kind of wash out over time or do you think that great businesses are always built on kind of insights that are, that are true, really true for a period of time and provide a significant competitive advantage that allow you to do something you just wouldn't be able to do otherwise.
- [12:27]
Tim Doyle
Interesting.
- [12:28]
I think, I think like certainly the
- [12:30]
business history that I've like looked back on, I think a lot of it has been built on shifts in the media landscape. Like I think whether you look at the App Store generating obviously the mobile app era and all of the businesses that came off that, the first the Facebook pixel starting the, I guess like the, the director consumer era in a meaningful sense. And then like recently we've obviously had like returns to a bit more of an organic content world with TikTok Shop and you know, the influencer world and the kind of continued breaking up of that and probably like Shopify underlying that as well. So I think like I guess you, you get these moments that, that create businesses and then can you build durable strategies over the top of that? I think the one strategy that is, that has remained durable for me throughout the last 10 years is like the Importance of creative has gotten higher and higher and higher and higher. And the definition of what good creative is changes all the time. But you're producing more, you're producing faster, you're producing to a higher level of insight. And to me, the temperature, I feel like I've been a slowly boiled frog in that world because it's just happened to me every day. The quality has gone up, the authenticity has gone up, the speed has gone up, the volume has gone up. And so to me, that's been the one durable one. And then underneath that is, you know, a lot of changes in the media landscape. Although obviously like meta has stayed universally very important. I would say like attribution has become more challenging and that that greater challenge has created kind of greater diversity of channel and I think greater need to be bold in your bets. Like I kind of reflect on a golden era where you could run a, you know, a square static on Facebook and run a discount message and $4.00 CPMs and $50.00 tax. But. But the modern version of that is, you know, you have to be much bolder in your storytelling, much bigger in your bets, much better at more channels and, and still on that kind of core principle of being really good at measurement and really good at storytelling. And so I guess there's durability and then there's variance and you got to be comfortable in both.
- [14:26]
Host 2
It seems to me that this is probably the tale of this age that the tools that we are provided with to, to create new creative or to look at analytics or to spin up a website or obviously better than they've ever been before. But all that that's doing is it's really raising the bar. And that's kind of what you're saying. I mean, the bar for success today compared to, I guess at this point, this is my 17th year in E Comm. 18th year. And it's just amazing the difference, as you're saying, in competitiveness and the bar for success, you just have to bring a level of excellence that is, it's hard to even compare to 10 years ago because it's so different.
- [15:04]
Tim Doyle
And excellence is the start line. Right. Like I like it's excellence plus creativity. And like those, you know, those are two really different modes of operation. Like getting to excellent and then getting to like truly creative is just like two really different problems to solve in the same team and often in the same people. And so yeah, the bar. The bar is very, very high.
- [15:22]
Host 1
And so, yeah, and often straight up opposing each other too, sometimes.
- [15:27]
Host 2
Well, great companies. I mean, there's a lot of history of this, that great companies are full of creativity and conflict over that creativity. That that's kind of like if you look at the Wright brothers, like they would, they would go out and test stuff and then they would just argue through the night and then they go back out the next day and then they would test some more stuff and sometimes they would be arguing and then they would intentionally switch positions and argue the other person's position. But I think that this was something that took me a little bit of time. You know, it's like when you first get married, you think like a great marriage means that we're not getting into fights all the time. And then you realize like actually like a great marriage has healthy amount of conflict, that's done well. And I think that the same is true of businesses that you really have to have people that have strong enough different points of view. And that's really what creativity is, where they're willing to really argue for something and kind of pound it out. And I agree with what you're saying because like in a world where these machine learning, you know, AI driven things are basically able to look at everything that's ever been done and say, well, we'll whip you up the best version of that as a human in the loop, like you've got to be adding value by saying, well, here's a totally new way to come at it, right? And if you can't do that, like I don't know how you stand out or you know, it's like what I tell people all the time is if you want better than market performance, you have to be doing something different in a rap, right? And I think you nailed it. That that thing has to be creativity in the years ahead or you're just not going to be able to have market beating performance.
- [16:52]
Host 1
Tim, you're. I mean we get, every time we do one of these, these sort of series, we always get these weird founding stories. Like if you look at like people's entrepreneurial journey, it's always strange. I mean Mike's is strange, mine's less strange. I think I have the least strange of everybody we've talked to. Like I'm just so obvious. Going from like politics to sort of like mattress company to telehealth health company. Is the through line this like creative obsession? Like this like just media obsession or is there something else that kind of connects all of these things in your mind?
- [17:28]
Tim Doyle
Koala experience was really formative for how I thought about.
- [17:31]
So the political experience was very formative
- [17:34]
to How I thought about advertising. And then the Koala experience was very formative to how I thought about business. And I think, I guess like the. And this is. This, this kind of dates me as being quite old. But, but the. When I started in Ecom, I knew nothing about it really, but Casper was exploding in the U.S. one of my
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friends who was working with me at the consulting firm left to start a mattress company.
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I thought that was insane. And so, but then, you know, it took off and I, and I joined.
- [18:01]
And what was super interesting about it
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is, you know, Casper is a story of an epic flame out over the period of five years, kind of sponsored by a huge amount of venture dollars. Koala actually IPO'd a couple of weeks ago as a really durable, you know, smaller than Casper, but very durable, very successful business. And I think, like, I reflect on, like what the moments that made that work were, and I think it was the true, the first true example of like a single product DTC business not being able to consume venture dollars. Like, essentially the idea of marginal CAC being introduced in real time to this, like, business that thought it was going to be, you know, the global champion of sleep. And so we watched that explode from a distance. And what I thought was really clever that Koala did, and I was a part of, was like realized pretty early on that it wasn't selling a mattress as much. It was selling like a convenient furniture experience. And so built the brand and built the experience about like four hour delivery. So it was like a. The brand was almost entirely built on four hour delivery. And so what was really interesting about that is like, they solved a logistics problem to do that and then got known for really fast delivery in a generation of people that were moving house more often than they had before. And instead of being like, we're going to be. The famous Casper line is like the Nike of sleep. They quickly moved into a bed base and then into a sofa. And I think like, the sofa was actually the really interesting moment because it's not intuitive for a business that starts in mattresses to be a sofa company. But basically what they were saying is like, if we can be there on the day people move into their apartment, then we can maybe fill a couple of the needs. And instead of being like, let's get 100 extra dollars of revenue out of a pillow or let's get, you know, 150 out of sheets, they're like, can we get another thousand out of the sofa? And I think while I was there, the AOV went from, let's call it 900 to $1500. And so as the, you know, marginal CAC game begun, we kind of turned up to a knife fight with a bazooka, like kind of destroyed all the other mattress companies. And that was the path to durability. And so like, I guess the through line into Eucalyptus was you. The Internet is a story of things getting more convenient and faster over time. And so if you can take high friction multiplayer experiences, turn them into low friction kind of single touch experiences, then you can really build something that is a differentiated customer experience. And then if you can build an LTV engine on the back of that, then you've got the core economics of a really great business and something that can really scale. And then the problem that I kind of saw at Koala that I wanted to solve with Eucalyptus was I didn't feel like Koala had the levers to be a multi, you know, $100 million, multi, billion dollar business. It just, it just like it always felt like it was going to be a great, you know, several hundred million dollars business and there wasn't, there wasn't enough financial upside in for me in that. So I, I thought about Eucalyptus as well. If you can build technology experiences that differentiate from a like, let's call it a convenience perspective in environments where Shopify doesn't exist, then can you scale those up to real scale and can you launch them in different categories and in different markets? And, and so my belief going in was single platform, multi brand, multi experience, multi market. And we could get something really venture scale if we did that well. And then the thing I got extremely wrong, extremely wrong was that one core marketing engine would be able to allocate capital between opportunities and kind of have more durability in those opportunities. So, you know, if our skincare brand can grow really quickly because it's doing, you know, really great creative, then we can pull back from our Men's Health brand or we can pullback from our fertility brand. The problem there was like they're all exposed to the same exact type of risk which is Facebook CPMs rising or, or you know, choppiness in, in kind of DTC markets. And so I ended up with like a levered levered bet on Facebook rather than an actual kind of like diversified one, which was a nightmare. And so got some things right, got some things wrong. But, but the through line was the Internet always gets faster. Convenience really matters. And then, and then the same kind of creative and marketing bets that we're talking about earlier, I've just got to
- [22:05]
Host 2
Ask Tim, because I think you're bringing up like the most practical problem that all of us face, which is our portfolios are just insanely concentrated. And it typically boils down to I'm either functionally 100% concentrated on Amazon or on Meta, right. Or something like that. So what would be your advice? Like having kind of gone through this whole process and tried to diversify and realized you still had an upstream dependency. If you were going to rebuild from scratch, would you just say, screw it, like, you know, I'm going to have to be concentrated, it's just the world we live in. Or would you build in a different way?
- [22:42]
Tim Doyle
A couple of things went right for me. Well, one, one thing specifically went right is like the greatest opportunity ever to arrive to healthcare arrived at the perfect moment for me. And so we went from being a diversified portfolio of bets growing 40% year on year to basically all in obesity care growing 250% year on year.
- [23:03]
And so I guess what I realized at that point is we could achieve
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the same portfolio effect across markets much easier than we could do it across brands. And so a lot of the infrastructure that we'd been built to do multi
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brand, ended up working multi market. And then you actually do get real
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investment differences between markets. And so you get channel mix differences, you get kind of creative differences, you
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get market maturity differences. Like, I'm sure people have come on your podcast and told you this before,
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but advertising in Germany, very different to advertising in Japan, which is very, very different to advertising in the uk. And so I actually got what I wanted.
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Host 2
I want to double click on that just to summarize what I'm hearing you say, because I think it's brilliant. What you're basically saying is that there's a lot of different ways you can diversify. And what you learned is take the most successful thing that you're doing and then find a vector you can diversify on that most successful thing instead of diversifying into several things where some of them are a lot less successful than your core thing. And in your case, I'm assuming this is GLP. GLPs are like this massive opportunity. And when you saw that, you realize like, oh, this is the business and I can diversify across a bunch of countries. They're going to have different, you know, medical guidance, different versions of like the fda. And so I actually do have a diversified portfolio, but it's diversified across this like generational opportunity in glp.
- [24:22]
Host 1
I want to go back to that. You said something interesting. You said that while you were at Koala. Number one, what was your role at Quality Number two, while you were there that you could just sort of see that there wasn't enough upside in that business. So like what did you see that was limiting that company, that opportunity that
- [24:39]
Tim Doyle
you had to go solve Employee number
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maybe five or six. So I was like, maybe later than that, but in the first 10 and I was like, the first. I was like head of the founder was a marketer as well. So I, we were. We kind of split the marketing responsibilities. But he was like a, he's a, you know, he's a generational e commerce talent. So it was great to learn off him. I honestly, like, it was. It was just going to be hard to see a single product business like Koala get enough market scale.
- [25:05]
And honestly, when we tried to go
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and raise capital for it, it was
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always really difficult to.
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To figure out the story that was going to be, you know, a properly scaled platform. You can, you can, you know, like an AOV of $1500 is nothing to, you know, like that's the, that's the foundation for a fantastic business. But the US was kind of closed off in, you know, from a. From a competitive sense.
- [25:31]
We didn't really feel comfortable in Europe.
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So it just felt like the limits were what we had. And so, um, and I honestly, like, I, I thought that eucalyptus could be kind of an LVMH or a, or a Unilever. And, and I. That was wrong. Like, and, and, and you just. I, I think you can't manufacture that many brands quickly enough to actually become one of those. But at least it became a place where when big enough opportunity did come along, we were well set up to take it and we were well capitalized.
- [25:59]
Host 1
Okay, now is. And the Koala thing, just so I'm clear, this is an LTV problem, right, that you're hitting on. It's like we've got one product, they buy it once. They probably don't buy many things after that.
- [26:10]
Tim Doyle
I saw the amount of competition coming
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to the space, to be honest.
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The other thing that I used to think, which I'm not sure I do anymore, is that. And I think actually, you know, modern great consumer businesses actually have solved this problem in a really interesting way, which is just like really, really focus on the core product. But I like, we were selling the mattress and the mattress is like, you know, relatively close to a commodity. And Shopify was so good and getting better all the time that I was like, what just stops every unique brand in this space getting eaten from the bottom. And so like one of the things that was really important to me with Eucalyptus was to get away from the Shopify ecosystem, which, which you know, has
- [26:44]
proven to be really powerful for us.
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But, but you know, that, that was a, a real, a strong assumption I had going in.
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Host 1
Expand on that. What does that mean to get away from the Shopify ecosystem? I've never actually heard that if the
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Tim Doyle
technology experience is commodified right, like completely, like if you can set up a
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great Shopify store in and like a
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good Shopify store in hours and a
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great Shopify store in weeks and it costs under 50 grand, then like you're going to have to be a great physical product. And I know that that's what you guys think about with your businesses, but at the time, like, like I've got in trouble for saying things like this in the past, but like, you know,
- [27:19]
mattresses are very undifferentiated product.
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You know, they come out of the same 20 Chinese factories largely.
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And so if, if the Shopify ecosystem
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commoditizes technology differentiation, you can't really win on convenience unless you're willing to make kind of incredible logistics investments which very few businesses do and can. And in fact that's largely commoditized as well.
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So I just wasn't comfortable with having
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to come up with unique products every time I wanted to launch something. And so my bet was more complexity of service experience in telehealth was going to be something that could be a foundational point of differentiation. And like that has played out to be extremely true over time, particularly with when it comes to complex regulatory environments.
- [27:58]
Host 2
And when you think about it that way, Tim, because I think I know the answer to this, but I just want to ask, are you thinking I, I am doing this because I'm thinking through the mind of a marketer media buyer and I want to be able to market. And so like I work backwards from that of like what's going to be able to set me up to use my superpower and it's this where I can keep more differentiation for sure.
- [28:20]
Tim Doyle
I can't, I can't actually think of any other way to think about shaping a business's proposition than from the lens of a marketer. Like it just, it just, I mean, and maybe that's just the grounding that I've had, but it's, it feels like if you can't craft differentiation from a initial upfront experience and then from a long term service experience or product experience, then it's going to be very, very Hard to build a business.
- [28:40]
Host 2
Yeah, I would agree. I mean, I think that what I've learned in my business is that maybe I would, I would modify that to say I think you have to start with an acquisition mindset. But I think that that doesn't always have to necessarily be a marketing first mindset. Although maybe we're saying the same thing. But I think, like, I just wanted to pull out the point that you've made it really clear what your superpower is. And earlier you made the point like, hey, don't try and replace yourself. You have the superpower. You're probably not going to find somebody with the same level of superpower that you have. And you should get other complimentary pieces. And I think that that's great advice to founders, like, find out what your superpower is and be great at it. Be a one in 100, be a one in a thousand. And then you focus on that. Surround yourself with talent and work backwards from your superpower in figuring out what products or markets you want to be engaged in. I do this all the time. I mean, it's kind of the idea that you choose what games you compete in. And really, really smart people are just very good at understanding their talents and picking only competing in games where they're likely to win because of their skill set.
- [29:40]
Tim Doyle
There's a huge margin of safety.
- [29:42]
Like, I like huge margins of safety. Like, I like, I like, I don't like necessarily having to win, like in the zero sum sense. I just like, you know, like, I'm like, make me top five player in, you know, the NBA, you know, and I'm really happy. But I like, I do not want
- [29:58]
to be slugging it out in the,
- [29:59]
you know, I'm going to mix sporting metaphors here and go like the, you know, the Division 10, you know, it's just too hard.
- [30:06]
Host 2
Well, and like, this is one of the reasons why we'll talk about on the show, but I talk about it in my company ad nauseam. I'm like, I want to be in really big markets. I want to be in markets where If I'm number 12 in market share, I still have a great business. And it sounds like that's what you're saying. It's another way of saying margin of safety that like, the bigger the business, the more the buyers, the more paths to victory and the more cushion that prevents you from failure. Because like you said, I don't really know what quote unquote winning is, but I know what failing is. And failing is when you can't Carve out a consistent way to profitably acquire customers.
- [30:38]
Host 1
Yeah, Tim, I think that the thing that stands out to me is this idea that multiple nine figures in upside was not enough for you. And I want to know more about that. I want to know if that's because of the role that you were in or if that's because of just the, the like your view of the market and like where you could actually go and participate or if there's something else there that we're just not even thinking of.
- [30:59]
Tim Doyle
I think like what I was thinking a lot about at the time is
- [31:03]
we are on the, we are in the early, early days of like the D2C era.
- [31:08]
And I was probably more bullish on
- [31:11]
the DTC era than the DTC era turned out deserving to be. But, but I mean what I was
- [31:16]
really thinking about is what do the
- [31:18]
great companies of 10 years from now look like with regards to building things that ship consumers products? And I was like the antidote to the everything store. And you know, the super long tail is like highly curated, high quality experiences that feel digitally native. And I was like, well if that's going to happen and I'm going to
- [31:38]
do it from Australia, you're probably going to have to do multiple of them
- [31:41]
to get something of real scale. And I honestly thought that the path was like genuinely unlimited as to what it could be. Because my view at the time, and
- [31:49]
I think this is probably brought out
- [31:50]
to be like largely true, is every category would have new entrants like maybe put in the show notes. My original seed deck is like public on the Internet and we had eight different products we were going to launch in the first couple of years.
- [32:03]
And there was like home orthodontics, there
- [32:06]
was men's health, there was contraceptives, there was peptides, there was dog food, there was female focused iced coffee and there was maybe three or four more.
- [32:19]
Oh, and there was prams.
- [32:20]
And so like I guess we had this for you and that was like crazy that the, there was like the length we went to, but we had this view that like there was going to be a great holding company that had technology differentiation and marketing differentiation and we were going to be at the front of that. And you know it actually looks like extremely naive on reflection. But, but I, I, I thought the opportunity was there to build something of enormous scale. And I, and I actually, I do think that like the consumer brands that will go on to be I guess
- [32:49]
like the holding groups of the next
- [32:50]
10 years, like a lot of mistakes were made in the first chapter of the DTC era. But I do think we're starting to
- [32:55]
see like I actually like, I find the Groons Groons Gruns story like so
- [33:01]
interesting because it was like a, it
- [33:03]
was like a formulaic execution of a
- [33:07]
scaled outcome which to me seems if that's possible then it's possible again.
- [33:12]
And if it's possible again, it means
- [33:13]
it's possible 10 times on one portfolio on one platform. And so maybe we actually now that
- [33:18]
the rulebook is a little bit clearer
- [33:19]
and a little bit better written, maybe we're actually looking at what will be, you know, the multi, the multibillion dollar outcomes in the space.
- [33:26]
And I actually think like hims is a really good example, you know, to, of a brand that has been able to platformize.
- [33:33]
You know, it has, it has like
- [33:34]
I think they have six $100 million
- [33:36]
US lines or more, something like that, which is insane. And it's because they got the platform technology play right, they got branding incredibly right. And then now they're doing product innovation on their platform in ways that I imagine they never would have thought possible at the beginning. So to round that entire answer out, like I was, I thought there was
- [33:56]
going to be, you know, $100 billion
- [33:58]
consumer businesses built that, that sold goods. I was like largely wrong and definitely
- [34:03]
wrong on my front.
- [34:04]
But I think like we're starting to see the hallmarks that it might starting to be starting to happen.
- [34:11]
Host 1
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- [35:56]
Tim Doyle
So only thing that gives me pause and fear about it is brands seem so moment in time now. They rise and fall so much faster than they've ever risen and fallen. And so because of the density of categories now, is there any brand, you know, do we actually, you know, of brands started in 2025, what percentage of them become household names in 2050? I like it could be zero. You know, I don't know.
- [36:20]
Host 2
This is, this is actually my thing, Tim. And going back to what we were talking about earlier, this is why I think if you just look at it through the lens of a marketer, the problem increasingly is that the diffusion of the insight happens so quickly. You know, like there's so many tools that can immediately say, okay, give me all their creative, like what exactly are they doing? What are the playbook? What are all the flows and where. I'm starting to think a lot more structurally. So I'll give like a, an interesting analogy because we keep bouncing back and forth to sports. So the NBA and I'm kind of aware of the NBA as a product because the funder are so good. The NBA had the highest viewership in the regular season in 26 years. This year and the playoffs had the highest viewership in 33 years. And the question is why? And I think I know the answer. I think it's actually pretty clear once you do a little bit of analysis at a surface level it's not obvious because it's like, well, there's no like dominant storyline. The best team in the league is the funder from like the second or third smallest market. The spurs are the second best team in the league. Again, small market, there's just like no good narrative why, you know, what changed year over year. The TV deal. And you Know why that mattered? It mattered because now Amazon is pushing the games and NBC is pushing the games and ESPN is pushing the games. You have more of these multinational corporations putting a lot of weight behind pushing the games. It's not even easier to watch the games, it's harder. But because of the simple fact that structurally you have so much weight pushing the league, it's taken the league to a level we haven't basically seen since Jordan and the Bulls. And so like I'm starting to think about consumer a lot more structurally. Like if you're going to win, part of how you're going to have to win is you're going to have to be aligned with the interests of the 800 pound gorillas. Because if you're not, anything you do is duplicable and you're not, you don't get built into the structural fabric of the machine. And, and so like that's what I'm trying to do. And I, I think sometimes like I'm a little bit insecure about it because I'm like, man, it seems so cool and all this stuff that's more kind of marketing funnel dependent. But I think if you're talking about what is durable and you can count on in 10 years, I think anything where you, you get in there like a freaking tick on these 800 pound gorillas and you're part of what they want to sell.
- [38:35]
Host 1
How does that work? Mike, can you. That's such an interesting theory. There's two theories right now that I'd like to unpack. First, Mike, is yours that like, how do you sort of like position structurally? And then Tim, we'll bring it back to you. This idea that you came at things from a technology and an experience perspective as opposed to like typically in consumer there's like categories is how people think, right? Like which category or which market do I want to be in? So Mike, I don't, I don't quite follow. Like, I think I get the theory of this idea. I want to position into like these large 800 pound gorillas, these big structural tailwinds. But how, what does that even mean? Like, how do you do that tactically for the people listening?
- [39:15]
Host 2
I think the most simple way I could say it is that what you want to do is create something that structurally makes Amazon want to sell your thing for you and makes Walmart want to sell your thing for you. And this is not how most people think. They think in terms of like, what is the hook where I can get people to want to buy it. But if you, if you actually go upstream and say even more than I want individual customers to buy it, I want the mega corpse to want to buy it and to want to push it because if I'm successful at that level then they, it is clear that whatever Amazon wants to sell people, they are going to buy every day. We, you know, this is proven out by our lives. Like why do you buy the things you buy on Amazon? Because they put it first on the algorithm, not because you did some kind of extensive research, you pulled it up, you bought the first or second thing on there and you bought it because of the reviews on there. Which I, I could go on a whole thing about how Amazon calculates its reviews. It's not nearly as impartial as you think it, Amazon sells what Amazon wants to sell and then we buy it. It works this way in physical retail even more extremely because there's, there's only limited spaces on a shelf. And so I've just kind of moved upstream and who is the main customer that I want to focus on. And I think that that's how you create durability because we, we don't have the benefit of time to kind of back test this. But we do know the consumer brands that have been around, as you said Tim, for 10, 20, 50 years. This is exactly how they did it. They went through the behemoth.
- [40:36]
Tim Doyle
Yeah, I agree. I mean there's this great, there's this great business out of New Zealand called Zuru, which I think literally all they do is they go to Target and then they go to Walmart and they go where, where is there a dated brand that you want competition to? So they've got a competitor to, to the nappies. In the nappies category they do really well in toys.
- [40:57]
I think they've got a few like,
- [40:58]
like a, like a competitor to like the kinder surprise. Like they just like little chocolates and things like, just like just every subcategory they'll go and produce a competitor if
- [41:07]
they need, if Walmart needs it. And I think like it's turned into
- [41:11]
a multibillion dollar business. Yeah.
- [41:12]
Host 2
To take it even a step further, we, we have had major mass retailers come to us and say hey, we're not happy with so and so create something so we can buy it from you instead of that. Yeah, this is like, this is what really happens is how the sausage gets made. And so sometimes it's just like looking at, hey, who's vulnerable, who's not doing a good job of serving the retail customers. Like the big the big wholesalers. And sometimes it's like they'll literally come to you and say, if you had this, we would love to buy it from you.
- [41:35]
Host 1
I want to jump into the eucalyptus thing then. So you're at on this note of like how Mike is thinking about just positioning, right. And. And who are you actually selling to? So eucalyptus, you're at Koala. You have this sort of like this thesis, right, that's forming on what limits the upside to Koala. So then you have a new thesis which brings you to Eucalyptus. And ultimately, like you enter into a series of categories that are actually quite complex. And there is no. But there's not a lot of playbooks built. I guess when you started this, particularly in the, the telehealth thing, so what
- [42:09]
Tim Doyle
was definitely happening was like the technology was filling the gap between patient, prescriber and pharmacist. And so like you had curology in the US really ripping. You had hims really starting to rip as well. And so it was pretty clear that if you could solve the friction, both regulatory and consumer, of connecting those dots and like being able to being the technology layer that connects practitioner to patient and then through to pharmacy, that.
- [42:40]
That was going to be a great experience.
- [42:41]
But I was more excited about it
- [42:43]
because I thought it was going to be a platform experience.
- [42:44]
I was like, this is going to, this is going to scale to, you know, end categories because, because they're all going to be different experiences but they're all going to have the same kind of core fundamentals. And so that was what I guess
- [42:57]
the original insight when we went in was. And I really felt like that was
- [43:00]
going to be big enough to build
- [43:01]
Host 1
a really good business where I'm a little lost him. And I don't. I want to just get you to expand on it is there's a big difference between like prams and like Schedule 4 drugs, like the, the. So when you're hitting on like platform, you know, where I'm a little stuck is you want to get away from sort of the Shopify thing, but then like sort of build your own kind of like platform sort of business. Could you kind of give us the, give us the, like the pitch? Why did you think this? Because obviously you've, you've like since changed now you're quite focused.
- [43:37]
Tim Doyle
Yeah, yeah. I've led you down two different versions of the original. So the prams and stuff was. So we raised like 1 1/2 million dollars US pre really starting the company and that was very portfolio oriented.
- [43:53]
So like we could do a whole,
- [43:54]
whole range of things in a whole range of categories. Then we built our first brand, which
- [43:58]
was Pilot, which is primarily ed, very similar to what Ro and hims were doing at the time.
- [44:05]
And then we built our contraception, contraceptive contraception management brand, which is called kin. And then it had kind of some fertility extensions off the back of that. And that's when the platform thesis really
- [44:15]
started to emerge for us, was like,
- [44:17]
oh my God, this was so easy to build. Like, doing this again was so remarkably easy. Can we do it again? And we did like skincare maybe six months later. And so we had three in, three in the first 18 months. And so that was like this, this realization that, oh my God, like these
- [44:33]
things can be laid on top of
- [44:34]
each other really easily. And we can basically break up the pharmacy space by kind of specializing the service experience. The big aha moment for me was when we built our fertility business. We had all of these young women coming through getting the contraceptive pill from us and like 35% of them were having their prescription changed from one pill to another. And that was because doctors were prescribing like old versions of the pill. And so we could essentially build a better version of the experience, get patients like more up to date on what
- [45:10]
the medication choices actually were, solve huge
- [45:13]
problems for them, and then have this incredibly retentive kind of follow up off
- [45:18]
the back of that. And I was like, oh my God,
- [45:19]
we've got three businesses now with, you know, fantastic margins, like, you know, 50% plus nine month retention.
- [45:29]
And we're like.
- [45:30]
I was like, this doesn't look like a consumer business at all. And the cost of technology here is we can invest more engineers than we would otherwise be able to because these things are compounding. And so I was like, this is actually the bet, the best shape of consumer business that I've seen because we have different experiences, all scaling, all on one technology platform, all in interesting and different subcategories with like different LTV profiles
- [45:52]
that will get better over time.
- [45:54]
And so we thought we'd really solved it and then kind of COVID ended and we ran into like the world's biggest brick wall.
- [46:01]
Host 1
So what's the world's biggest brick wall? Just the, like the snapback of COVID
- [46:06]
Tim Doyle
Yeah, like, so at the same time retention drops, CAC rises across the entire portfolio. Suddenly, you know, three or four month paybacks become nine month paybacks. The technology platform is like fracturing because different experiences are slightly different and it needs more investment than we'd Hoped and, but we were maybe hitting the tam of some of these smaller subcategories and so it just, it just, it hit the wall because all of those are correlated assets so quickly. And so um, luckily what it allowed us to do is we like we were able to slow down a little bit, kind of figure things out. And then once we started in weight
- [46:45]
loss, it was transformative. In, in three or four months there's
- [46:50]
Host 1
like two businesses on the Internet that are, that have all that have forever been the best. It's like porn and weight loss. Those are like the two areas that you could ultimately go into and they've always crushed. I am so curious how the you navigated or thought about all the regulatory frameworks early on and like getting into Telehealth in like 2019, like today. I think there's enough people out there doing it that it like we've had, we had jack on from usually. Right. And they do it mostly in skincare. How did you know where you could sort of push the, the envelope versus like oh like we're running into lawyers.
- [47:30]
Tim Doyle
Yeah, yeah. I mean uh, so we got kicked off stripe maybe six weeks into the life of the business and like we're off stripe for like off stripe for like maybe four months. Um, so it's like near, near business killing experience. Like day one.
- [47:45]
Host 2
You haven't been kicked off of a transaction processor then. Have you even really lived? Are you. Do you even really E Com bro? We one time had a reserve. Sam, you'll appreciate this. We had a reserve on a business Iran of $5 million. They literally held on to $5 million in reserves because of our great.
- [48:05]
Tim Doyle
What we learned pretty early on was that compliance could be a real advantage if we got it right. And so we have had a big legal team from very early on, have worked with regulators from very early on and kind of tried to chart the path to what compliant telehealth was going to look like. Because I mean, and maybe actually I'm wrong here, but I felt like on, in a 10 year timeline if you didn't do it in that way, there was no way you were going to be able to do it at all. And I actually think like, like it's been so interesting watching MEDV get the coverage it has over the last couple of weeks and months because like they do a very similar version to what we do, but they make every non compliant decision as opposed to us making every compliant decision. And so you start kind of questioning, you're like geez, like that that business makes an insane amount of money. Have we, have we made the wrong calls here. But then you, you stretch forward another 10 years and you're like, well no, like these are going to be firstly like that thing's going to blow up and obviously has, but these, these businesses are going to be very intertwined with governments over the next 10 years. And so to, to have taken the sensible steps early on, definitely a sacrifice on what could have been from a
- [49:19]
speed of growth perspective.
- [49:20]
But I always felt that it was going to be like the path through this thing being there was going to be a leap that we were going to eventually have to take which was from private pay, cash oriented business to part of the system. And unless we had our like I's dotted and our T's crossed that that
- [49:36]
leap was never going to happen.
- [49:37]
And so it always felt like the right call, but it's been an expensive call for sure.
- [49:42]
Host 1
What does it mean to be part of the system?
- [49:44]
Tim Doyle
Can you go, I think like governments, governments will eventually pay some money for the subsidization of these medications, but they probably won't do that without some care model wrapped around those medications. And we've built the care model and like, you know, not very many DTC businesses have done kind of 20 pieces of peer reviewed research.
- [50:03]
Host 2
And so this is kind of structural bacon that I'm talking about. Like that's perfect example that like okay the UK offers subsidies for GLPs, but only if you are on this list and guess what, you're on the list with eucalyptus because you've done the work and you've done it the right way. And now all of a sudden basically the government of Britain is pushing people to buy from you. Like that's the kind of like structural like that you're looking for.
- [50:28]
Tim Doyle
Yeah, perfect summary.
- [50:29]
Host 1
Then I guess when I look at the, the whole journey here, Tim, right now there was, I guess like what, by the time the acquisition happened there was two brands left.
- [50:39]
Tim Doyle
Right.
- [50:40]
Host 1
Are there, are there any that you wish you hadn't spun out or shut down? Like is there any of the house of brands that you're like, man, that actually was a good one. We should have kept it or gone deeper or something else.
- [50:51]
Tim Doyle
Yeah, so compound our, our Men's longevity product. It's like it got a lot of things right when we started it in 2024 it just was going to be a different technology experience. Like the diagnostic piece was going to be more complicated than we were used to. So the way that it was working is you would do a dexa scan, a VO2 test, a blood test, a whole lot of other kind of like a mobility test. It had a large in person experience basically. And as a result the AOVA was kind of $2,000 a month for the first three months. And, and at subscale it was like fantastic. And we were like, okay, let's make the investment to scale this. And we just got a little bit timid. And to be honest, like one of the hard things about managing a portfolio is our women's focused weight business was going so well that taking any resource away from that felt a little bit insane. And so we were trading doing Germany and our, our German business is now really substantial versus doing this longevity business. And the reality was we just went with the rational short term decision. And I know that's been the right decision on an 18 month timeline, but like I think it'll probably be the wrong decision on a ten year timeline. Um, and, and maybe actually like, to be honest, I don't have to think in 10 year timelines anymore. But, but if Eucalyptus had been a standalone entity for the next 10 years, I think we would have regretted not having that thing mature because it's, it feels like where the world is headed
- [52:27]
Host 1
is the advice in hindsight then to spin a company out and give it its own space.
- [52:32]
Tim Doyle
Maybe, maybe. I like. So I, I think about this thing all the time, which is like, how do you start new S curves? Like in a world where you know, like Amazon does it, very few other
- [52:45]
businesses do it effectively without natural advantages.
- [52:48]
And so I like, I don't know the model because I'm like, I've tried small discrete resourcing and it takes too long and is too slow and the execution bar is often not high enough
- [53:00]
because they don't have the resources that they need.
- [53:02]
I've tried like intentional high talent carve outs. I've tried like platformization and I haven't answered it. Like, I think like we, the thing that we do really well is roll our main thing into new places. And so I don't know if I have a good answer, but I wish I did because it's pretty imperative if you're going to build a platform business that you're going to have to be able to start these new things. And I think like the great US platform businesses do it right. Like DoorDash is an example of, you know, multiple different S Curves. Whether it's advertising, the kind of core food delivery business, I think there's like a logistics platform behind it. Like there's, there's enough there right to, to and that's, that's how you make the leap from you know, billions of dollars of enterprise value to tens of billions of dollars of enterprise value. And I like we just didn't do
- [53:49]
a great job and so can you,
- [53:51]
Host 1
can you go deeper on the S curve thing for the people listening?
- [53:54]
Tim Doyle
Yeah, yeah.
- [53:55]
Host 1
I've not heard many people talk about this in the way that you are.
- [53:58]
Tim Doyle
Yeah. So like if you think about wanting to build a multi billion dollar business and you very few of them don't start with, without the first one being several hundred million dollar business but then you've got this several, several hundred million dollar business in our case like let's call it a $400 million US revenue business. And you're looking at it and you're going like look, this is great but it will have a natural ceiling or it will have, you know, unit economics pressures and we should be trying to create the next business lines whether it's from a, selling to the same customers, selling to new customers, expanding the brands. Like there should be new ways to grow and those new ways to grow is going to have S curves right where it's like there's going to be a pain at the beginning where it looks shit and then it's going to slowly mature and then eventually it will look great. And so the question is, is like how much pain are you willing to endure? How are you going to staff it, you know, how much capital are you
- [54:56]
going to put into it?
- [54:57]
And I have both been short termist and timid in my approach to that and I think like actually being a part of the HIMS business, well like
- [55:06]
not yet but being eventually being a
- [55:07]
part of that business. I think like they've actually really thought about it in a long term and deliberate sense. And the example that I'll give is like, you know, they've bought a whole lot of manufacturing and kind of lab infrastructure because they've gone well over 10 years it's going to be very important to get diagnostics right or labs right. Whereas and it's not a business that's particularly massive for them now but as they think on a 10 year timeline they've made the infrastructure investments to be something differentiated to allow that to mature. And I just like don't think we did that very well. And I think very few businesses do it well. And so I guess like I think we would have been a better business or would be a better business if we'd been bolder with the way that we'd staffed and funded those bets.
- [55:55]
Host 1
So can you then expand on the, on that, can you expand on the capital raising part? So like you have, you raised a little bit of money at the beginning and I think you raised 50 million before you guys sold. That was the last round in 100 US. Okay, there we go. What was the capital used for? Was it just depth then like in the things that were working really well as opposed to trying to start these new S curves?
- [56:22]
Tim Doyle
I mean we, in the capital, in the fundraising decks, we often talked about
- [56:26]
new S curves and I think like
- [56:28]
probably didn't deliver as well as we should have on some of those. I think like if you think of new markets as we, we, we delivered on one type of S curve, which
- [56:35]
is a new market.
- [56:36]
And we did that really well. So you know whether we're the most multi market telehealth business in the world
- [56:42]
by, by some distance.
- [56:44]
And so I think like that, that one we solved but. And then the other one. Yeah. The thing that consumer founders don't really
- [56:51]
get when they try and raise money
- [56:52]
is you cannot spend those dollars on growth. Like you just can't. It's like a, it's a disaster if you do. Nobody wants to fund growth. Like nobody wants to fund a cohort hole. Like you have to have a story where you are investing the dollars for material changes in your unit economics based on a short or long term investment. And so I'll give you two examples. And so one is like we have probably the most retentive weight loss program in the world. That's not magic. Like that's a whole lot of technology investment over time. And so what we have funded is the technology investment. And so that gives us a unit economics advantage on the retention side, which gives us a advantage on the CAC side which gives us the growth that we have. The other example I'll give you is David. The protein people, they took 70 million bucks from green Oaks. That's not to put more David bars in more stores. They bought that ingredient that they then cornered the market for. They started doing fish. They are looking for margin expansion, unit economic shifts, major capital investments that will yield over time. I see too many decks from consumer founders that are like, yeah, we're gonna, we need this money because we're gonna from 50 million to 500 million. And it's like, well, without, without a material shift in your unit economics, it's hard to believe that people are gonna fund that.
- [58:11]
Host 2
I mean, it's such a good point that if you're trying to raise money just to turn around and give it to Meta. That is an insane idea. And I just, I just wanna like triple underline what you said. It's like you have to be turning around and buying something that gives you a durable competitive advantage where you should not be raising money. Do not take money from somebody else unless you know that you can turn that into a durable competitive advantage. You will live to rue the day that you did.
- [58:35]
Host 1
Yeah, I suppose it's so true in consumer too because we're, it's a hard industry to underwrite in the beginning, at the, at the start of it. Right? Like our, our margins are not. Oh, I guess what SAS thought their margins were back to Mike's stock based comp thing, but you know, it automatically we're handicapped and we, we get discounted. So as an industry. Um, Tim, you, you basically went from that last raise to sold pretty quickly.
- [59:02]
Tim Doyle
Oh no, we canceled that. So we were about, we, we signed it, we signed a term sheet. Um, I, I've got a good relationship with the, with Andrew Dudham, the, the HIMS founder.
- [59:13]
We spoke all the time.
- [59:14]
Um, he was like, did you just sign a term sheet? I was like, yeah, we did. He was like, oh, maybe, maybe now
- [59:20]
is actually the time that you join us.
- [59:21]
And so we, we like they approach really late in diligence. They came pretty aggressively and so we ended up kind of canceling the round and, and getting on board with, with the HIMS team, which was, which is, I mean I'm really excited about it. It's going to be like, you just don't get many chances to. That brand is so incredibly strong that
- [59:39]
I'm just like, it's, it's excited to take it around the world.
- [59:41]
Host 1
One of the things I, I heard you use the term window washing when it comes to fundraising. Can you tell, tell us what, what window washing is?
- [59:49]
Tim Doyle
Yeah, I, this is, you know, overly, overly open podcast guesting. I guess I was, I was, I was being interviewed by two young VCs and I was making the point that I don't think there's a worse job to take early in your career than being a vc because your job is to lie to companies and the company's job is to lie to you. And so you actually never really see the nuts and bolts and the decision making that goes on inside a company because you see a window washed version and you present a window washed version and the whole thing is a window washed version. And so the point I was trying to make was one of essentially, you know, being part of a sales process the whole time. But the way that it was construed was there's lies all the way down between companies and investors and I think like that's obviously not true. It's just the best version of the truth that gets presented in all, in all cases. And so one for one for learning for sure.
- [60:41]
Host 1
Well Tim, we're. I don't know if you know this but we live in a world where we're not super great at nuance anymore.
- [60:46]
Tim Doyle
Yes.
- [60:47]
Host 2
Yeah, it's.
- [60:48]
Tim Doyle
It's funny that that's a. Yeah, it's a different time. Right. I think. Yeah. And also like the rewards for. The rewards for more extreme like extremism in with regards to like even how you talk about business is just. It's really surprised me how much that's become a thing.
- [61:02]
Host 1
I know. It's why, I think, I don't know, I can't speak for Mike, but it's why I like doing long form conversations like this as opposed to you know, 15 second, 30 second short form content. It just because they, those your incentives are just to make something extreme because that's what gets views as opposed to like quality of conversation and like leaving somebody with something that's valuable.
- [61:24]
Tim Doyle
Yeah. Like AI creative. It's just like it's like it's all a big. Like nobody's making great I AI creative yet. Like nobody. Nobody's changed their business trajectory fundamentally with a static generated by one of a slew of startups that are wrappers on top of the models. Like they're just not. It's not quite there and that's cool. It's not quite there. Like it's going to get there. We should be excited. We should be testing lots of stuff. It's not quite there and but you know, if you see the 15 second versions of it, there is, you know, a thousand hustlers on. On X being like this is how brand one went from you know, $1 to $100 million in nine hours. And I'm just like it's such a hard like I feel for young people trying to figure it out because the lessons are. The lessons are the ones that sell, not the ones that last.
- [62:09]
Host 2
I mean the long form versus kind of clipping culture I think is a broader thing which is if you're going to be successful in the years ahead, you're going to have to be countercultural and develop the ability to hold a thought for an extended period of time and most of our culture is just not going to be able to. I mean we. There is research out there that the kind of tick tock ification of our brains. Like watching TikTok for 15 minutes harms your brain. Like, there's like not even a lot of debate about this right now. And like people are losing the ability to really think deeply about a thought. At the same time that AI is kind of lulling people into a sense of trust where they don't even think. They have to consider the worthiness of a thought and, or the accuracy of a thought and. And so like one of the things I'm telling my kids is like, listen, if you can think for yourself, if you can look somebody in the eye and have a good conversation with them, congratulations, you're top 1% in your generation probably. And like I do like this about long form content that it's like, I don't know how many people are listening to the podcast at this point, but I would bet if you grafted out that if you're still listening to the podcast, you're probably one of the more successful people that's listening to the podcast. Because the ability to hang with things, the ability to kind of really think through things is so much of what I'm seeing in the, in the outlier successful people right now.
- [63:35]
Host 1
Yeah, I mean look, you're, you're both.
- [63:38]
Host 2
It's.
- [63:39]
Host 1
I'm going to tie this back, but I don't know if you guys are aware of this. I guess there was a study done where they actually made AI watch short form TikTok content and it actually made the AI dumber. Like it was like performance dropped by like 17% or something. So this works across like the human brain and neural networks, which Tim, it does bring me back to this. What, what are the things that ultimately drove to this, like you know, step change function in your business and like ultimately getting you to this exit. So it's not, it's not this like short termism, you know, snack food, you know, that you guys did like, you clearly did some things operationally that were very important. So like could you maybe hit on like the biggest, like these are the levers, this is what we invested in.
- [64:24]
Tim Doyle
Sure, for sure. So I think like firstly like understanding the drivers of the unit economics of your business are like, it just like it couldn't be. I mean it sounds so simple, but it just like could not be more important. And what I mean by that is like different businesses make money in different ways. Like if you're selling a physical product with a, you know, three, three repeats a year or two repeats a year Whatever. And you, you've got to be gross margin focus, you've got to be basket focused, right? But like the product that we sell is it has 150 plus dollars of gross margin every month and the only game in town is can you hold patients for longer and deliver them better outcomes. And so so much of our initial investment went into what does it mean to remove as much friction from the experience as possible. And then when you can't remove that friction, meet patients with the support that they need to be able to get them the outcomes that they need. And so like the first real milestone of us being a great business in weight loss was when we published, I mean when we did the first bit of work to prove that we were delivering a better series of clinical outcomes than the clinical, than the trials for the drugs. And then that just feeds into the top of like, firstly that's extreme vote of confidence in what we do. And then second, that feeds into the top of funnel and the brand. And then the marketing side becomes relatively easy, right? You can then your tactics in the mid funnel have a natural advantage to them because you have something that is
- [65:47]
very hard to say for others.
- [65:48]
And so, and then once you've got like, so I guess like understand the unit economics and then from there build a retention engine that drives those unit economics. And then from that retention engine then you become a brand and you build
- [66:01]
brand work and you do brand work.
- [66:02]
And I think where we, because you know, it's the same lesson I learned from Koala, which is if you create a gross margin advantage and they did it through basket size, we do it through retention, then you actually get the capacity and the capital to build a brand. And so you can actually start to build, make durable marketing events. Sorry, marketing, durable marketing investments into things that exist in ways that the rest of your category just can't do. And so we were the first ones doing the tv, the first ones doing the radio, the first ones doing, you know, the large brand campaigns. And so when this debate about GLP1s and are they safe and who are they for? And, and you know, how do you do them? And all this time and stuff was happening. We weren't running Facebook ads at that time. We were running, well, I mean we're
- [66:45]
running a lot of Facebook ads at that time. Actually that's, that's true. That's trite.
- [66:47]
We were running a Facebook ad, but, but we were also running the billboards. We were also running the TVC's. You know, we were making the argument as to if you cared about your long term health in this category, then the safe, durable place to do it was with Juniper, which is the brand that we have. And so, but it all comes from like it comes from. We built the gross margin advantage first. Like the marketing sizzle came, came very much later.
- [67:13]
Host 1
And, and this clinical outcomes thing is interesting. Like how did you justify the investment in that? Because there was up until that point, did you have any proof that that was worthy? Like that's a worthy place to invest the dollars.
- [67:26]
Tim Doyle
We were seeing obviously some very strong behavioral signal in our retention data. And so the question of then could we get that published was a pretty trivial one because it was like, well, it's going to cost us a million bucks to do the publishing here. You just put that in your CAC
- [67:43]
and all of a sudden you're like, is this worth it?
- [67:45]
And again you have the margin of safety because you're kind of like, well this is already worth it and I'm already spending this money in different ways. If I treat this as the cost of production of a high quality tvc, do I believe it's going to move
- [67:57]
the needle as much?
- [67:57]
And, and luckily, like our organization I think is quite good at thinking through big creative bets, big narrative bets. We're probably better at big narrative bets than we are kind of the technical side of channel work. Like we do, we're just good at, we're good at our big, our big kind of big storytelling and creative bets. And so this felt like a really obvious one of those and it worked really well.
- [68:20]
Host 1
Do you, do you anticipate or predict that this is going to be a more common, I guess, strategy in health and wellness that we're going to start to see far more like actual science being done?
- [68:32]
Tim Doyle
Sure.
- [68:33]
Because like, I mean like in, and like in the sloppification of the world, you're gonna have to find new ways to speak.
- [68:39]
Right.
- [68:41]
And I think like there are twofold, you know, benefits. The LLMs and the agents will be good customers for good research. And then also it's cut through brand messaging. And I think it's more about the
- [68:51]
cut through brand messaging.
- [68:52]
I think there is so much noise in wellness. And if you like, the story of my career I think so far has been like the cost of setting up these businesses just falling away to nothing. And so if that continues and AI was obviously only going to continue that, then the question becomes even more important of how you cut through. And I think the era of cutting through with format is kind of over. I think we'll continue to see new creative formats emerge. But like the returns on new formats, like, if you were the first one to do, you know, Instagram stories, great. If you're the first one to do Street View, you know, street interview podcasts, great. But it feels like those bangers are like, less common and actually the rules of the game are kind of known and it's. Can you say something unique and have
- [69:40]
something unique about your product?
- [69:41]
And so, yeah, I think research is going to be a really, really big lever that people pull.
- [69:45]
Host 1
Yeah, the format was like a. The, the way I explain it to my team is, you know, you're. You're throwing rocks in a pond, and when it was a small pond, they made pretty big splashes. But now that you're throwing, you're basically throwing rocks in an ocean, you're not really going to notice them anymore. Right. So, yeah, completely agree. The. Is there as you sort of look forward. I mean, you've made a, a bunch of statements as we're talking to you around, like, how you think about business and how you think about categories and markets and, and even this technology experience angle that you come at things. I want to know, like, if you were to look ahead five to 10 years, is there something about consumer that you just think differently about that maybe the rest of us are talking about all the time? Like, is there some contrarian take that you have where you're like, I just think this is how things are going to be done now because, man, we're all thinking about AI and its impact on sort of barriers to entry and then raising the ceiling to success. And I'm just curious how you think some of this stuff is going to play out.
- [70:43]
Tim Doyle
Yeah, the thing that I've been thinking about a lot and this is like, so there's two things I've been thinking about. Like, I like to think that the mental model, I don't know if it's a mental model, but like, the, the way that I like to think about things is if I see a trend, I try and drag that trend to its absolute extreme, and then I look for opportunities on either end of the extreme. And so I guess, like, the examples that I would think about now is like, obviously, like, if AI is driving down the cost of brand creation and content creation to zero, like, what. What lives in that? And I think, you know, heritage is one thing that lives. And so like legacy brands that have been around a long time with products that are really differentiated and solid, I think, like, they become much more valuable. And I think like, that's not a unique thesis because I think Thrive just raised like a trillion dollars to do that. But like, I put my money where I'm at. My mouth is, I've like invested in like a small hotel, a publishing company that's trying to compete with the New Yorker. Like I've invested like really outside of the things that I've done. And then the other end of the spectrum is if the cost of producing software goes to zero, then everything will have software in it. And so therefore, like all of the things that, you know, all of the businesses that have been denied software because the cost of engineering is too high, what happens when they get software and what happens when they get, you know, automation and the, and the margins improve massively. And so like I think about all of the like real world experiences that are currently like terribly janky to access.
- [72:14]
Like do they get much better? Do they get much, much faster? They get much easier?
- [72:17]
Do people do more of those type of things because software removes the friction from doing them in the same way that like Shopify has done that for commerce? Is there, is there hundreds of examples of like low level experiences and things
- [72:29]
that get much easier?
- [72:29]
And maybe there is. I haven't like gotten to the end of that thought bubble, but I do think that's like if everyone has software engineers, if every single person has one software engineer, like what gets made. And I used to really think this way about the no code movement. I used to think that social experiences that had code in them were usually so because they'd been made by the least social people of all time, like engineers, because engineers naturally have to be like computers. And so I'm like, well, if no code comes along and like truly social and creative people can create experiences, then do you get much more social experiences? And that hasn't come to fruition because I don't think no code actually met to its promise. But maybe AI is the, is what actually drives that to reality.
- [73:13]
Host 1
That's definitely a theory, right? Is that AI unlocks actual like basically like closing the gap between like real creatives in the world and technology. And like when you shrink that gap, then all of a sudden the experiences get better. I mean, I think we're going to see this barbell effect for sure. Like it's going to be like this extreme. You know, everything's going to have software and then everybody's going to want to go to a hotel in the woods that has no electricity. Like it's, that's, that's how we're going to Proceed here and, and that's going to impact brand building. But I guess, you know Tim, as a, as a self proclaimed media buyer, if all of this is true, does, does all margin then just not get deployed into more advertising? Like is, is all this actually ultimately just distributed distribution?
- [73:55]
Tim Doyle
Like so, like what is distribution?
- [73:58]
Right?
- [73:58]
I think we've become a little bit. Because we, because we lived a 10 year arb where meta was cheaper than
- [74:05]
it should have been.
- [74:06]
We've become a little bit narrow with what our definition of distribution is I think like doing, you know, and we're actually seeing a return to kind of own distribution being thought of as like a really important thing. And you know, that's why like you see these podcasts trading for huge, huge multiples and hopefully that works out being a good thing for you guys and, and, and you know, and more, more of that type of thing. But I actually think like, like I think about creativity when it comes to distribution and then also investment when it comes to distribution. So like, you know, the lazy version of it is every company trying to start a podcast. But I think like what would it mean to, you know, to invest for us, like to invest $10 million a year in events? You know, like, could we afford that? Could we sustain that? Like is that a distribution channel that will actually work? What would it mean for us to you know, buy a whole lot of GP clinics? Is that distribution? Should that be thought of as marketing? You know, like I think boldness with like, if you think of distribution as just like how you get in front of customers in a differentiated way, in a way that they might trust or like then I think we're going to expand the kind of aperture of what's possible there a lot and I think we're going to see less. Okay, I, the way that I define advertising is like any, any attention, any mechanism to buy attention. So if you take my definition of advertising, more advertising, if you take the classic definition of advertising, probably less advertising,
- [75:27]
Host 1
I tend to be more aligned with what you're saying does that. I guess if you look at the evolution of Eucalyptus, then your channel, I guess like just being super nerdy here, but your channel mix then is just like layering on top of each other over and over and over again. Right? Because you probably started off like fairly single channel and then like it's just gotten more and more complex and now you're talking about buying clinics or places.
- [75:50]
Tim Doyle
The crazy thing about our business. So, okay, so like we've done some incredibly creative and interesting things. Like we were like One of the huge first buyers of Grindr media. Like, one of like, you know, like, we've. We've done some really clever. We've done some really, really clever stuff at different times in different ways. But honestly, like, in a category like ours, the biggest thing that we've had to do is get search right because the category went vertical. And so, like, you know how we're talking about discipline plus creativity and execution plus creativity right at the start of the conversation. Like, our story is one of incredible discipline on the search side and then, and then wide, wide ranging creativity on the bets that laid on top of that. But like, it would be, you know, it's very easy for me to say, like, oh, it's been a story of, you know, really interesting media buying. It's been a story of really interesting landing page work because, because the category was growing and it's been, it's been a really interesting story of like, you know, knowing when to listen to Google and knowing when not to listen to Google. Like, yeah, like, in the category we've been in, it, it went vertical so quickly that discipline, discipline and execution became the things when you were just trying to hold on. And now that it's stabilized, more creativity and experimentation and big bets are back on the menu. But, you know, I went to a dark hole of discipline for like three years.
- [77:11]
Host 1
Mike has talked about this many times on the show. Like the. It's all these boring things that you sort of have to get really, really right in order to get scale. And I think in almost any category,
- [77:22]
Host 2
Yeah, I mean, we talk about it on this podcast, everybody gets to hear kind of the highlights. But really, I mean, success is just hours and hours and weeks of grinding away and in obscurity at stuff. Like, I mean, that's the cost of excellence. The cost of excellence is that you're just willing to pour really large amounts of time at something to become truly exceptional at it. And, you know, like, to me, this is kind of, like you mentioned Tim earlier, young guys that are kind of coming up in the industry, I think this is like how we do them a disservice. I've. I've heard this analogy before, and I think it's a good one that, like, you can't. If somebody wanted to learn how to swim, they could read all the books about swimming, they could listen to professional swimmers talk about swimming. But you know what? That doesn't help them to swim. You learn to swim by getting in the pool. And like, that's what's true about any of These disciplines we're talking about with ecom is that it's like the way that you learn it is by doing a freaking ton of it. Hours and hours and hours of it. And it doesn't. I'm not saying don't listen to people, but like, also, like, you need to get out there and do stuff, right.
- [78:27]
Tim Doyle
I try and really avoid talking about the tactics that made us successful because the tactics that made us successful and not the things we do now. And like, but, but I do really think that, like, a durable understanding of unit economics, like, I find it insane, insane how much coverage there is from like the big agencies on, on Twitter, on X being like, here's how to think about marketing efficiency and here's how to think about cohort economics. I'm like, if you don't have that nailed in the first six hours of having your business and you're relying on an agency to tell you how to do it, you're not, it's not going to work. Like, get that foundation before you even make an ad.
- [79:06]
Host 2
Oh, this is totally a hobby horse of mine. Like, people want to outsource thinking all the time. It's like, hey, you know, who should I use as my Amazon ads agency? And I'm like, there's nothing wrong with using an Amazon ads agency, but don't do it until you've tried to run Amazon ads for a while. Because how are you even going to know what a good agency looks like? How are you going to evaluate their performance if you don't understand anything about it? And people all the time, they're like, oh, here's this new thing that I know is important, but I don't know how to do. I just want to outsource it. I want to outsource the thinking, I want to outsource the understanding. And you just can't do that at all. Like, you can certainly have people operate parts of your business come in and help you, but there's no substitute for learning it. And like you said, like, man unit economics, like some of these basics and maybe that's, you know, like, maybe we're getting religion around this stuff more and more because we're not in zurp. But I, I think it's, it's a great point that like, some of these things are just fundamentals that transcend time
- [80:01]
Tim Doyle
and knowing, knowing what you want. Like, I just think most people, most companies are the function of like one number, like, being better than anyone else at one number. And like, you can be gross margin, it can be retention, it can be acquisition. It's probably not going to be acquisition. It's very hard for that to be the case. But, but really, really knowing where you're religiously spending your time and investing to
- [80:19]
get things better, I think like such an important skill.
- [80:22]
Host 1
So ultimately you guys figured that out for Eucalyptus leads to the exit. You described this as like full circle for you, right? Coming, coming into the hims company. Is there like, I'm just curious, is there like a version of this story that maybe full circle might be simplifying it? Like, are we not doing it justice with what you've built? Like, it's, it sort of seems like you went into a lot of places and were very creative while being extremely disciplined.
- [80:52]
Tim Doyle
So, so I think like what we got right, the main thing that we got right, and this is the main thing that we got right and very, very few other companies get right is like, we realized very early on that the best professional services talent was about to leave professional services in huge numbers because it was huge dissatisfaction. The startup world had changed the way that people worked, but professional service firms hadn't really changed. And so we put a proposition together to employees that incentivized them on the upside, gave them a new model of working drop them into countries that they never would have otherwise gone to. So it was like, it was like the Uber, the lessons of Uber at the time applied to, applied to our business. And that durable talent advantage going all the way back to like the salary cap thing was actually the thing that like made this business interesting and then made it good and then that, that's what everything else was laid on top of. And so like, as I think about, like what we were staring into was either 200 million incremental capital into the business to essentially fight hymns on the global stage, or join them and lock in some version of that success. And I think I never for a minute thought the better path there was to fight them. Because the thing that was really true to me was that the promise that I'd made to those staff members who joined us early on was like, if you take a big bet and you kind of do something creative and come and join us, then I'll do everything I can to turn that into an outcome for you. And so when that outcome like kind of appeared and was real, it seemed like the very, very obvious move to make. And so now like we have this global platform that we can build from, but also a locked in outcome for people that spent five years like really, really pushing for that.
- [82:45]
Host 1
So is that, does that then sort of dovetail into how the deal was structured, right? So like I guess with what's publicly available is like some part cash and then like a whole chunk of stock, right?
- [82:58]
Tim Doyle
No, not stock. There is stock. There is stock. So there's like there's a hundred, 100 mil US of stock over three years. That's kind of split among the team. But the bigger thing is that a large part of the team are being paid like approximately half their, their amount up front and then half in the
- [83:17]
earn out over three years.
- [83:19]
And I think like honestly that's what, that's what humans are really buying, right?
- [83:22]
Is like a team and a platform
- [83:23]
that has like learned the hard lessons about like I can't tell you how complicated it is to run a telehealth business in Japan. Like I can't tell you how it's like it's very, very complicated. And so that's the thing that we had and that we built to real scale. And so it's funny because like the brands, like I'm a, I'm a marketing guy and yet like the brands that I've built, the marketing systems that I built, they're not going to exist in three months time, four months time, you know, like they're going to get folded in and, and we're going to build their thing. But what will exist and what will continue to be really valuable is like the investments we made in the team that were capable of building a, you know, a retention engine and running that retention engine at scale.
- [83:59]
Host 1
What was in all of this, man, I just, I have to ask like what was something that you thought was impossible in maybe the industry that you were in that, that ultimately proved you wrong?
- [84:11]
Tim Doyle
I. So there's lots of things along the way that are like changed really quickly about this industry. I think like to be honest, like one that really shocked me was how willing people were going to be to like honestly go to like the, the lowest common denominator version of accessing these medications. Like I thought I, like I thought there was going to be a much more durable advantage in safety and security of that. Like, like I, I thought it was going to be our big competitors were going to be like established clinicians, established clinics, you know, like the, the, the normal path to getting care. But actually the, the emerging dominant players for a long time were like the medvis of the world, you know, like the ones that were willing to cut all corners. And so like I was, I was shocked and I'm still kind of processing this shock at like how Price sensitive people actually are, even when it comes to medication. Like there is no category exempt from, from people willing to shop to the lowest possible price for things. And so I was like, I, I never internalized that. And it surprised me, you know, like right up until reading the MEDV article, like in my mind I was like these like bottom, bottom of the barrel compounding opportunity options in the US they're going to be like some to maybe a couple of hundred mil and there's probably five of them that have done 400 mil or more, you know, so it's like, it's insane to me that
- [85:44]
that's how it played out.
- [85:45]
Host 1
Did you know what shocked me most about this whole industry is that people are willing to give themselves injections for sure. Like just that behavioral thing. Like the idea of giving myself a needle is like, have you, have you
- [85:56]
Tim Doyle
seen what a, like a non properly administered compounded setup looks like as well? It's like you, you like extracting the vial from the liquid. You then like, it's a big need. Like it's crazy, crazy like this on brand.
- [86:09]
Host 2
And it's also very bullish because like right now you can make an argument that there's all these barriers, right? That like there's. We're on first second generations of these drugs where the side effects are higher. You've got to inject it. And like, you look at all the stuff that's coming, man, it is going to be. I mean everybody's going to be on one of these, right? It. And it's just like, yeah, you're gonna be able to take it orally. I mean, like I was talking this, this week with some people about the myostatin inhibitors that they've combined with these. They. They are pretty close to basically finding a way to give you something that like, it just burns a hundred percent fat, which is wild, you know, like that's basically not even humanly possible. Like even if you fast or you like, do things like you can't. So like we're, we're getting to like superhuman what these drugs are gonna be capable of. And then, you know, the research says, hey, you're less likely to drink, you're less likely to smoke, you're less likely to gamble, you're less likely to get Alzheimer's, you know, and you just go down the list. So it's, it's just such a revolutionary, it's such a revolution. I mean it's probably the, the best product in the history of the world. And we're in the early innings yeah,
- [87:11]
Host 1
yeah, I know it's, everybody talks about AI and it's like, well have you seen this other type of technology?
- [87:16]
Host 2
Have you seen where they translate AI revenue next the GLPs. And you're like guys, the big story is GLPs.
- [87:24]
Host 1
And like, yeah, impact is incredible.
- [87:26]
Tim Doyle
It would be, it'd be interesting to see on a 10 year timeline what has more impact. Because like I, like you were already seeing the life extension, right? It's going to be like it's going to be the anti, like amphetamines of, of what like the, the opioid crisis was to the, to the US like it'll be life extending in the same way that was life shortening.
- [87:43]
Host 2
Yeah, I think that's a great point. I mean like, I think that to continue to push yourself in business past a certain point, you have to believe in like the greater good, that somehow you're part of like the greater good in some way. And like it's pretty easy to convince yourself of that with GLPs because it's just like you're making people's lives better. You're extending their life. They're more likely, you know, to have all kinds of good outcomes. Making, making the world hot again is a great, a great endeavor to be a part of.
- [88:09]
Tim Doyle
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's one.
- [88:10]
Yeah.
- [88:11]
It's been just super interesting to me. Like, it's like, like I think about this point a lot and I like to what, to what level of responsibility do I have for making sure people go about these things the right way? And like there's the balance of like the commercial and, and like the, the, it's not even the clinical right. It's like, because like I, I can use behavioral tools. You know, like I can use like our most used feature is a weight tracking graph. How do I design that weight traffic tracking graph so to get people the best chance to get the best outcomes. And I'm kind of lucky. Well, I mean I've convinced myself that I'm lucky that my incentives are very aligned with the patients because outcomes equal retention and retention equals gross margin and gross margin equals marketing. But there is another way, right? There's like the, the, the med V way of doing it and it, and you've really got to convince yourself and be patient. And actually that's where venture capital has been really good because it's allowed me to play the longer game which, which you know, has led to me being more convinced that we've done the right thing. But it's, it's certainly not written in stone that that will be the way
- [89:13]
that it plays out.
- [89:14]
Host 2
I think this is where like an understanding and appreciation of compounding is so critical because you look at some of the all time great categories and it's just like yeah, you could see the growth and you could see meaningful nominal sales five years in, 10 years in, but then you go 30 years in and it's just like it just dwarfs it. And I think that that's what's going to be true in this category that like so much there. I'm sure there's people doing the black hat cash grab right now. I mean it just feels like everybody's a compounder now. But I think that you're right. Five, ten years from now, reputation is really going to matter and the size of the price is just going to make today look small in nature.
- [89:52]
Tim Doyle
It's, yeah, it's going to be, it's going to be, it'll be fundamentally behavior
- [89:55]
changing for a lot of the world.
- [89:57]
And so it's going, I mean I saw the, I saw the like Instagram time on the meta time on site metrics down for the first time ever and I'm like, it's, it's hard to, it's hard to look past that. That at least may have be somewhat
- [90:10]
impacted by GLP1s because it's just like
- [90:12]
such a dampener on addiction.
- [90:15]
Host 2
It will, there's, there's kind of, you know, Peter Thiel has this idea in zero to one of like every great startup is built on a secret, you know, that you know about the world. And I don't know that it's really that much of a secret, but like that the world's going to be dramatically changed by GLPs might be the single insight that, you know, the insight that GLPs and AI are going to change the world in all kinds of different ways is probably the only central insight you need to build a successful company. Now you got to figure out the exact offshoot of that. But like, I mean that is, that is like the most obvious thing ever. As we said here on that.
- [90:49]
Tim Doyle
I love that secret quote.
- [90:50]
And it's like, it's one that I've thought about a lot.
- [90:51]
I tell you where I often, what I often think about with regards to it is that secrets stay secret much longer than you expect them to. Like people, things are often out and like available as insight. And so you think someone will be doing that, but then the actual explosion of the category takes years and so the secret can be held by hundreds of people for quite a long time. And then you just by the matter of staying at it and staying relevant, you can arrive relatively late and still take advantage of it. So if the secret's big enough, which like GLP1s obviously have been, then it's not about being one and done with who wins on it. It's like, you know, there are thousands of winners as long as you commit to commit to the inside.
- [91:33]
Host 2
You know what I think that is, Tim? It's like if you think about the stock market, if you knew a secret about somebody's earnings, right? Like, and that got diffused, everybody would act on it. And so like, it gets arbitraged away in no time. But the reason why that's not true in entrepreneurship is because it's really freaking hard work. And so like, even for me, it's like I'm running my business over here. I'm doing electrolytes, I'm selling water bottles, I'm like, man, I bet I can make a bunch of money in jail. Peace. But it's like I'm preoccupied, I'm busy. And, and like, and then for every one of me, like there's a thousand people that are like, yeah, I could do that. I'm gonna get back to tick tock, you know, so like there's just so few people willing to put in the work required to take advantage of it. And so I think that that's the reason why your insight is so true. You think? I mean, the classic misunderstanding of entrepreneurship is that the key is insight and it's not. The key is execution. Like the insight plus execution is what creates the outcome. But insights are not scarce. It's actually the people that are willing
- [92:30]
Host 1
to do the execution and commodity and insights are becoming commoditized. Right? Like that's actually.
- [92:36]
Tim Doyle
Yeah. And execution is, I think execution often gets a bad label as like one practice done. It's like, it's the, it's actually the balancing of a thousand things. I find like that to be often misrepresented. Like people talking about like, well, if the cost of execution goes down, I'm like, it's only going down marginally. Like you, you've got to go and do a thousand. You know, the number of things you have to do to succeed just changes fundamentally. And so it's like execution across vectors, not down one.
- [93:03]
That ends up being the challenge.
- [93:05]
Host 2
Maybe the word is coordination, like even more than execution. Because we tend to think about like, oh, I executed this task. But like so much of building a business is like, I'M coordinating, you know, I'm herding 500 kittens at once, you know, and I'm coordinating all this crazy stuff.
- [93:19]
Tim Doyle
I love that. And bed sizing across all of that coordination. Yeah.
- [93:23]
Host 1
Tim, do you do you that on that? Do you think that because you're transitioning into SVP International, I guess is the. Is the formal title. Do you see that's still the job. As you move from, you know, building eucalyptus to now part of hims like. Or is something. Are you anticipating a lot of change?
- [93:42]
Tim Doyle
I think my time horizon just shifts shorter. Like, I think like, like the same way I think about the responsibilities of my C suite. Like, their job is to make sure that the business hits its numbers this year. And I think when you're a founder, you've kind of got next year in your mind. And I just don't think I'm gonna have as much of next year in my mind. I think I'm gonna have like a bit more discipline, more complexity, because I'm going to get a bigger P and L, but more discipline and much more. I get the sense that I will spend more time in what will make sure we deliver numbers next month rather than. A lot of last year I spent thinking about whether or not labs were going to become a commodity and whether there was worth making an investment in
- [94:23]
that space or not.
- [94:24]
I just don't think that's going to matter to me as much. And it's going to be, how do we ensure that we have our retention advantage turn into a gross margin advantage turn into scale for the next couple of years?
- [94:35]
Host 1
The way that we like to finish these shows on this, this is perfect transition is we like to do this segment called the Titan 10 where we just ask you some questions and we get like, you know, gut feel answers from you. And there are a lot about this, like sort of short term. How do you. How do you actually do this stuff?
- [94:50]
Tim Doyle
Right?
- [94:51]
Host 1
These are like very tactical. Um, so the first one is, if I dropped you on a desert island to manage the business, think of that P and L that you were just talking about. What three metrics do you take with you? You only get three numbers to see how the business is doing.
- [95:04]
Tim Doyle
Uh, like, I mean, the. My answer here is like, no, no. Which ones are important to your business and to my business it is. We are a retention business. Um, our retention comes from outcomes. So if patients are losing weight, we're doing well. So are patients losing weight. Is that weight loss turning into retention and then is that driving out, like we have a Businesses need to find their pre purchase top of funnel metric. So we have a like quiz at the start of our purchase funnel. And so I'm, I'm much more obsessed with are we creating high quality quiz starts than I am orders because I think too many people don't understand that marketing is a long term game. And so I like, I'm very obsessed with our top of funnel metrics.
- [95:42]
Host 1
Love it. You also get to take a book or a resource but it can't be about business.
- [95:48]
Tim Doyle
Yeah.
- [95:48]
So this is kind of cheating because it's business adjacent. But who is Michael Ovitz? The book by Michael Ovitz about Michael Ovitz. I just think it's incredible. I love books about managing creativity. My two favorite books are Creativity Inc. And who is Michael Ovitz? And it's just like if I could be good at one thing, I would love it to be getting the best
- [96:12]
out of creative people.
- [96:13]
And I think I'm reasonably good at it. But I think both, both Pixar and CAA are examples of that insight. That ability scaled to enormous, enormous scale.
- [96:24]
Host 1
Do you have a contrarian belief about business that you think people think you're crazy for?
- [96:29]
Tim Doyle
I wish I'd been a little bit less focused at some times sometimes I wish like I like, I just, I think that like a lot of small bets simultaneously across a lot of fields is actually the right way to do things and then knowing the ones to double down on. Like I like I actually, I mean this is gonna, this is gonna be a good summary of me and how I think. But it's like I like in Facebook ads, right. It's like there is variance which is like creating many versions of the same ads and then there's like variants which is like creating many different ideas. And like you can trick yourself that you're creating a good account with hundreds of different versions of the same ad, but you're creating a good account when you create hundreds of different ads. And like I wish I had spent more time and been more willing to germinate small bets so that I could then see what worked across many, many different parts of the business. You know, like doing the, doing the cohort modeling in different ways because they would produce different insights. Like just like path dependency is such an important part of doing things well. But I think like I would have loved to have shaken things up a little bit more along the way and I think people would think of me crazy having heard of having heard the journey that I've just described.
- [97:42]
Host 1
Oh, I like that. What's the single most important word in leadership.
- [97:45]
Tim Doyle
Then I think. I think it's. I honestly think it's like, this is not one word, but it's like, maybe the word is confidence, but it's confidence in the people around you. Like, I, Like I've. I've never ceased to be amazed by how good people can get when they. The best people. Like, how the rate of improvement that they have in them. And then, like, I think it took me about two years to realize that I wasn't the smartest person in my company anymore. And then the next two years to. To realize that I was like, maybe in the. I just. I just. I just had more context and the ability to bully people, and that was all that kind of really carried me through.
- [98:19]
Host 1
Okay, so then what's the most single. What's the single most important word in broad business? Then?
- [98:24]
Tim Doyle
The thing. The thing that comes to mind is like, Is like, honestly about differentiation and thinking. Just like, just like, what gives you, like, just obsessing. It sounds like, it sounds like. I mean, like listening to Mike here talk about it just like, it sounds like the obsession about, like, what I do different. Like, I see so many same, same, same businesses, and I just. I just like, wonder if people are really able to articulate in a small amount of words what they do differently. And I. And I think, like, if we were.
- [98:51]
If.
- [98:51]
If more people were able to do that, then I think we would have more healthy businesses.
- [98:55]
Host 1
What's the best meal of the day and why?
- [98:57]
Tim Doyle
I'm not a very good eater. So dinner. Because. Dinner. Because I'm like, it's probably where I eat most socially. Like, I like, I love social eating.
- [99:06]
So dinner.
- [99:07]
Host 1
Okay, there we go. What's the most overrated growth tactic in consumer.
- [99:12]
Tim Doyle
I think all growth hacks are overrated. I think all of them, every single one. They're never as durable as people make them out to be, and they're sold. There are more growth hacks to sell courses than there are to grow businesses, and I think that's a disaster for our industry.
- [99:26]
Host 1
Okay, so then what's the most underrated thing? The most underrated tactic or strategy?
- [99:31]
Tim Doyle
Bold. Bold creative bets. Bold storytelling bets. Like, I think, like, okay, here is the most underrated thing in advertising or in marketing is a great script. Like, there are not enough great scripts. People don't write great scripts. Like, it's like, I see so many insane examples of, like, if we chop together these 40 clips into one mega UGC compilation, or like, if we get this creator and we pay them this much money and it's like, just write a great script. Great scripts can carry quite a lot of things.
- [100:02]
Host 1
So good, Tim. That is it, man. You crushed that dude. That was so fun to have you on. Great conversation. I learned a lot.
- [100:10]
Host 2
So, Tim, it is no surprise you've been successful, brother.
- [100:13]
Host 1
No, not at all.
- [100:14]
Tim Doyle
Thanks, Mikey.