My First Million - #95 with Craig Clemens of Golden Hippo - The 9-Figure Business You've Never Heard Of

Episode Date: July 24, 2020

Shaan and Sam are joined by the founder of Golden Hippo, Craig Clemens this episode. Craig talks about Golden Hippo's brands, how he got his start, how to launch a new product, and a bunch of ideas for potential businesses. Joined our private FB group yet? It's a page where people share each others million dollar ideas or what they're already working on: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

So today we have, Craig, what's your title actually? Are you CEO or founder? What are you, what's your title? I just use co-founder because I do too many different things, you know. Okay, so co-founder, Golden Hippo. I don't know how you describe you guys, but I've, Craig, I think I met you originally at a conference and we became friends. And you just tweeted something the other day that got thousands of interactions and it caught my eye. And we've, we chat just friends, but you tweeted this thing. What did you tweet the other day? It was the 10 things we learned at Golden Hippo after spending a billion dollars of our own money on media. And our own money. So what is your company? Company's called Golden Hippo. We build brands direct to consumer and we are

self-funded. So that's where the own money comes from. How so like what's a brand? Can you give an example or can you say what you guys sell? Yeah, I can give an example. So we partner some of the world's top doctors, people of influence, people of expertise, and we help them bring their ideas out to the world. So probably the brand we're most well known for is a brand with a doctor named Stephen Gundry, who is a world famous heart surgeon. He's an inventor of a device that is used in 90% of all heart surgeries. And we partnered with him to bring nutritional supplements into the world based around his ideas and philosophies. Okay, and so what are examples of products that you guys are selling with Gundry, Dr. Gundry?

So Dr. Gundry's philosophy is that we humans are a condominium for bugs, aka bacteria. And he calls it holobionics. And what that means is if you take care of the bacteria that lives in us, you know, the 25 trillion bacteria in our gut, you guys are all familiar with microbiome and on our skin, that they will take care of their home, which is your body. So that's something all the products have in common is that they're designed to nourish the bacteria that call you home.

So Dr. Gundry has like how many skews? Like how many like, is it like just like one or two products that you're selling to his audience? Or do you have like a whole store with like dozens of different things? Yeah, yeah. It's like, I don't know, 50, something like that. You know, we have everything from specific digestive, health supplements to coconut bars to coffee creamer, you know, the whole game.

And is it all physical stuff or is there any information? The information is available on Gundry MD when you subscribe to our newsletter. You know, we send it a high quality email newsletter. We do a podcast, we do a YouTube channel. But the information is all free. The products are with people. And roughly how many brands like him do you guys have? Like dozens or hundreds.

or like six. Yeah, more like, you know, in the 10 to 20 range. I actually don't know exactly because we're always launching new brands and shutting down brands that don't work. Got it. And at the beginning you said self-funded, you said, well, the tweets from that went viral that caught my attention to many others is, you know, here's what we learned, spending a billion dollars of our own money on paid media.

And it was about marketing and it was about how to spend money. Well, self-funded, is that because you had a big, win before this or is that because you bootstrapped this kind of slowly but over time accumulated a big cash flow in business so give us kind of the brief history yeah great question so self-funded because we bootstrapped though this is not my first company and I was really fortunate in my younger days to have an amazing mentor who taught me all this shit you know I was one of those kids you fairly graduate of high school out of 1.7 GPA. I went into the lucrative field of 1.7. What is what even how do you even get a 1.7? I

even know that's a thing. That's what I had. That's what I had. It's a D plus. My boy. So let's see if it was for the same reason. My was because I just hated doing homework. Yeah, same. Yeah. So hated doing homework, never got the projects in on time. You know, had to go to summer school. I wasn't even supposed to walk in the graduation, but my mom was a teacher in the same school district and she kind of shmoos the principal. And on graduation day, I get up there and they're calling the other C, so they're like Clarkson. And then they go to whatever C comes after, Clemens, but they skip my name. And so I walked up and got my diploma, but my poor grandma was sitting in the stands and she never saw me.

She's waiting. She's like, where's Craig? You know, you're still just trying to live down that disappointment. Disappointed grandma, it's like, okay, I need to change the world now. Yeah, like Donald Trump is all trying to impress his dead father, you know, me with my, my, my grandma. And so you, you're a crappy student. And Sam, you were also a 1.7 GPA type. I've graduated with a 2, a 2, which is a slightly above a C average. Oh, man. I'm a road scholar compared to you guys with my 3.1. All right. So Craig, were you like business motivated at that time,

or you were just wandering? I had zero motivation. I went to community college because my parents dream was for us to go to college and went there. I was delivering pizzas. I then really stepped my game up and started waiting tables, which is a lot more in the tip jar than the pizza delivery. And then I got a job as a telemarketer. And that was a real game changer for me because it was the first time I was getting paid actually to use a skill. Now, don't get me wrong, I was pretty good to deliver the pizzas. But this time, I was actually doing one-on-one calls with people and the job was selling tools and industrial supplies. So I'd call these farmers out in Iowa, and I'd try to sell them drill bits and wrench sets and things like that.

It was pretty bizarre. At this point, were you, were you motivated? Like, you know, Pursuit a Happiness where you're not going to put down the phone. You're going to try to get, you know, 10% more calls than everybody else. Did you transform in that way, or what was it? You know, I really wasn't. I always had this thing against working hard. I think it was some sort of rebellion against my mom or something who was always telling us.

me I need to work hard and go to school or I wouldn't amount to anything. And I think because of that, I didn't want to do my homework. I didn't want to put the hours in. So I had an eight-hour shift at the telemarketing company. And then I got a better telemarketing job at a company that did credit card merchant accounts. And that was like a legit corporate gig. You know, there were people there that were making six figures, wearing suits. And I showed up there a 21-year-old kid. I would wear my collared shirt that I would wear at the nightclub, you know, to the office to at least have some sort of upscale attire. And it was straight commission. And I told the boss, I walked in there so cocky because I was pretty good at the tools and all that. I said, hey, how many sales do I

got to get in my first month to get one of these corner offices? And he says, if you get 20 accounts, you can have a corner office. I don't know what 20 accounts was. So my first day, I sat there, pounded the phone, and I got one guy who was kind of interested. And I was kind of interested. finally I stayed there till 8 p.m. and got him this fax in his form to sign up the credit card account. I just bulldoze this dude. And he ended up backing out a few weeks later, of course, you know, because that's usually what happens. I got like 12 accounts that first month. But I just really liked partying back then. I was 21. I was going to the bars and, you know, waking up with the crack of 1130. And that's when I'd roll into the office. So even though I wanted to be this high. hot-shot salesman and make six figures. I just didn't have it when it came to being straight commission and picking my own hours. My own hours would be like, you know, 1130 a.m. to six or 7 p.m. And then the guy who passes out the leads would see me rolling in there at 1130, where am I shit from the night before? And the good lead comes in. There's someone else who's been

there since 6 a.m. trying to feed his family. Who's going to give them a good lead to, you know? So I did make 40 something thousand dollars that year, which was a game changer for me. I was now rich, quote unquote. And I was still in my boring hometown, which is a thousand oaks, California, if you guys are familiar. And I hated it there. And all of my friends who did have their shit together that had real grades in college had moved down to San Diego to go to San Diego State or USDA.

And so I packed up my bags and I moved down to San Diego. and I tried to get other jobs doing merchant accounts. I sold direct TV. I did mortgage loans. And I just could not find a job that may be anywhere near that 40 grand. And since it was straight commission, I never had to pay the taxes on it. You know, it's like you hold your own money and you wait. But well, I was running through these dead end jobs.

I spent through all my savings. So pretty soon I was like 20 grand in debt to the IRS. And that was a real low point for me because, By that time, my friends were starting to graduate college, and they were getting the salary jobs, driving the company cars. And I was still going to McDonald's with like a dollar off coupon for the two cheeseburgers and a Coke. And it was pretty depressing. So that's where I was. And then you said you hooked up with someone, a mentor. And I know, I think I know who is. Is this Evan Pagan? Yeah, yeah. Do you know who this is, Sean?

I just heard about him yesterday when I was doing my research. But no, tell me. Let me tell you who he is. Let me take a stab at this. Craig, because this is from an outsider's perspective. And this is, I think I could do a good job of relating this to anyone who doesn't know. So Evan Pagan also went by David DeAngelo. I was a customer of this. I assume that. You're male. And yeah. This is the pickup artist guy. Yeah, but I was on the, I'm 31. So I was probably only 18 or 16 when this stuff happened. So I think I'm on the younger age of when this was at its peak. And so this guy had this thing called double your dating. And it sounds sleazy. I mean, it doesn't sound, it sounds like it's

sounds like it's trying to like hook up with girls. It's not. It was about how to like build a relationship with people. And I was 16 pimple face and I was like, fuck, I want a girlfriend. And so somehow I came across this double your dating thing and you enter your email and he was, he would send these super long like 3,000 word emails, only text about these stories and he would get you to buy his book. And Evan, Evan is still around. But at the time, his stage name or whatever you want to call it, brand name was David DeAngelo. And I'm pretty sure, I don't know, but I'm pretty sure he was selling 30 or 40 or 50 million dollars a year of this book on how to date people. Is that right? I can get into all the details of that for sure. So I was in your shoes, I was 18. I only

kissed one girl. No, I had kissed two girls in high school. The first one was legit. The second one, I was at a party and there was a girl who had thrown up. She was 20. I knew her kind of from my martial arts studio. She had finished puking and she was walking back to the party and she was the back of my head and made out with me. So that was my second kiss. Great. How are you only kissing two girls? You look like Mark Wahlberg. What's going on? Did you grow into Mark Wahlberg later or what happened? So, you know, I left out the part about me not graduating college and stuff. I was a virgin all that whole time. I was a virgin until I was like 22. I was really bad. So I was in these forums talking about how to meet girls. And I just wanted to find a girl.

That's all I wanted. I was like saving my virginity to have a girlfriend. So that was my goal. I wasn't trying to be a pickup artist. I just want to one, but I was just not socially able to do so. I was super shot. I won, you know they have the high school Hall of Fame. So in junior high school, I won most bashful. I was voted the shyest guy in the whole school. And so in high school, I decided to do something about it. And I would buy these books like I remember there's one. called 92 tricks for success and personal and business relationships. And I read these things and I'd test them out. So I'd go up to like the cool guy at school and I'd say, hey man, how was your weekend? And he'd say, it was good. I was good. I rode my bike around and stuff.

Well, enjoy the rest of your day. And he'd say, okay, cool. And I'd be like, yes, I had a normal conversation. I did that. I was able to speak with them and I wasn't an idiot. So I was really bad, but I worked to myself. And so, yeah, I was in all these forums talking about meeting girls. and I met a guy who knew a guy, et cetera, et cetera,

and he said, you should meet this guy, Eben, because he's also based in Los Angeles. And Eben was also a dating nerd. So I meet him. We hung out a couple times and lose touch when I moved down to San Diego. And then I'm working at this other telemarketing company, and what you do at the end of a telemarketing shift, because the room has these speaker boxes so everyone can hear the calls is you start prank calling all your friends

and so you know we grew up on the jerky boys and we had epic prank calls so i had this prank call that was pretty epic i would call people up and uh well sean to give you an example what's a what's a name of uh your current or past uh girlfriend uh past girlfriend jessica okay cool So let's say Sam and I are buddies and you'd be like, hey, call my friend Sean, his ex's name. Is it extra current? X, happily married now. Okay, got it. So call you up.

Say, hey, Sean, this is Steve Johnson with Longitude International, the Revolutionary Penis Enlargement Pill, guaranteed to add two to three inches in length or three to four inches in girth within 30 days. We're having a special right now. I can get you two bottles for the price of one and you don't pay anything out of pocket until you see the results. How would you like me to send it out to you? And they'd say, no, no, I'm not interested in that. You know, I'm good. And I'd say, well, you know, Sean, man to man, I mean, I'm good down there too. But, I mean, couldn't we all just benefit a little bit from some more length and especially a little more girth?

They say, ah, no, no, I'm really good. I don't need that shit. Like, well, Sean, that is free to try. You don't get billed unless you actually use it. And if you don't look down and see more girth, it's not going to cost you anything. So let me just send you out a sample. No obligation. And if you like it, great.

I'll charge your credit card. If not, you don't pay anything. No, no, no. I really don't know that. Okay, well, Sean, I wasn't actually supposed to tell you this, but it turns out you're referred to us. Does the name Jessica ring any bells?

Then they'd be like, oh, fuck. Okay, here's my address. Send me that shit. And you put their friend on the phone and tell them they got fun. So a lot of good times at the office there. So, hey, guys, I want to take a second to answer one of the most common questions I get, which is, hey, I got this great idea or, hey, my company's doing really well, and I just need a developer. I need somebody who knows that a code so that I can either bring this idea to life or I can grow faster.

And, you know, I've been there before. I've dabbled in the no code tools trying to make it work. Sometimes that works most of the time. It's not good enough. I tried to learn programming myself. That was a waste of time. And, you know, I've looked at overseas platforms to say, hey, can I have fun? find an affordable developer. You know, I can't afford somebody here in the States in California

and paying some Silicon Valley prices, but maybe I can afford a developer in the Philippines or in Eastern Europe. And the big challenge has always been finding somebody who's actually like good, like they're vetted. Like I never know if somebody's going to just take my money and run if they're actually a good developer or a bad developer. And how do I know? If I knew how to code, I could judge their stuff, but I don't know how to code. So what I really like about this week's sponsor, Lemon.io, is that they have a vetted marketplace of remand. remote developers from Eastern Europe. So I know the founder pretty well. His name's Alex. And what they do is they filter and they test and they basically have a reputation system of any developer that they have on their roster. So you know if you go to Lemonio, you're getting a developer who is actually good. It's good quality who's going to get the job done. And so the way it works is you go, you type what you need. Hey, I want to build this app or I need to add an extra fun and developer to my team. And I don't want to hire. Within 24 hours, they'll match you with the right developer. If it's not the right developer, You just tell them and they'll switch it, you know, basically for free.

It's a replacement guarantee. And they're actually cheaper than the other outsourcing platforms. So, you know, you get one big savings when you just go outside the U.S. or outside of Europe and you get somebody in kind of in either Eastern Europe or in the Philippines, Southeast Asia. You know you save money there. But lemon.io is actually half the price of the other platforms that try to do this. And so it's stupidly effective. I would just kind of take advantage of this as long as they can offer these rates.

It's pretty amazing. And Alex basically told me that for any my first million listener, they will offer a 15% discount on the first six weeks of work that you have done. So if you want that done, if you want a developer who is vetted, who can build your projects, go to lemon.com. Again, that's lemon.com slash mfm, like my first million. All right. Enjoy. Back to this week's episode. So I decided I wanted to prank call Eben. And I dialed up the phone. I hadn't talked to him in a year or so. And I decided to do it myself because I didn't think he recognized my voice because I didn't know him that well.

I'd been like a year. And so I call him up. I say, hey, Evan, it's Steve Johns with a longitude, the revolutionary penis enlargement pill. And he goes, is this Craig? I'm like, oh, fuck. So didn't get to fall off the prank call. But we get to talking. And I say, what are you doing these days? He said, well, you know, I wrote a book with the dating advice that I've been giving out for free in the forums. I call it double your dating. And I've been selling it as an e-book. I said, what's a book? I said, what's a an ebook. Is that like Amazon? And he goes, no, it's a, it's a file, like a PDF file. And I said, what do you, you charge them for this file? He goes, yeah, I charge 40 bucks and then I send him the file. I go, wait a second. So people you are sending you 40 bucks, you don't even send them a real book. And he's like, no, no, it's information. I was like, dude, you're going to jail, man. That sounds scammy as fuck. And he goes, well, I actually sold $4,000 worth ebooks last one. I said, okay, you know, not bad. I talked to him a month later. He sold 17,000

dollars worth of e-books. I talked to a month after that. He'd sold 70,000 worth of e-books. So at this point, I was like, okay, man, I'm coming to work for you. I'll shine your shoes. I'll get your coffee. I'll wash your car, whatever you need. I don't care for the scam. I just need to know how you're making 70 grand a month selling these e-books. And he goes, ha-ha, thanks, but no thanks. Because he knew I was just, you know, party animal that didn't have any useful skills besides harassing people on the phone. So I go to the website, as Sam can probably remember and it's not even a real website. It says one sentence, it says you're about to learn secrets. Most men will never know about meeting women. And then it has three or four bullet points

of what you'll learn, like how to get a girl's phone number, you know, how to kiss a girl without getting rejected. It says, putting your name and email address. That's it. That's the whole damn site. So I put in my name and email address and I start getting these huge newsletters like Sam was talking about with these dating tips and advice like, you know, first date ideas or, you know, what to do if you're fresh out of a relationship, all this stuff. And I'm reading them. I'm like, you know, I can write this shit. And so I sit down one day and I write one. I'll never forget. It was called Two Tips to Kiss a Girl. And I was careful to write it in this exact funny style that he wrote in, which was very conversational, single sentence paragraphs. And it was copyrighting,

but I didn't know what that was. I wrote it and sent it to him. And he wrote me back. And he said, okay, now we can talk. And he gave me a job at $3,000 a month, which was a life-saving at the time. And I actually didn't get hired as a copywriter. I got hired to do link exchange. Do you remember those days when you trade links or something? And I started doing customer support, but not like help me download this e-book, but more when people write in, they'd say, hey, I'm 30 years old. I just got divorced. Will this book help me get back in the game? And so I'd write, yeah, it absolutely will help you get back in the game. There's something on page 36 that'll tell you what to do to build your confidence. So I was getting to the minds of

customers doing that customer support and that made me a much better copyrighter later. So the numbers in that business, at the time I joined, you know, that's about what was doing, 70 grand a month, soon it was 150. The men's dating brand eventually got up to about 8 million a year, but then we started one for women that was called catch him and keep him. And the women's market was even more rabbit. I don't know why. Wow, that's counterintuitive. I I wouldn't have thought that. Yeah, I think men are more desperate, need more help. Right.

Here's the thing, the women's ads converted much better, but it wasn't all trackable. And the takeaway that we had, and it's not 100% sure if this is true, but, you know, Sam, did you ever tell any of your friends about that dating book you bought? Never at a million years. I didn't either. I wouldn't even tell people I worked at this company. When people would ask me what I do, I'd just say, oh, I do. This is the first time, and that was 15 years ago that I'd ever even said that. I took the cover off the game when I had the book.

I was like, hey, that's a Bible. There it is. You don't need to work. Yeah. But women, they'll buy this book and they'll tell all their friends and they'll have a book club about it. So I think that's why it was selling more because women will talk about it. But then the other interesting thing, the back end for each business was CDs and DVDs of live seminars. And the men would buy those like crazy.

The men were way more valuable on the back end. The women were not spending $100 to $300 on these expensive courses. maybe because that made them feel desperate, maybe because they weren't as desperate as the men were. Who knows? But it was really interesting getting to be on the ground floor. So how big did it get? Got to 20 million with those two combined. And then, you know, this is early.

This is like 2004, 2005. And people are asking, Evan, hey, I'm a golf instructor. Can I do books on how to play better golf? Or, hey, I train guinea pigs. I want to do an e-book, teaching people to train guinea pigs. So he decided to launch a business course called Altitude that showed people how to create their own information product businesses. And so I ran this little incubator that we had there. By this time, I was proficient in copywriting and marketing.

That became my college education. I didn't listen to music in my car for three years. I only listened to like audio cassettes by Jack Trout and Our Eyes and Good to Great and Gary Halbert shit, you know, some of the stuff we talked about when we first linked up. and that business took off. And I don't remember the exact numbers on that. But that's what Evan is still doing today is the altitude thing. And he sold the dating companies to a couple of the top employees, but I remember correctly.

And so just to give people perspective, can you say how big golden hippo is now? I mean, I just want people to be like, okay, this guy is worth or not worth listening to. And oftentimes numbers are the best way to do that. Sure, sure. So I can tell you that we are almost 900 team members. We're not public on revenues, but we've grown to about 900. A big chunk of that is customer support too. So we've got about 400 agents in Salt Lake City, Utah at a call center. And we do all of our own fulfillment. And of course, email and chat support is critical these days. So we've got about 70 people doing that also. If I had a guess, I would say hundreds of millions in sales. That's what I would guess. I can say the nine figures is accurate. Okay. And what makes you guys a little bit different is, and I think I said something negative about you guys, and I'm going to, I didn't mean for it to come negative. But you guys do a lot of long form copy. And what I said was a lot of people, I think I used the word scammy. And I didn't mean to say that. What I meant to say is that a lot of people perceive that as scam stuff because a lot of scammers use that. I didn't mean to say you guys were a scam artist or anything like that because I don't think you are. But you guys do do a lot of like long form copy.

Is that correct? Well, we do. And it's the same model that we did with the dating advice. So if you remember, you signed up and you got these really new, really long newsletters with free tips and things like that. So that's why our stuff is long is because we lead with education. So I like to say that we have two offerings. We have education and then we have great products.

And if people just stick around for the education, don't buy anything, that's fine. You know, we try to leave people better than we don't. Do you have tens of millions of email subscribers? I actually don't know, but I would think that that would not be true. I don't think it's that many because we have a different business model than some people. There's other very successful businesses in the spaces we are in that grab emails and then sell back end.

And that is what we did with double your dating and catch them and keep them, is we would go for that email with those capture pages. And at Golden Hippo, we only email, for the most part, existing customers. We don't do a lot of email capture, though it does work very well for profitable brands in the space. So not against it. Why would you do? Why did you go away from that? That seems to be like the standard protocol.

Like, hey, email, they're willing to give it. And once I have that, I can start to sell them drip by drip until they're my customer. Why did you move away from that? Yeah. No particular reason. I've seen it work very successfully as I was saying, you know, and I don't know if it's something that we wouldn't necessarily do in the future, you know. I know we have some quiz funnels and things like that, you know, that asked for it. And so I would say a percentage of our people are our first timers, but also if you've ever read at a company that does a lot of emailing, you learn that the more people on your list, the harder it is to get your email in their inbox, you know, especially in their like real inbox. And so if you're emailing millions of people, then you get on all kinds of weird lists and things like that that Gmail automatically put you in the promotions tab or automatically in the spam.

And it's really hard to figure out why. So we found that just emailing customers cuts down in the bulk of it by a lot. And so that was the, I think, original reason. And so not to say we wouldn't do it again. So let's talk about some ideas. So the space that you're in, like from an outsider's perspective, it seems like because you're launching new brands, you're constantly looking at opportunity.

And maybe before you got into this, you had no idea that Dr. Stephen Guntry, like that people ever even bought anything that he was. interested in selling. What are you currently surprised about in your space and where is there opportunity that you think you guys are not capitalizing on because of it's just not a priority? Well, I can tell you things that I'm not allowed to do legally that are pretty interesting. Yeah, let's start there. Yeah, okay. So, I mean, it's not going to be anything you haven't heard before, but I can't fuck with CBD, which I think is great. I take it myself for sleep, but it's still not federally legal to ship state to state yet.

It's like gray area. And so I get asked all the time by, you know, celebrities, doctors, whoever, if I want to start a CBD brand with them. And I have to say no, because we have too much to lose. But I don't tell them to not start it because I think the laws are heading in that direction where it's going to be totally fine soon. But right now it's not. So I can't mess with it. How would you spin that up? 24-year-old Craig Clemens with nothing to lose would be like,

you know what, we'll figure this out. The laws will get there. You didn't have anything. Yeah, and I encourage people. I've had people come to me that were more entrepreneurial and say, hey, do you want to do this together? I say, no, but you should do this on your own because it's a big category. It's something that gives results you can feel,

which I think is really important when you're doing something in ingestibles. And it's something that helps a lot of people. How would you get your first customers for that? I mean, I think that the CBD thing is easier because there's so many people already making it. Let's say you just wanted to sell it. What would you do? Yeah. So I like to lead with education with everything.

And I think one of the reasons that our advertising is successful is we give value. That's definitely why the networks love us is because people click on our ads and they learn something interesting. And something interesting to a CBD customer could be, why is this not marijuana? I mean, think about it. You know, your parents, like, do they know the difference? They probably have fears around that. There's such a huge education opportunity around CBD right now because it's derived from marijuana.

Marijuana has been, you know, blacklisted since Nixon or whatever. You know, they've been hearing this shit's bad for them for so long. Why is this good for them? That's a huge education opportunity. So I look for spaces where there is. an education opportunity and then give that education. I think it's a great way to cut through the noise of the 4,000 ads people see every day. So you'd write a blog post titled that and then it would be like a thousand word blog post and you would drive traffic to it from like let's say

Outbrain or Tabula or something? I think Facebook is the best network in the world to do your initial testing on. And the reason is because you can target so tightly and then go broader and broader. So what I would suggest is, you know, the blog idea is a good one. And you can do different types of blogs. You can do it on your own domain. You can do a sponsored post on, say, well and good or something like that, you know, or even LA Times or some of these will take sponsored posts. So you can do that type of educational presentation. And then, yeah, I'd suggest they go on Facebook and they look for people who have raised their hand and said, I follow this back pain group, you know, or whatever it is that people are buying CBD for the most. You know, a lot of people buy

CBD for anxiety and their pets. That's a big one. You know, so you can target anyone that is in a I love dog videos or cat videos group. And then start off and get your advertising to where you can convert those folks that are really targeted. And then unchecked. the box on, say, cat lovers and see if it still works for just a dog lovers. Then uncheck that box until you can go broad. That, I think, is the key to scaling up. And that's a great thing about Facebook. Yeah, I love that.

That's extremely tactical. You can do it to Google AdWords in a way with type and traffic. You know, you can go on the more targeted terms, you know, like buy CBD for my dog's anxiety during flights, you know, like you can do the on-tail stuff. But you know, but you eventually want to get to the place where you can convert on CBD or on RACP. So when you're when you're testing a brand, a new new idea, I don't think back to the last idea you guys spun up or you were involved with. What's the time frame you give it? Do you say, okay, we're going to spend six weeks on this and we kind of know within the six weeks we're going to be able to validate this or is it not time based?

It's something else. Yeah. So in my post, my 10 Things post, I think it was number five. and I said nothing is more expensive than a just okay converting ad campaign. And not many people got that one. I got a lot of comments on the other ones, like when I said social media, influencer marketing is for companies like burning money,

got a lot of good back and forth on that. But that one, not too many people got, except someone who I really respect, Jeremy Liu from Lightspeed retweeted just that number five. And if I even wrote, I was like, I think you're the only one that actually got this.

And what I mean by that is that if you have something that shows a little bit of promise, it keeps you putting money and time into it. Totally. And you can just chase that rabbit for freaking Everman and just dump money into it, you know. And so I actually would much prefer putting something up that completely tanks or does really great and not doing that. you know, I've lost a lot of money trying to build brands where I've partnered with someone who I really like, maybe I really liked their product ideas or their philosophies. And then the world just didn't respond. But since I liked it so much, I kept going for it and going for it and going for it.

What's an example of a metric that says this is taking off? I mean, like, do you want like a, do you want to put in $1 and get out three? I think that's different depending on the brand, you know. So if you have a subscription model, for example, you can spend a lot less up front. You know, like if you look at Guthey Ranker and proactive, they're losing money on every sale. And I think they have like an eight month turnaround or something like that. If you're doing something that is low LTV, like maybe you only have one product, yeah, you got to make your money back pretty quick. You know, so there's no like real set metric I can give you. it's different for every business.

But I would suggest define your metric and try to go for a home run or a strikeout. Is there a product that you guys created where you're like where you weren't? I mean, I'm sure that many of your successes you were shocked by, but is there something? What's the one thing that took off and you were like, oh my gosh, I did not think that this was going to work as amazing as it does? Shoot, that's an interesting question. I'm trying to think of which one to share because that happens all the time. And one of my other points in that tweet. Yeah, I know.

I'm not even doing this for. You're going to be wrong a lot. Well, the one that's popping into my mind is when we were doing heart health, which we still do, but we had a particular campaign that we were starting off for it. And the ads had the picture of a beating heart, you know, and some copy around that. Conversions tripled when we switched the ad from a heart to a foot. Weird. What the fuck?

Yeah. So the reason why is because people who are looking for support with their heart typically have circulation problems that affects their feet. Right. And so we did this in the heart health space, and it worked really well, so well that we were running a ton of media for it. And then we partnered with another doctor who has, I think, one of the greatest products that we make, it's a foot cream called FootMedics. And this product, when people start taking foot medics and putting it on their feet, they never stop. The LTV is insane.

But we needed to run the foot banners and Facebook ads and all that to sell foot medics because it was a more natural food product. So we did this deal. We created FootMedics. Actually, we didn't create FootMedics. That was kind of like an acquisition slash takeover, whatever. That's a different story. But because we were doing so much media in the heart health space,

putting feet all over the Internet, some of these networks got together and they said, you know, these feet on the websites aren't a good look. and they banned advertising that has feet in it. Now, you can get away with like a sexy woman's shoe or something like that, but if it's just like a random person's foot, it's not allowed in the networks.

It's a random thing that they don't want on the site. And if you think about it, if you got some nice-looking website, there's just a random foot there, you know, it's not the best look for your site. You know, everyone, I would say, everyone wants the BMW ad because you get this sleek car,

maybe a sexy couple, and then no one clicks on it. No one leaves to go buy a BMW. They stay on your site and watch more ads. So that's everyone's dream ad. Their nightmare ad is an ugly foot that someone clicks on and leaves their site because they're so interested that they buy the foot product and never go back to the Facebook newsfeed or whatever it is. You know, so we ruined the foot banner for everybody and then we had this great product foot medics and we had no way to advertise it. And it's still around, you know, and it does a little bit of business, but not to the scale it would have been had we still been able to use feet.

Yeah, I want to go back to one thing you said, which is something that has stuck. with me as well. It was a thing we put on our wall at my old house, which is mediocrity is expensive, which is kind of what you were talking about. And I used to say, the worst thing we could do is being a just okay or mediocre business because it's going to drain us of our most valuable asset. It's going to be really expensive on time. And it's going to be not that expensive on money. And we're going to justify, keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going. When really, we just want something that's going to break out. And the thing that's going to stop us from finding something that breaks out is spending all our time on.

something that's just okay. If it fails, if it's obvious, you don't even have to be smart. We can just move on and it won't be so expensive on time. So I definitely agree with that one. Yeah, there does need to be a good way to measure it because then you got guys like Gary V that are like, you need to hustle 12 hours a day for, you know, give up your 20s and, you know, work on this same thing that just converts okay and one day it's going to blow up. And that's not true for everything. I think so many people waste so much time cranking on these business ideas that don't have real proof of concept. You know, they get a couple customers,

but they just never break through. And they think it's because they're not working hard enough or long enough or whatever it is. But really, it's just because you're making something that people don't necessarily want. Right. Yeah, and I think that you have to,

the way I'm like, how do I figure it out? How do I know when I should be the guy from Pinterest who was like, yeah, we just kept going, even with growth was flat. And then it started picking up years later. It's like, how do I know when to be that guy? You know, when do I be the tortoise and when do I be the hair?

and because there's examples on both sides, and then there's a graveyard of people failing because they took either approach, so it's hard to really tell. And my answer to myself, and I don't know if this is right or wrong, but I like it, I use it,

is go against human nature. Like if my human nature is to be really hopeful. So I know that. So what I should actually do is be actively skeptical about things, because I know my default is going to be to see the one customer that it's working for and not the 99 that I've rejected it, that totally don't care about this. And so I just try to work against my own human nature because that keeps me honest.

Whereas if I feed into that, if it's like my nature is to be optimistic, delusional optimistic. And then I'm actively like, yeah, I should just keep going. Even when there's no evidence to keep going, I'll end up, you know, at an extreme dead end. Yeah, I'm the same way as you. Fortunately, my brother, who I run the company with is a classic pessimist shooting down every one of my ideas. And I got to fight for the ones I really like to get him executed on, you know, but I know if he agrees with me on something, it's probably going to be a good idea.

So it's good to have that balance. You'd have something that'll check you. What's your hit rate with brand? So I know you said, and when it comes to marketing, for example, you never know what's going to work. You'll get surprised all the time. You'll be wrong more than you're right. Well, one thing I've seen as a pattern, I'm curious if it applies to you guys is there's all these people, I bet people who once they become masters at things that are what seem like, you know, hit businesses. I have friends who do viral videos. And I talked to them. I'm like, oh, yeah, viral videos.

It's lightning in a bottle. Who knows? And I was like, what's your hit rate? And they showed me their, you know, set of their catalog. And it's like nine out of ten. And I was like, nine out of ten are going viral. He's like, yeah, but like, eventually we figured out what emotions we're tapping into. We filter out bad ideas early.

And then we have a distribution system that kind of ensures success. And I was like, wow. So if something I thought would be low hit rate, these guys over time have gotten to be very high hit rate. I'm curious for you, are you guys, what's your hit rate on new brands or new products you roll out? Is it more like eight or nine out of ten? Or is it more like one or two out of ten? So I'll answer to that on both sides, new products and new brands. New products, we never fail because we're asking the customers what we want, what they want.

We do a survey. We say, you know, which of these 10 products would you like next? So we don't fail on new products as they told us. I mean, well, once in a while. Because sometimes, you know, people tell you what they want. but then when it comes time to pull their credit card, you know, they just aren't copyrighting. So once in a while, we don't, so I would say, you know,

let's say eight or nine out of ten on new products. Yep. And maybe it's seven out of ten because also, too, there's human emotion involved in our side. And sometimes you end up getting that product in the line that someone in formulation really loved that they just championed all the way through and then it was their dream and not the customer.

Right. We forgot the customer at some point. Yeah. So, and I've been as guilty as that as anyone at my company. So I'd say that's on the product side. On the brand side, 60% maybe, you know, I'm always surprised by what fails. It's still pretty high, though. I mean, we're still in business.

So, you know, it's. But your failures, I'm sure, are pretty cheap. You know, when you launched it with a new brand, I don't think it's going to, I don't think you're putting in $10 million into each one. It's cheap if it fails quickly. If it takes a year to realize it's a failure, that's when it's really expensive, you know. How much money do you invest to want to a new brand?

You know, let's say, so I'm not a numbers guy at all. I'm the marketing positioning guy. So I'm just going to guess a million bucks, something like that, you know, maybe 1.5 by the time it's said and done, including resources and things like that. So like five or 10 people?

Well, it's not mostly people cost though, right? You're talking about the whole marketing. Well, what I mean is you throw five or ten people at something and then you give them a little bit of a budget for marketing. That's not the way our company does it. We do it differently than your standard incubator or whatever. So, for example, our formulation team formulates all the products for all the brands. There's not a brand that has a specific formulator, for example.

There's not a brand that has a specific copywriter. You know, vertically integrated. You manufacture your own products. You're not. We don't manufacture own products, but we formulate in a house. I have a team of people with deep backgrounds and science coats and all that stuff that are amazing at formulating products with high efficacy at taste really good and are, you know, cost-effective.

still best in class. But I will just say quickly, if I can do a little pitch or whatever, we're looking to make acquisitions right now. We're looking to acquire great consumer product brands. We're looking to acquire startups in finance, you know, personal finance, like debt repair, credit repair, things like that. You know, we're expanding into some new categories this year. So if people are listening. Who should get it? What type of company? I'm the type of company that's A, B, and C, I should reach out to you. Yeah. How do they reach out? Yeah, Sweet Spot is like one to 20 million and revenues, you know, so some proof of concept there that could benefit from working with people who are experienced in scaling. That's something that is, is really a strong point for us,

so we can help with. How do they reach out? They can just, you know, hit me pretty easy to find at Craig Instagram. I read my DMs or Twitter or, you know. Okay, cool. All right. So now, to the ideas. Okay. So we do this for, consumer product brands, someone needs to do what we do for personal brands. There's a couple companies that do it, but they have a slightly different model. So there's Mind Valley that partners with authors and speakers and they put them in the Mind Valley educational program where I think it's like a Netflix for personal development, if I understand it right. And I was looking up Mind Valley last night. So it's like a 70 million. It's owned by this guy in Thailand. Where is he in Indonesia?

Yeah, you should have him on the show actually. He's awesome. He's a friend of mine. introduce you guys. His name is Bisha. Yeah. So it's like a $70 million information brand. And they sell to dumb it down. Like I think one of their biggest products was like a $300 yoga course. Yeah.

He's built an incredible business. And he does a bit of what I have in mind. Though I think there's an opportunity for a company that just helps people in the thought leader space that don't want to learn marketing really go big on their own personal brand. So my wife is a perfect example of someone who needs this. That's how I thought of it. My wife is a holistic health practitioner. She has a book coming out with Hay House that helps women with body image issues. She puts out amazing content. She's got a coaching practice with women all over the world that work with her 101. She's created courses, but she doesn't know how to market. She's actually

become a great copywriter, but she doesn't know how to like run paid media and build out funnels and all that stuff. And so if there was a company that worked with people like her and I also host an event in Los Angeles. Next time you guys are in town and you're allowed to see people in person, let me know. But we do an event where we, it's kind of like a mini TED meets pool party. And we bring in speakers in all different areas. And so many of the speakers say, Craig, I want to start doing courses and things like that. I don't know where to start.

And, you know, some of them end up doing great products with Vision. But I think there's more of an opportunity also to partner with people on a smaller scale than Vision does. Because I think he has like 40 or 50 people, but maybe run, you know, three, to 10 amazing thought leader businesses under one umbrella and share resources. I think what it's, you know what it's like is, do you know Tucker Max's company? Yeah, Scribe. Yeah. Okay. So it used to be called book in a box, which was a good explanation of what it is, but it wasn't a good name. And he changed to scribe. And what Tucker does is authors come to him, people who are consultants or like thought, kind of thoughty leader people or people who just want to leave a legacy for their kids,

they give him 25 grand, or he gives them 25 grand. And you sit with a, ghostwriter and you tell your story and they turn it into a book, which sometimes that book is just, I want to give to my kids because I want them to have like a cool story about how I grew up, or I want to get speaking gigs or I want to get consulting gigs. And what you're describing is almost like a service where you probably wouldn't want to pay up front. What you'd want to do is find people like your wife or people who are high caliber folks and you're like, look, we can turn this into a block and then a course and we'll get a percentage of the revenue. Exactly. That's interesting. That's interesting. It's almost like a modern day Harper Collins or a modern day penguin or something like that.

Like a modern day book. I can describe it because it's not just about the book anymore. People want all that digital content. Right. So brands like double your dating and catchman keeping would be great examples for that. And Evan was actually getting into that with that incubator where he had me teaching them copywriting and he was going to bring them under the umbrella. and then he went into the biz, uh, biz op space, you know, and, and got away from it. But yeah, that's one idea number,

uh, one idea I think is waiting to be executed on and I would love it if it existed. Okay, the second idea is something I came up with during an ayahuasca trip. I went on this trip, really hoping to have a personal growth moment and a breakthrough. And I ended up building an app in my head for eight hours. And I'm not a programmer or an app designer.

It was maybe a complete waste of time, but I hope someone builds this thing someday. Maybe that person is listening, so I'm gonna share it. So it's a message aggregator. You know, you get the messages on your email, on your DM and Instagram, on your Facebook, on your Slack, all that stuff, and they're just all over the place.

Then you gotta go to 20 different things to answer all your messages every day. So this thing has a wheel that looks like a wheel facing you like a slot machine wheel, and it puts all your emails there and you can scroll through. But it also merged, them with your to-do list because a lot of those go together and right now emails and to-do lists don't connect and they don't connect with calendar either. So imagine that wheel is your email and then you can swipe over and you can see the next wheel that comes up as your to-do list. Swipe over. The next one is your calendar and you can swipe through and it's all your messages from all those platforms combined and when you hit one and let's say you answer the email

it pings it says do you want to archive your to-do list item two? Do you want to take this off your calendar? Or if you go and hit the to do-do list it pulls out all of the messages that might be related to that whether it's on Slack, whether it's on Facebook, whether it's on Gmail, and it pulls them up, so it's got it on your screen so you can just address it and get it done. And then it's a gamified system like a machine gun. So if you imagine the wheel, like a machine gun turret, and it just keeps throwing emails and tasks at you. So you just bang them out and get them through your day to hopefully get to inbox zero, which is something I know nothing about. I've never had it before.

But yeah, someone please build that thing because I don't know how and I would love to use it. We've talked about superhuman and hey, hey.com. Have you paid attention to those? I pay superhuman $30 a month. I've only used it a couple times. I've been paying for a year. I do like it. It's just a lot to learn with the keystrokes.

Yeah. And I haven't been able to figure that out yet. I haven't seen, hey, I have an invitation waiting for me in my inbox also. Though I got a little turned off by what appeared to me from outside looking at it. Now, I didn't go deep in it, but it seemed like, this whole like whining about Microsoft, your app store taking money and stuff. Clocking out my Twitter feed.

I was just like, I don't want to have any part of this because isn't that common knowledge that the app store is going to take their piece? Right. I don't want to go to that tangent, but whatever. Okay, so the ultimate, I like the message aggregator side

because I have the same problem, Twitter, DMs, Instagram, email, text messages, whatever it is. And you sort of have to like, it's like, you know, when old people have, to take all these pills because they have like all these conditions and they have this pill pack that's like, oh, it's Monday, I got to open these seven different lids and I got to take these

seven different pills and then by the end I'm zonked out. That's how I feel when I check my messages. And so if you could either make it fun or at least put it all in one place. In theory, I like that. I also, this is something that Paul Graham, the founder of why commentators talked a lot about is like email is essentially a to do list. Why is it not designed to work as a to do list or with a to-do list. Somebody needs to do that. We'll make a lot of money. And he wrote this like seven years ago, eight years ago. I think some people have tried. Of course, people try everything, but no one's nailed it. I like that. And I think the hard part with that is monetization. But it's something that

superhuman and Hay are doing that in a million years, I never thought would work. But I now completely agree is charging money for it. Like you're, you know, like that most people will be like, yeah, we'll make money from advertising where we'll get like a billion users and hopefully something turns out. But I think monthly fees for services like this is actually 100% the way to go. Are you guys both Bay Area guys? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so I was up at a Google summit a couple years ago and I was talking to a woman. I forget what company she was with. But she was talking about how Larry and Sergey back in the day were big proponents that you should never sell out to the man, meaning the advertisers.

and then they acquired Google AdWords, which was called, I think, go-to at the time. Or double-click. Okay. Yeah, one of those. At the same time when they were debating, should we charge people $4.99 a month for Google? And that that move right there ruined the world

because now it's an advertising-driven thing instead of a subscription thing. And she was telling this to me as though I should have known this, and this was some type of thing that everyone intends. knew about. So I'm curious, is this something that you guys have heard before and believed in? And is there protests in front of Google or was there back in the day? Because that was the first time

I'd heard of it. There's definitely a revolt amongst high-end insiders. And I have heard that story that they were like, we're never going to do advertising. But Google is, I think, pretty good for advertising. Like, it's like high intention or it's intent. Like if someone's searching for something there is. It's effective. Yeah, for sure. It's effective to advertise on it in the same way. Facebook's really effective to advertise on it. I think you're bringing up a more philosophical. So first, no, I actually hadn't heard that story that Google was sort of at a fork in the road moment

trying to decide whether they, hey, do we charge for our product or do we do this sort of free and then make money off ads system? And I do know that the sort of ethos went from like, advertising is a necessary evil for Facebook and for Google. Early on, like Zuck had no interest in ads. Probably still doesn't have that much interest in ads. And it was sort of like,

you know, can't be, or don't be evil was, you know, the phrase for Google, that was their marketing message as far as how they're going to run things. And then now today, like, you know, the suits have taken over. It's a, you know, it's a public company. They have to, the job is to make as much money as they can. And so that's why you see things where, you know, if you look on the Google front page, it's like, everything is an ad until you scroll type of thing. And like, oh, how the, you know, how the times have changed.

And so, yeah, it's different. And same thing with Facebook. Facebook was not. Like, there's interviews of Mark kind of casually sit. in an interview like this talking about advertising and how it's kind of lame and how he doesn't really want to do it. Evan Spiegel, same thing. He thought advertising was creepy the way it was done. It's like, that's their business model. So what are you going to do? You're going to hate your own business model or, you know, that's not going to work. Who thinks long form copy is scammy,

but you know, hey, I use long form copy. Look, I use long form copy. Not everyone who uses long for copy is scammers, but a lot of scammers use long form copy. Yeah, that's true. But what's your By the way, I need your email, cold email technique. Did it work? To get a, it worked right away with like a, oh, top 20 celebrity in the world. Oh, man. Yeah. I don't want to say it was, but it was, it was a pretty, pretty good move.

I need to charge some money for that. I think it's out there for free. Well, all trend subscribers have that, but yeah. It's awesome, man. Can I pitch trends? You know, you and I only met for like five minutes at a conference. Yeah. Talk once in a while, but we're not like homies, you know.

Right. Pitch it. Trends is fucking awesome, man. It's so high value. I tell people to subscribe for trends. I actually wrote back once, or maybe I said this to directly. I thought it was too good. I thought it was too much content to digest.

It was just too long and too much great information. But I tell people to subscribe the paying subscription to trends all the time. I think it's the best business newsletter that's out there. I'm going to clip this. We'll probably have this clip this clip this clip. right now of me saying this in the ad and we're going to run this as an ad thank you the smile on sam's face i've never seen this guy smile like this all right i love it you had a third idea as well okay vr i'm holding up an oculus for people who can't see yes it fit this on my dog's head i don't know

what it is but it would fit and how much fun would a dog have in vr chasing virtual tennis balls you put like the haptic bite thing you know you'd be the device so they can bite on the virtual tennis ball. And the dog just has like the greatest day, every day. And the technology's here right now. Maybe it would need to get a little bit lighter, but it's here, man. You know, the weight thing would definitely work with a bigger dog, German Shepherd or something like that.

You know, maybe in three years, you can put it on the Shih Tzu, but this is here and no one's done it yet. And this thing, like this, for example, what if there was a dog adapter for this actual Oculus? What if I could put this on my German Shepherd? I'm not using it because I don't wear this thing that often. You know, that is a billion dollar business. Okay, so what you're saying sounds like a crazy person,

but I want to give some perspective on this. Dog VR. You were just said dog VR. And on the surface, that's a laughable idea. But when I, when I, as a dog owner and someone who's involved in a couple dog businesses, I know you're involved in a pet business too, right? Yeah. Pet owners have the highest engagement I have ever seen.

So like the pet companies that I'm associated with, and maybe you can verify this because you're a pet business owner, is that the highest engagement of amongst customers that you've ever seen? That was a loaded question, but yeah, yeah. You know, I'm just so far removed the numbers. I couldn't exactly tell you. It's not as good as we thought, though, as far as them buying everything. We thought they, we thought they would be fanatical of buyers than they are. I will say, what we did expect as you know I own four dogs once they start on the dog food they don't want to switch because it's a very it's the healthiest option with a convenience and it's just bad to switch your dog's food a lot so that is true but they don't like buys that that's been a hard business for us to to get margin on because of the food costs and shipping and and and all that stuff you know there's this company that was that just raised 10 million dollars today and they claim that their dog, it was either a pill or a food, that they're going to add one to four

years to your dog's life. And they've hired all these scientists. They raised $10 million. And in my head, I'm like, can I, can I eat that food and or can I eat the dogs that are eating that food? I'm like, what can I do to capture that? But that sounds like a company asking for a lawsuit, though, because there's been huge lawsuits against companies that have made those claims in the past. So I don't know, did they do a 20-year study with 100 dogs or something? That sounds crazy. I'd love to know the name of the company. It's called, I think they raised $10 million today.

It's called Celebrity. So C-E-L-E, so like the word celebrity, C-E-L-E-V-I-T-Y-Y dot co. A consumer. This is the fourth business idea. We're just going to collectively sue them, and we'll make $10 million bucks pretty easily. So that's a brainer. Bob's eating it, and then we got the class action. Yeah, I'm in.

Yeah. I mean, hey, props to them. I'd love to check it out, you know. I'm going to pitch our dog food since people are listening. You know, you should always be pitching, right? Have you guys seen the documentary, the dog doc? No. You on dogs too, Sean?

I have a dog, and my dog is the pickiest eater, and we've tried all these different dog foods, and I'm trying to get her to eat something healthy and not, like, the only food I know she likes is chips. Okay, well, I'm going to send you some of our. dog food, but watch the documentary The Dog Dog. It's produced and directed by the same woman who produced Buck, the documentary on the horse. It's like an Oscar-worthy documentary. And the star of it is a veterinarian. His name is Dr. Marty Goldstein. He's famous for saving Oprah's dog

when every other vet said her dog was going to die. He saved Martha Stewart's cats. He just has this little practice in Connecticut where people from all over the world would come bring their dogs. He's actually retired now, but this is what he did. He would help all the dogs that no one else said could be saved, and he would do it with nutrition. He'd take them off the medications and put them on his nutritional therapy, and the healings are miraculous. And the documentary highlights it, and it shows that not everything is perfect. You know, there's some cases that he couldn't help.

It's a really great documentary, and that is my partner for our pet food line. It's called Dr. Marty's. I sent you some, Sam. Did you give it to your dog? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You sent me that like three months ago? he's eaten it all. Cool, cool.

And we're good and he's healthy. Sam's dog literally eats everything. Like I've seen Sam just, when he's done with his plate, he puts it on the ground and his dog eats the whole thing. Awesome. Well, you know, it might not be Dr. Marty's anymore. I don't know if I sent you a six months supply, but no, it was not six months, but he ate all of it. Good, good, good. Well, you know, hopefully that gave him some extra.

So we're kind of overtime, but a first year of a fucking great storyteller. I think you, you know, I'm smelling a. a regular friend of the pod who comes on with some regular cadence is great. I want to ask a question. So when exactly did you start Golden Hippo? 2010. And so now... Oh, five.

He said five, right? 2005. So I got hired at Evans Company in like 2003, 2003. And then we parted ways basically the end of 2008 when the recession hit. And I had a lead generation company also that also had to be basically shut down with a recession. And that was a, I didn't get into that story, but it was a troubling time for me. I went from making really good money to making zero in like 30 days. And then in the midst of the recession is when we started Golden Hippo.

And that's another reason why we didn't raise money, aside from the fact that no one was going to give four jackasses with no college degrees a sense of VC money, you know, it was a recession. people weren't writing checks like they are today. So the thing I was going to ask is now D to C has been hot. Me and Sam always joke. Sam loves to say, you know, if I see another brand that's just millennial pink, lowercase, you know, lowercase brand going into some established category, raised $10 million, it burns it. You know, we have friends that have been super successful with D2C e-commerce and that sort of thing,

but, you know, you see a lot of this happening. What's been your, A, what's your reaction as you've been seeing? in that and you're like, dude, I've been here at this party for a while. And then also, how do you differ from the model that you see Silicon Valley chasing? And what do you think of that model? I don't know what they're doing. You know, it's, it's, it impresses me because I don't know anything about it. Like if someone gave me $10 million, I wouldn't even know what to do with it. Instead, go start a new brand. Like, what do you do with $10 million? I guess if you're in that dog company, you go maybe now you do the clinical studies or something like that, you know, uh,

I'm impressed by some of these brands. At the same time, I worry for some of them because I feel like you raise that money and then you're going towards your next money. Then you're going towards your next money. And then hopefully some big conglomerate grabs you before the rugs pulled out from under. It feels like the business model of all these brands are to me. I saw a quote from Gary V that said most of these DTC brands are out of business. They just don't know it yet.

I don't know if that's necessarily true, but it's something I don't understand. know right so I I am quite impressed by the companies that do that and I read I just got on the Twitter you know that was like you know my fifth tweet that wasn't about like you know here's my pizza I'm meeting today so I just started reading the director consumer Twitter and I got on that clubhouse too yep and most of the time when I see someone's theories on what you should do to start a DTC brand it is it is They're not things I would do. So they talk about you need to build a community.

You need to be Omni Channel. Right. You need to do influencer marketing. I don't get that. I mean, it does work. I mean, Vital Proteins just sold for, you know, several hundred million dollars to Nestle on the back of influencer marketing. And I have heard that their EBITDA was next, was very low.

Right. And it works. So, you know, proud of them, but I just, it's not something I understand. Love it. Yeah, I like having the sort of the other perspective because I think it's really easy to just read the articles and be like, oh, that's the formula. But I'm more interested in somebody who's actually got a working formula that didn't, like a fundamentally working formula. And yeah, I was curious about your take on that. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of different ways to do it.

Like I said, like some of my direct competitors will grab the email first. You know, it's just different ways of doing things. And I don't think there's a right or wrong. It's just what you're more comfortable with. You know, if I had come from Silicon Valley and had a college degree and, you know, worked at a Sequoia before I started this company, maybe I would have started it with $10 million. Right. Sam, anything else before we go?

Yeah, I just had to ask you one more question, which is we have a lot of people, this is similar to what Sean asks, who have raised a whole lot of money. And sometimes that's great, sometimes that's not great. But the stories that you're saying, you're saying that you have a home that was confused for Mark Walberg's house, so you must have a lovely home. You said you have 900 team members and nine figure company. How are you guys financing all this? I mean, has it just been crazy profitable from the beginning? Or do you take debt? Like, how does this all work? And how are you able to cash flow so much? Well, it went a choice. We didn't have any money in the bank.

and I came from a company that didn't have any money in the bank either. You know, Evan bootstrapped the dating advice brands. So we just started. We had, there's four of us. Three of us put in 20 grand each. We loaned our fourth partner, his share, you know, so it ended up being 60 grand total. And then we just, you know, didn't have a choice. Like, it was either it's going to make money or we're going to try something else.

And have you guys been crazy profitable every year or did it just start laying in just ask me the EBITDA, Sam, ask me the even. I mean, yeah, we've been profitable since day one or else we would have had to go raise money, right? So it doesn't need to take on outside funding. Now we're talking to some people now. You know, we might take on some funding for some of these other categories we're getting in. Like, you know, for example, like dog food has been a tricky one. and that is a brand that I could see as potentially needing some cash for to really scale it up. You know, dog food's expensive.

Shipping is expensive. It's hard to get the capacity of the manufacturing. You know, so it's not something I'm ruling out. It's just not a world I come from. And had I known that world, maybe I would have after we took that 60 grand and built it up to, you know, whatever we did the first year. I think we did, I don't know, half a million in revenue the first year or something like that. Maybe if I knew that world back then, I would have gone and done a VC road show and done that. I just don't come from that background.

You know, I just, like, had no idea that that even existed until I started going to, like, Summit series and meeting other people that had similar brands to mine that had raised money. And they also had these things called exits that. And I didn't know that was a thing either, you know. Well, that's why I'm bringing this up, because Sean and I were kind of middle of the road in terms of bootstrapping and not bootstrapping. a lot of our friends are the raise lots and lots of money and sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't but and I love having my frame broken and listening to other people do different things so it's certainly

is simple but hard what you did right like you just make a profit I mean that's duh that's like how businesses work but that's what it's always cool to see whereas a lot of people are starting stuff and they're waiting to exit in order to get their big payday whereas you are kind of able to get paid along the way and I think that I like talking about that and sharing those different stories of there's a lot of ways to make something happen. Yeah, one of the reasons the podcast is called my first million is because I wanted to show all the different ways that people can make it. Like, there's no formula. There's no, you can't copy any of these, actually. But if you hear a hundred different stories, they'll start to be like, oh, okay, there's so many ways to win. And I'm going to be inspired by these people and I'm going

to take parts of their story that is relevant to my context and make it happen. But like, like Sam said, we want to hear the variety of different paths, not just like the same story over and over and over again. And then you think, oh, there's only one way to win. Yeah, the podcast name makes me laugh too, because I once met a Russian guy. And he said something I'll never forget. And he said, we started talking about business or whatever. And I said, hey, you know, tell me about this and that. And he goes, never ask a man how he made its first name.

Dude, that should be the intro of the podcast, a Russian voiceover just saying that. Yeah, because you hear about these people, you know, it's like, Sam, I think I saw a tweet that you did that you liked Andrew Carnegie's biography or whatever. Loved it, yeah. I mean, the guy was insider trading. That's why he made all his money. All those guys were. Joe Kennedy. They all were. It was all illegal shit. Yeah, I mean, Hamilton Blenders started off selling sex toys, you know, and then it turned into a blender because they had that vibration technology. How many people made their money

in prohibition and, you know, smuggling alcohol? It's just a funny saying. So I like that you guys are digging in and asking that question. Yeah, most people would be shocked. Like Joe Kennedy, he made his first million by Hertz, which at the time was a cab company. George Hertz was like, hey, you got to make my stock better. And so he would buy all the stock and then hurry up and sell it to a pool of investors. And it was not, it wasn't illegal, but it's probably unethical. But of all the biographies I read, a lot of it starts that way.

Yeah, yeah. I had made my first before I started Golden Hippo. I had also lost it all. So, you know, it's, it's a different thing keeping it and making it. Craig, do you have kids? No, but trying me. Okay, so let's say you have a son or a daughter. They just turned 22, and they're like,

Dad, I want to learn about copywriting. What do you point them to as like kind of ABCs of copyright? Where would you send somebody for the first kind of 30 or 60 days of going down that, trying to become great at it? Yeah, I always tell people to read a book called My Life and Advertising. which was written by Claude Hopkins, who's one of the greatest copywriters in the 1920s. The psychology back then is the same as today,

and I tell them to read my life in advertising, which is his biography, not his copywriting book, because it talks about how he built all these great brands that are around today, like Hoover vacuum and Goodyear Tire and Pepsett and Toothpast. And it's just really fascinating stories. And if someone doesn't enjoy those stories,

then copyrighting is not going to be for them. Gotcha. Okay, cool. And I also tell people to buy that one because it's free. You can just Google and you can find it as an e-book. And it often is alongside his copywriting book, which is called scientific advertising, so you can knock them both out of it.

Do you know that story, Sean, about Claude, basically toothpaste didn't like, toothpaste wasn't like that good of tasting, but he made this ad where he says, if you rub your tongue above your teeth, you'll feel film. And we're going to get rid of that film with toothpaste. And then he also said, like, something to the effect of like, it hurts in a good way.

Like the way that you feel that. that like, that like crisp feeling in your mouth with toothpaste. That actually, that way you know it's working. Like he would do things like that. So people like, it became a habit. He created, he was the one who like helped make toothpaste a daily habit. Yeah, people, only 5% of people were brushing their teeth daily in the United States. Before Pepsiden came out within 10 years, it was 85%.

Wow. That's kind of amazing. I always have felt that copywriters and comedians are the truth tellers of society. they understand people the best. And they're able to, because they understand people, you can't be a great comedian if you don't understand people, if you can't tell the truth. And you can't become a great copywriter if you don't understand people

and you can't tell the truth. And then there's a whole bunch of jobs that are the opposite. Yeah, definitely. We should jam out maybe next time since I know we're out of time, but there's so many stories like that about these daily life things that were created by marketers. Like orange juice, for example, most people don't know that was invented by marketer. Bacon and eggs was invented by marketer.

It's like all these things. I don't even want to get. It's such a deep rabbit hole. Fascinating stuff. All right. Well, you got to come back on. This is dope. Thanks for, thanks for doing this.

This is fun, fun to meet you. And yeah, I hope everyone enjoys this episode. Yeah, thanks for having you guys. This has been a blast. This is great. I appreciate it. Thank you.