The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - “That’ll Never Work” — Now It’s a $270M Brand (w/ True Classic CEO)⏐Ep. #218

Episode Date: September 8, 2025

Check out my newsletter at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://TKOPOD.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and join my new community at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://TKOwners.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠━I sat down with Ryan Bartlett, founder of True Classic, and this one was wild. He took a $3,000 investment and turned it into a $270 million t-shirt company, all without venture funding. We broke down exactly how he pulled it off from finding product market fit to reverse engineering Facebook ads, negotiating every SaaS and 3PL deal, and turning free gifts into a growth engine. He shared the hidden power of starting with a simple agency, why CRO and email are the smartest plays right now, and how you can test 50 product ideas a month with almost no risk. We also went deep on how he uses comedy in advertising to build unforgettable brand moments and why inventory innovation is the future of ecom. Ryan even dropped a few business ideas he doesn’t have time to pursue and one of them might be yours now.True Classic: https://www.trueclassic.comFollow Ryan on X: https://x.com/RyanBartlettEnjoy! ---Watch this on YouTube instead here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠tkopod.co/p-yt⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ask me a question on or off the show here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-ask⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Learn more about me: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-cjk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Learn about my company: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-cof⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow me on Twitter here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-x⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Free weekly business ideas newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-nl⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Share this podcast: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-all⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Scrape small business data: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-os⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠---

You can do it with virtually no money. If someone who has failed through life as many times as I have was able to figure it out, quite literally everybody can figure it out. I remember like it was yesterday because you get that little to-ching sound on your Shopify, and it is so addictive. Everyone in the world is doing a 7 out of 10. If you're 8 out of 10, you take the whole market. We did 15 million, and then we did 90 in the next year.

And we were like, oh, we're going to be billionaires. We got into Costco, Target, Sam's Club, T. T.J. Max, Coles. The world is giving you clues every single day on what you should be doing. It's up to you to really cancel out the noise and listen to those clues. It is so easy to make money. Working with other businesses and charging them a flat fee and just stacking those retainers up. My life took off when I started thinking about stacking up retainers. If you're a 20 to 50 year old man that's been on the internet over the last six years, you've probably seen ads on Facebook or Instagram for True Classic. Did you know that that company was

started with only $3,000 from a guy with no apparel or e-commerce experience. And that just six years after founding it, it's doing $270 million in revenue without ever being venture funded. This is one of the most incredible stories that's never been told. I had to have the founder on and talk about how he built this and what we can take away from it. I promise you, this isn't just like a how I built this type episode. This is a how can you build something similar to this type episode. Very tactical. lots of business ideas. I mean, you know my style. Come on, guys. You're going to love it. Music took up a decade of my life. I went to school for audio engineering. And so I thought that was going to be it because everyone told me, you're so good at music. You should do that for a living. And I just

followed and went down that path, went in debt. Didn't work out. Gave up. Went into poker. Put another 10,000 hours into that, thinking it was going to be my future. Went bro. Gave up on that. Then I went to digital marketing. And that's when my life started to take off for the better. And I built an agency over a decade, another 10,000 hours. So between, you know, exercising the creative muscle with music and learning risk tolerance and how to bet on yourself through poker and then learning digital marketing and building other people's businesses, it was kind of like the perfect third, a third, a third of DNA to really make true classic work.

So the idea originally, I had a bunch of ideas as most entrepreneurs do it. And you just don't know what's going to hit. And so I had always been tinkering around with like the apparel industry is boring. It's archaic. No one's really crushing it on the innovation side. I felt like men's clothing was underdoing it. I felt like the premium market was overpricing it. So I was just like, let me just focus my energy on one thing, the shirt, the t-shirt for men.

Let me just build the perfect shirt. Let me tighten it up on the shoulders and arms to accentuate the guy's body and make him look, you know, buffer than he really is. And then let me make a premium garment that isn't $100 a shirt, like some of the Nordstrom people that you go in there and see. And I also knew that like I had to solve a real problem, right? Like most people that I talk to that come to me nowadays, these like young entrepreneurs, they're like, I want to build a lifestyle brand. I want to do. And I'm like, buddy, solve a problem. Like I know you what you want to do. But like if you're not listening to the market and what they actually want from you, you're building it the wrong way.

building something for you, not the market. Solve a problem in the market and your life will be a million times easier. Right. So I went into solving the premium over gouging problem, the fit problem, and then just the comfortability problem of just like building clothes that were all comfortable, not just a couple things, but like everything we make is wildly comfortable. Yeah, because it's like as a man, your age, similar. Like I buy a shirt and I just don't know how it's going to fit.

Is it going to flame out at the bottom? Is it loose? And so when it comes to the problems you were trying to solve, was it more about the fit, the comfortability or the price if you had to pick one? If I had to pick the most important, it was the fit first and foremost because everything I would put on, I just felt pretty overwhelmed. And I remember asking my wife, like, why is everything in your side of the closet like perfectly made for you? Like, why is it all tailored and why? And what I found was that like, I think they just thought that guys didn't care. And, you know, largely we don't for the most part. I wanted to prove that thesis out. And I was like, look, if there's just a small group of guys

that love True Classic for what it is, I'm happy with that. I don't need this to be a million dollar company. I didn't anticipate it to get this large. But the Tam was much bigger than we realized, I think. Now, did you go into this thinking like, all right, men are struggling with X, Y, or Z problem. And then you put all these hundreds of ad creatives out there and you learn, And wow, actually this problem is the one that they're clicking on. I thought that this problem was the biggest, but this is the one they're clicking on. So I want to make more ads like this. Did that ever happen?

That's exactly how it happened. So I tried everything. As most entrepreneurs do, you just like, throw it against the wall and see if it sticks. And what I found very early on was the women would give us feedback in the reviews. And they would say, you know, I don't know what you guys are doing over there. But all of a sudden, I spend $50 and my husband's got this air of confidence. when he leaves the house. And that's when I made the connection that like,

oh, we're selling confidence. We're not just selling T-shirts now. And when you make that kind of emotional connection with people, you are on to something unbelievable. Now it's bigger than shirts, right? And so what I started figuring out,

because I'm a skinnier guy, I'm like, you know, 6-2-175. I float right around there. And yes, the shirt made me look better. But what I didn't anticipate

was that for the bigger guy, the large, the XL, the 2xel, it made these guys look wildly better. Like it made them look like they literally lost 10 pounds overnight, just putting a shirt on. And that wasn't even a problem you were trying to solve. No, I was just trying to solve, like, let me just have it look a little bit better for everybody. The skinny guys look a little bigger.

The big guys look a little slimmer and so on and so on. And so once that popped, I was like, oh, we got to go all in on this dad bod thing. And that's when it really started to explode. So I just leaned into what was working. Well, I think the timing is also critical because in an age of social media, like, confidence has never been lower. If we could measure confidence in society, it isn't an all-time low.

And you're coming in selling that with the same social media tools that are taking their confidence away, right? So product market fit, textbook definition right there, right? Yep. And the product had to be great early on because the marketing really wasn't that great. It took me a while to get there. So to get to the, you know, 100 million in two years, that was on the backbone of just building unbelievable product market fit and having the product stand in his own because you know as well as anybody that without the retention in the repeat by,

there is no business essentially. It has to be great. And that drives all the profitability because we are, you know, largely a, you know, break even on first customer acquisition company, as most startups are. You're just trying to get them to come back and either buy denim or underwear or long sleeves or whatever it is. In any business, retention is the name of the game. In your business, what does that look like? Are you, after the first order, I imagine there's an email marketing sequence that, yeah, what does that look like? Well, first of all, before they even stop converting, before they even get to the checkout, we're already doing what's called a gift with purchase, which is tremendous for the business. And so,

What we do is we get them in other categories before they even check out. So, yes, you're going to buy T-shirts. We're also going to throw in active wear. We're also going to throw in underwear because these are killer products and we know that. So when they get them for free, they're like, and they get them home, they're like, oh, wow, I wasn't even anticipating this. I thought they were a T-shirt company. Actually, they sell amazing gagers. They sell amazing underwear.

And then they start getting into these other categories very quickly. So that's kind of the first component before they even literally convert. that's not something you probably just tested that right or you've heard of someone else doing it you're like so it's just like that's like the slogan of this whole podcast is test everything except drugs and this is what happens like how much has that one little hack added to the value of your company like if you were to like include the retention improvement and all that dude it's everything it's everything as long as you are being thoughtful about the product that is going into their basket as long as you're doing that thinking and through that like because i could have just thrown anything in there, right? But it wouldn't have made sense. I did it specifically. Well, number one, boost AOV. That's like the obvious thing, right? Like average order value. Yeah, because they get excited to see something for free, so they want to hit those thresholds. Because when you get to 100, you get free shipping, you get to 150, you get a free shirt. You get to 200. You get free underwear or whatever it is. And so it boosts a OV up because they want to keep hitting those tiers. So that's number one. That's the obvious thing.

But the not so obvious thing is cross category and getting them in. into the newer markets. So once we figured that out, I think we figured that out around year three. And it was because I was, we launched Activeware and it wasn't doing great right off the bat. And I was like, how can I get people into this category?

And I'm like, well, I already have people converting. Why don't I just force them into these categories with free product? Like let me just, if that good of a product to where I know once they get it, they'll buy it. And that was the thinking. Well, you just kind of gave me a new framework to think of and it's like,

You heard of a chicken salad chick, the restaurant chain? It's a franchise that sells chicken salad. That's it. I love that. And the franchisees do hundreds of thousands a year of net profit. It was founded by a woman. Incredible, incredible startup story. Anyway, I'm relating what you just said to this because the framework is, and I'm making

this up on the spot, it might sound dumb. What if the side dish was the main dish, right? That's it. So you were like, I have an e-commerce brand. We throw in free crap sometimes. And I'm ashamed to admit a lot of times. it's just the overstock crap or the stuff that's expiring or the stuff that we're going to throw away and liquidate.

Yeah. And it's like, sure, let's give them some pickled okra because these go bad in two months anyway. And that's like, that's the norm. And people kind of when we do that, we pat ourselves in the back. We're like, yeah, good. Hey, I'm doing what I learned about in that Facebook group. Oh, I'm pretty smart. And you're over here like, okay, what if that afterthought was like the whole strategy?

What if we took something that was really good, like based on our reviews, like a really good jogger or something and gave it to them for free. And then we just wait and see. And we might lose $7 on that first order instead of 70 cents, but let's just wait and see if it plays out. And then when it plays out, you're like, wow, I just added $10 million a year to my business. Right. Yeah, because you have to grow these other categories. I think that's like we had to get beyond just T-shirts. And still, even to this day, six years later, people, a lot of people only know us for the T-shirts because it's what we've sold the most of. But you really have to get them in the other categories to make the, allow the business to keep growing beyond T-shirts.

Yeah. It's like Lulu Lemon, any brand, Nike, right? Like, what have Nike still sold shoes today, right? They wouldn't be in the Fortune 500. That's exactly right. You have to go above and beyond. And there's a lot there, obviously. It's beyond marketing, but like you just have to continually provide real value for people

in the form of product. And it can just be, like what I normally see in these other brands is everything is an afterthought versus their first killer product that they crushed with. And that's something that Lulu's done really well. They came out with a leggings and they were a legging company, but then they have a lot of other amazing products, which is rare. And that's how you get to Lulu's level. So what most companies do is they go, oh, that crushed. Now let's do it just a bunch of other stuff because we need to just keep boosting top line and we need to do it. And then they don't put the same intentionality that they put into the original product into everything else. And that is a

huge miss. I've seen that with a lot of the big brands too. And they just cannot crack that nut. But you have to take that original DNA that you put there and spread it out. It has to really go into the same. And that's what we did like with denim. That's what we do with activeware. We took the same idea of problem solving and then started going category by category and saying, what are we solving in denim? What are we solving in underwear and so on and so on. Yeah. Instead of saying what can we launch in denim, what can we launch it? Like how can we be opportunity? you're saying, this is what you said originally, what problem are we solving? We have to solve a problem. I imagine there's been categories that you asked that question. You thought, you know, I don't,

I don't really know what there's to solve right here. Let's just pass on this one, right? Yeah, I would say the one problem you're always really solving in apparel for us is that the premium market is still gouging everybody. So even if, let's just say for argument's sake that the denim doesn't solve the fit problem like it did for T-shirts, at the very least, you can, can get, you know, page level or AG or ragam bone level denim for half the price. Like, that's a real problem. That's a problem that everyone's facing. They want the premium market, but they can't afford it. And so that is in the absence of something like fit, we lean in heavily on like, well, it's going to be the same fabric as the top guys. And you're going to get to pay literally

a quarter or half the price. And that's a big win for customer. Okay. So what was the month and year when you first originally started? So I started on the journey of like thinking about it in 2018, but it wasn't until late 2019 that I started it. It was like August of 2019. Okay. And was there like when you first started thinking about it, was there a triggering event, a conversation, something that you saw out there in the market that really, because you probably, you're like me, you're an idea guy. You have a lot of ideas. What kept you on this one? You know, ironically, and I've told the story a few times. My brother texted my mom not too long ago and reminded or reminded me of a story that I had told him when I was 19 about there was a store called Carol Oha that sells

these like a really comfortable bamboo t-shirts in Bahamas. And we used to go to Bahamas every year as a family. And I went in there when I was 19 and they didn't have my size and my color that I wanted. And I told my brother, I was so pissed off. I was like someday and this is very entrepreneurial to say is just like, I'm going to build my own t-shirt brand so that I always have my favorite t-shirt. And he told my mom that story and I looked back. Even back then, I was thinking about this T-shirt comment up. Now, of course, I waited 20 years to execute on it because I had forgotten about it. But what it brought me back to was like, it was always there.

It was always stewing in me. And so while I had a lot of other ideas, like I wanted to get into the lab diamond business. I thought, what an amazing value for the customer in that business. Or there was a bunch of ideas, but the T-shirt one just kept staring me in the face literally every day as I would go into the closet. And at a certain point, I'm really good at like accepting what the world gives me kind of guy.

Like I just, I take it in and I take it for more than face value. I always take it as like a sign that I need to be doing something. Yeah. That's what I tell entrepreneurs too. I'm like, the world is giving you clues every single day on what you should be doing. It's up to you to really cancel out the noise

and listen to those clues, whatever they are. But it's very difficult in the midst of our lives and the chaos to listen to those voices and inner voice. So I just kept coming into the closet and feeling the same thing every day. And then finally, as I'm going on this journey of drop shipping in like probably 2017 and learning ecom, because I didn't know where I was going to go product wise, I was selling a million different products on these drop shipping websites.

And finally, I asked my wife, I'm like, what if I just did t-shirts? Like, I know that sounds so lame and like incredibly commoditized. But like, and she was like, well, like, what are you going to do? What's your angle? And I just started kind of peppering her with the value props and what I thought I could do. And at the time, she thought I was insane. It was just something that was really hitting me consistently. And I just finally decided to like, well, what am it's going to cost me like a couple thousand dollars to try this?

What's the big deal? I don't, it's not going to bury my life if it fails, you know, so. I've got a question about that. But I want to go back to drop shipping. What types of things were you drop shipping and how much success were you finding, if anything? Because drop shipping gets a bad rap. What I love about your story is that you start with drop shipping. And I tell people to try that sometimes because it's like you're not going to finish there.

Right. So one's cool if I was like, oh, drop shipping is over saturated. It's dead. And it's for sure a lot harder than it used to be. Yeah. But I give people advice like this to start little things like this because it gets them in the game and it gets them going. Dude, it's the perfect training ground. I try to get like I had two guys come into my office a couple of days ago.

and they were like Harvard grads, like young guys, they just graduated. And they wanted to sell clothing. And I'm like, trust me, you don't want to do this industry. What you should do is go on Ali Express

and find some product and drop ship it and see if you can create winners out of that before you go on this journey, right? And then we're like, their mind was blown because they're thinking

they're going to burn through all this cash and like this is like, do we spend on Facebook ads before we give up? And I'm just like, dude, you don't have to worry about any of that. Here you just go straight, the manufacturer, they'll ship directly to the customer, you don't even have to be involved.

So I just think it is, listen, I am very thankful for my drop shipping journey because it taught me all the inner workings of e-commerce, taught me how to do customer service really well. It taught me operational logistics and know-how on the supply chain side. It taught me marketing. It told me how to find winners and how to do customer research and how to care and how to really dig into the reviews and find those golden nuggets that means so much to the customer when you take it and you implement it into a product and you give them what they're actually wanting, not what you think they want.

Big disconnect between the data speak. Yes, dude. And the data is all there for the taking. And I always go back to Amazon when people are like, I had this idea. I'm like, if you validated it on Amazon? And they're like, no. I'm like, dude, it's all sitting there for the taking. I don't know what you're waiting for.

Even to this day, when we want to do a product, my product team, listen, they're like wildly successful apparel people in the industry for. God knows how many years, right? And I'm like, have you looked at Amazon? They look at me like, I'm insane because it's just, it's the drop shipper in me being like over customer centric and going like, guys, please, just I know WGSN trends tell you this or that or the industry this. Like, forget that, dude.

Go validate. Please on Amazon and come back to me with something really tangible. And then I'll feel much better about investing into product. But to answer your question, yes, dude, drop shipping is the. answer in my opinion. And someday I'm going to get my kids drop shipping if they want to get into econ because it teaches you everything you need to know. And it's, listen, to your point, it's not, you're not going to do millions of dollars necessarily, but it sets you up. You learn how to find winners, scale those winners on Facebook. And that's, now you're on your way. Yeah. It's a lot of

surface area for building different skills that you'll need in any business, whether econ or not. What kind of products did you drop ship? Oh, dude, everything. It was a, very much a, you know, just testing stuff. Yeah, it was like, like I basically took the only two winners that I pulled out of a sea of like products on a website was the, these were really popular for a while, but the fidget spinner things. I used to sell those too. Yeah, yeah. So what dropshippers do really well is they go, they're like the Amazon. They're just like, let me throw everything in there.

And then they start narrowing and narrowing, narrowing, right? So like the fidget spinners kept winning for me. And so I took the fidget spinner and then I just made a whole website around fidget spinners. And that way you keep the focus. And then you learn that that's how you do it. You just, that's the model. Test everything. Find your winners.

Scale the winners. Another one was like this backpack. It was like a tech backpack that had like a charger adapter thing that went into the side. You probably know from like doing like it. Like it's a lot of the same stuff that everyone does. But it works and people love it. So like those were just a couple of my early winners. that I tell.

That's awesome. Yeah. I had this company that holds that sold iPhone parts wholesale. And my iPhone repair shop customers were selling fidget spinners on the counter. So we would order him by the tens of thousands of dollars for like a dollar each and then sell them for a dollar 50 each. And then they would sell them at the counter for $5, something like that. Yeah. But it was a good little business for a while.

Yeah. Okay. All right. So you take $3,000. What are first steps? When you were talking earlier about like, why t-shirts, why t-shirts, this can really apply to anybody. So you have an idea, I think this thing could work, right?

What really got me to take the leap from idea to execution over that year was that the more research I did on the competition, the more confident I got. By the time I got to executing, I was like, this is going to be a billion dollar business. Like, this is going to be insane. I am going to come in thrashing and making huge, impact into the market, outmarket everybody else. Like I'll develop better product. I'll do better marketing.

I'll do everything better across the board. It was like everyone was doing a six out of ten. And I was convinced I was going to do a 10 out of 10 across the board. What were you learning that gave you that much confidence specifically they like? Well, number one, the products just largely sucked and they were overcharging. So that was like the first learning, which is like, okay, everyone's gouging. So what? What do I do about that?

So I had to go down the journey of like, what do cogs look like? Like, what does it take to basically make a bamboo shirt for cheap? And then I very quickly realized that, like, I couldn't do bamboo because bamboo was hard to make. So I ended up going with like this 6040 cotton poly blend that was perfect. And so I could get that for like a couple bucks essentially on COGS. And I was like, how are these people getting away with charging? Because I could do the math of their product margin. And I'm just like, dude, they are just making too much margin here.

Let me just take that margin away and see if I can build the business on the little margin I do have and give it back to the customer. Well, you know what Jeff Bezos says about that. He says, your margin is my opportunity. It's great. Was that like the 80, 20 of your opportunity here was you found out where they were sourcing this? You had an agency background. So you roughly knew what their cost per acquisition was on Facebook ads. You're like, all right, they're selling the shirt for $29.

They're paying $3 for it. They're paying $3 to ship it. They're paying $6 for a customer. These guys have 60% net margins. Not even including the retention and reorder rate and subscription. What are we doing? There's a no brainer. Yeah.

And I knew that once I started testing on Facebook, I was going to see what the ROAS looked like. Like was it one and a half to one? Was it three to one? Was it five to one? Like I couldn't wait to get in there because I had already scaled up Facebook ads across these other Chochie products. And I knew what like good ROAS looked like.

So I was just like, let me get in there and see what happens. And sure enough, what I landed on was like my break-even Roaz was like somewhere in like the one-six mark. And my super profitable row-as was like two to one. Like anything over two to one, my days looked unbelievably profitable. That would always come from like an ad hitting or something happening on Facebook. Like Facebook back then was wild too. Like some day would crush. Other days they'd do an uptown.

and everything would tank and I would like open up my dashboard and be like I'm going to lose the business this month like it would yeah it was it was brutal but you just got to keep keep the faith right you have those bad days and your row as it's cut in half well you also have to diversify because even to this day you know like the last couple years we would spend 60 70 million on facebook ads a year I mean it's just mind blowing right it's not until this year that we built a big enough brand through, you know, Costco and Target and all these big initiatives that we've done to be able to pull back on Facebook and not see the business take a hit. Because in the early days, you pull Facebook back, the whole business reels back. And you're just like, wow, am I,

if Facebook goes away, we're out of business. Like, yeah, diversifying sooner than later is incredibly important to the success of your brand. Just so the, the viewer has an idea of Roaz, like, you're talking about spending $10 to acquire a customer that places a $20 order. And after you work out your cost of goods sold and all that, you're not really profitable. You're just hoping and praying that they come back and order more, right? That would be a two to one ROAS, right? Correct. Yes.

Okay. Okay. So you start doing research. Are you like ordering from potential competitors, trying the quality and all that? Yeah. You have to do a tremendous amount of market research. And then you have to go while they're underdoing it here. and they're sucking at this and they're not doing good.

Like, you have to just keep picking apart their deficiencies and then over-indexing and being better than them at everything. Like I said in the early days of before I started, it was the customer service. It was, like, I would see the way they would interact through email and with their flows. And I'm just like, God, they're missing it on literally everything. Like, it was nothing that I didn't think I could do better at on that side of the business. So, well, that's what happens in high margin businesses is you don't have to be creative. You don't have to try.

You can be lazy, right? Which creates the opportunity. Like, why do you think Amazon? It's a very low margin business on the retail side of things. They're amazing at customer support. They're amazing in all these things because it, they have to be. Constraints equal creativity, right? Right.

And that's good news for anybody that's starting anything because everyone always goes, well, it's so commoditized. I'm like, dude, they're all underdoing it, guys. Like, just so you know, everyone in the world is doing a seven out of ten. If you're eight out of ten, you take the whole market over time. That is the punchline. Okay. So I assume you start with Shopify.

Yep. There was no question. That was Shopify because even though I was a WordPress guy my whole life, I wanted no problems. There's no second place. No. No. So you're ordering samples from overseas, I imagine. You find something that fits and no designs to start, right?

So you don't have to worry about design. Even to this day, we don't do any designs. Okay. Okay. That was a very strategic. I just wanted to be playing everything. I wanted no logos, which is very counterintuitive. But it just goes to show that, like, again, I was thinking about the customer.

I'm like, does a customer really want a logo? I don't think they do. I think it's important for any business owner to remember, like, the customer doesn't care about you. You take up zero space in your customer's brain, which means, like, probably email them more often than you think you should. because they forgot about you, right? Probably don't really worry so much if you have a mistake on your website because they don't care.

They're not thinking about you. When it comes to putting logos on your website or on your shirt, it's like they don't care about you. They just found you from a Facebook ad. Like, what does that add to you? Right? It's like, well, it's viral marketing because no, they're not going to buy it. There's no viral marketing if they never buy the thing in the first.

Ironically, viral marketing is just creating amazing product. Right? Yes. Everyone thinks everything's a hack. And it's like, dude, it goes back to like the basics and it's so boring to go back to the basics no one wants to hear that they're just like what is the facebook hack that gets me to a billion it's like uh making amazing product buddy like that's it do something amazing and in the money follows it's that simple oh all right okay

so you go to shopify how many skews how many products do you start out with on day one one one product the t-shirt six colors how many different sizes small through two xx Excel. Okay. Did you end up adding to that three and four X? Yes. We added my Bucky's website. We sell up to 4X. Yeah. It took us a while to get there. In hindsight, we probably should have done those inclusive sizes a little bit earlier. We also should have done a lot of things that relates to the t-shirt, which were incredibly accretive to the business, like doing the curved hem, which is like so obvious now doing the Pima incredibly obvious now it's like we should have done a lot like I probably left 50 million or more on the table not doing the versions of those t-shirts earlier right like we

tried to go well now we got to do polos and now we got to do this and that and like all the other extensions of apparel going back to what we were saying about like lean into what works and then do all your iterations against that winner like fidget spinners doing a smaller vision doing a bigger widget doing it like all the iterations versus like let me come out with a net new product and then see what people think yeah I love that it's important okay so you start Facebook ads day one like this business is you're not even launching without Facebook ads right what do those first few days look like how are you feeling because you've got that the trough of disillusionment like are you still hyped when you see those first numbers roll in oh yeah dude I remember

like it was yesterday because you get that little toching sound on your Shopify and it is so addicting. And so the first couple days were slow. It took us a little while to start generating some sales. But within a couple weeks, dude, we were already doing like, I remember like the first week we hit like an $800 day. And that was like blowing my mind. Yeah, we couldn't believe it.

I was also like being really aggressive on Facebook ads. Like I wasn't scared to push. I think most people would have just kind of let it rise. and build slowly. But I was in this like, I got to go mindset. Everyone wears a T-shirt. Mm-hmm. And like I was already coming from a place of like I had watched so many dropshippers scale

aggressively. So I was like, let me test the upper limits of this. Now, if I push and I look tomorrow in Roaz is like point two, I'll pull back, right? Like that's how I thought about it. So I wasn't scared to like really push on the needle on ad spend. Because it was just working. And also, this was pre-IOS 14, where we lost all that customer data. So it was working even better back then.

I don't know what it would have looked like, you know, post the data loss. But things were amazing in the early days of Facebook. How many creatives did you start with that first month? Not many, dude. I probably came up with 10 static ads. We didn't even do video for like, which I want to say six to eight months. It took me to do like a video ad. ad shoot with like a couple models walking around and it wasn't great. I look back at those ads and

they're so cringy. It was amazing. I made any sales to be honest. I had no idea what I was doing. What did like the format of your first like big winning ad look like? Like a static, what was your offer? What did the picture look like? The first static ad that crushed and it kind of led me down this journey, which was like really highlighting the value prop and going back to like what problem are you solving? No wonder that, and I knew this from drop shipping, which is like the ads that always crushed were the ones that were solving a problem very quickly in like probably 10, 15 seconds.

You had to really do the full thing from start to finish. Like if it was a kitchen appliance, you had to show the kitchen appliance doing the thing and like, oh, I can just, you know, disassemble an orange very quickly with this tool. And like you had to get that across. You probably drop ship something like that, huh? I did, dude. I did. I knew it.

One of the popular products was like, yeah, like the thing you put in an orange and it squeezes out the juice under. There were so many of those kitchen products that crushed on drop shipping. Because they, they demonstrate themselves so well. Yes, dude. And they solved the whole thing. Yes. Like if a couch could demonstrate its value as well as, you know, an orange squeezer could, then couches would crush. That's exactly right.

So you had to show that journey to people. And the sooner you can do it the better. Once I figured out the three value props that we kind of live and die by, which is like just fit, price, and comfort, things started really going off the right. Because then I was telling the right story to people. It wasn't just like, hey, I'm a T-shirt guy amongst a sea of other T-shirt guys. It was like, oh, that's that T-shirt that makes me look better. And it's like half the price as premium market. Like, I love that.

So once people started catching on to that, it just took fire. What was your daily ad budget that first week, first month? And I want to know how that scaled how quickly that's. Yeah, I was, you know, I should go back and really look at the early days on meta. But I do remember starting out at 100 a day. That was kind of like my starting point. And within a week, I had tripled it. I went from 100 to 150 to 200, 250 to 250 to 350 to 300 in like no time, like a week, week

and a half. I remember getting in my founders were like, this is going to get like really expensive just so you know. And I'm like, I know. And plus, we didn't have all the math worked out yet. So even though, because you know, like, when you look at a ROAS, that's not really the true ROAS. That's the attributed ROAS from Facebook, which doesn't take into account, your operational

expenses and like all the other line items after you look at your P&L. So it was a little scary. Like, I didn't know. You're not making money yet. You're not making a profit yet, right? No, we were taking all the money and just putting it right back into Facebook ads. That's another really important.

point and one thing I had an advantage of was that I didn't need to live off this business. I could just put every cent back into the business and that propelled its growth way above and beyond what it could have been had I been sucking money out early on. Where was your income coming from? From your ads agency? The agency, yeah. It was still, I had already hired out for like my position as CEO. Like I just handed it off and I let them run the agency.

And even to this day, it's still alive. despite SEO crumbling around us with Chad GPT. So how big was your agency at that point? It was a little over a millionaire. Yeah, it was a great business, dude. I always tell people to get into the service-based business. It is so easy to make money, working with other businesses and charging them a flat fee and just stacking those retainers up over years and years and years.

And if you do great work, you're never going to lose them as clients. In a sea of scam artists that are just constantly ripping people off in those industries, when you're the ones actually providing value, you never lose them. Or if you lose them, they come back after they get ripped off by somebody else and they realize, oh, the grass is not greener. I try to take a price cut, but I'll rather pay you more and get great service. Were you charging like one to five K a month or were you doing it like charging a percentage of ad spend? I was charging 500 to 5 grand a month because it was mostly L.A. market.

So even the 500s, I should have never started there. That was way too low. I would say my sweet spot was like 1,500 to 3,000 a month. And it was like a lot of lawyers and dentists and chiropractors and those industries where a customer is worth an insane amount of money for them to acquire. Yeah. Would you agree that just starting at an ads agency today, just like you did back then, is still a big opportunity?

Enormous, dude. I think people just underestimate it and they don't know even where to start. But my life took off when I started thinking about stacking up retainers. and how a little bit of, like, I think for people that aren't comfortable in sales, you have got to figure that part out if you're going to be in that business. Or find a co-founder that hasn't figured out. Or that, 100%. But, like, you need to be obsessed with sales because you need to know how to relate to people.

You need to know how to listen. You need to know how to not oversell and just really sell the value you're going to bring them. Right. So that was an important skill that I was lucky enough to learn young. my dad was a great salesman. And I learned a lot from him growing up. And he always told me I should like do sales in some capacity. Ironically, like here we are doing all these crazy numbers.

And I still do an immense amount of sales. I'm selling, you know, potential investors or acquires or or customers or you name it. Like I'm still out here selling. Also, when you have an ads agency, you have so much surface area for learning all the secret ins and outs and workings of what your customers are doing. I mean, you never even would have considered starting this business had you not had an agency. No chance. Because I wouldn't have known how to not spend, like, I wouldn't have known that Facebook was the answer.

I really would have, like, probably spent money and just sprayed it all over the place and lost a bunch and then given up. But like going through the process of watching lawyers, Dennis, chiropractors spend on the wrong things and seeing that and having that insight gave me such a huge competitive advantage because I was like, Oh, well, this is just a Facebook business. I love how like you can you can give opposite advice and both of them be true. Like you said you were looking at lab grown diamonds. I'm assuming one reason for that is because it's very high ticket, but it's a very high value for the price that they're paying. You can use paid ads.

So if you're a master at paid ads, why not pick something that's high ticket? So on one end of the spectrum, it's like, if you can really learn paid ads, find something high ticket. And on the other end of the spectrum, it's like, if you can really learn paid ads, go to a commodity, something boring. huge and like over competitive like apparel like you're going to win no matter what like because because the first principles are swapping your creative like good customer service good product all the boring stuff right it's true whether it's high or low ticket that's exactly right and like

dude to live through an era of where we even have the ability to run facebook ads is unbelievable like it really yeah i could have not built true classic without facebook ads like it just i have no problem saying that because that's the truth. Like, we're really lucky to be alive in this ecosystem where we have these tools because, you know, 30, 40 years ago, they didn't exist, dude. People were doing door to door and billboards and mailers and all this archaic crap that they had to do. So it's like if you're not using Facebook ads, boy, are you missing out.

And even now how we talk about, you know, AI and all the implications of what that does for business. What an unbelievable time that we're all living through. at true classic dude, you'd be shocked at how much tech and AI we use with everything we do because we're realizing that it just makes everything so incredibly efficient and better for everyone. Yeah. All right. So first four months, you do a quarter million in revenue. What does your first year look like as far as revenue, profit, and like daily ad spend look like roughly? Yeah, I would say, so we did 15 million the first year. And that's when we were like, wow, we're really on to something.

Oh my gosh. But it wasn't until the next year that we were like, because I remember when we did 15 million, we're like, guys, someday we could sell this company for like 50 million. It would be in stone. And then we did 90 the next year. And we were like, oh, we're going to be billionaires. This is going to be insane. Like what?

We're going to sell us for our. I see where this is headed. It's just, then we started looking at like, we're going to be Haynes. We're going to be like, you know, five, six years. And so it very quickly changed. And it became our life. We just stopped everything we were doing after that first year. There's so many inspiring things about this story, but one concept I've been obsessed with lately

is that of like chasing product market fit. You were 37 when you started this. You've done all kinds of random things, drop shipping, all kinds of things. You could argue that a bunch of those different products that you drop ship were all kind of different businesses, right? I've started 75 businesses. But if people get stressed about like, oh, shiny object syndrome, I need to stay focus on one business yet to get.

chase the product market fit, chase the energy. Because if you look at someone like Mark Zuckerberg, he's been doing the same thing for 21 years, right? And on one hand, it's like, man, that guy is so focused, he's so driven. And at the other hand, it's like he would be an idiot if he ever thought of taking his eye off the Facebook ball because Facebook has had product market fit from day one until today. He's not like some like super driven.

Like, of course, he's amazing. He's brilliant. He's driven and all that. But he doesn't have above average folks. is what I'm saying. He just has, you know, product market fit, in my opinion is like being chased down the hill by a rock and those rockers, that rock is a customer. And you just cannot even sleep because you're fulfilling orders. You have so much demand and it never lets up. Whereas most businesses, not that this is a bad thing, is you're pushing a rock up a hill and it's hard

and it rolls back if you rest on your laurels. But that's okay, right? But like when you just keep chasing product market fit and then once you find it, stay on it, you won't lose. Right. So like with my content, I see product market fit every month. Like I just keep growing. And so like, I would be dumb to stop doing content because it's there. I'm still doing other stuff. I'm still launching businesses. But if I ever found another business idea that kind of looked interesting, but I didn't know if I had product market fit yet. And I said, I'm quitting content to go all in on this. I'd be stupid. You did all these things for 15 years. And then you pivoted and you've been doing the same thing for six because you still have product market fit. You still have that energy. You still have customers being. down your door. Yeah. And I'm also just like obsessed with providing value. And that just that journey kind of never ends. Now it comes in the form of like philanthropic initiatives that I'm obsessed with. Like this teacher initiative where I pay off all their wish lists or, you know, the LA fires were here last year and I gave away like six million inventory to people that lost everything. And now I'm finding ways to make impacts in the world outside of just T-shirts and apparel. And that's what really moves me.

things like this, like getting to talk to other like-minded entrepreneurs and show them that you can do it with virtually no money. You can scale a big business. You don't even have to come from the apparel industry. You just got to be obsessed with what the customer wants and telling these, you know, stories to people to show them that like, listen, if someone who has failed through life as many times as I have was able to figure it out, quite literally everybody can figure it out. because it just came from an obsession with what is the market need. How can I fill that void? And then what do I got to do to scale that up? Okay. So year one, I'm just going to go through your last six years. 15 mil, 90 million, 150 million, 206 million, 212 million, 270 million.

And your profit per year, 2%, 4%, 5%, 8%, 8%, 8%, 16%. So you doubled profit over the last year. Yeah. Yeah, this year's going to, and that's really because of wholesale. We got into Costco and Target and they, and Sam's Club and T.J. Max and Coles and a couple other ones, but profit margins are unbelievable in those environments because guess what? You're not paying to acquire a customer and you're not break even. You're suddenly just wildly profitable. And so this is a huge growth year. You do hit a saturation where you, you have to go beyond the digital world, right?

Like if they're not on social, how are you going to find them? Right? So you have to start thinking a little bit more grassroots. That's where the wholesale comes in because now people walk into Costco and they see us and they're like, oh, yeah, I saw them online. These guys are legit. That's a whole new level of credibility too. Dude, that was one thing we didn't anticipate.

So we knew that, yes, we were going to hack, cack in those environments and get them to buy. because there's a big portion of people that just don't trust online, period. They just don't. Our generation, our younger guys, we all grew up in it. So we trust it. But like past our age, they're still in this weird limbo land of like, well, I don't, it's just marketing. Now when they see you in Costco, it's almost like they just immediately check that box of like,

well, Costco's done the work to vet these guys. This must be legit now. And so you get that confirmation the second they walk in the door and it becomes a no-brainer. for them to purchase. And wildly successful in Costco, they are amazing partners. I love them to death. I'm always obsessing about like,

what can I do for your, your Costco members? Like, what are some thoughtful things I can create for them? Like, I'm always working to try to figure that out because I just appreciate what they've done for the business

and where it goes. It's interesting, the perspective that you have going into Costco, coming from e-commerce. Most people don't realize how hard e-commerce can be and how,

like not free cash flow rich that it is, right? Because you're putting money into ads and inventory and some of that inventory just dies, right? But when you're going into Costco from that, you're like, I'm in heaven. This is luxurious. Whereas I've talked to other founders that went into Costco compared to other channels that they've been in and I'm like, dude, I don't make any money with Costco. I just don't make any money. But not only do you not have to pay to acquire a customer, you don't have to spend

three to four dollars to ship a t-shirt. you're spending like six cents to ship a palette full of t-shirts. Yes. Not just that. Like we're one of those products where like we're not a SaaS product. Like you actually have to touch and feel it to understand all the marketing. Because the marketing could just be the marketing in a lot of ways. So people are like, oh, I need to actually get my hands on it.

Which is why when people say like, well, why don't you do a Super Bowl ad? It's like, dude, we're already getting 14 million impressions a day on our ads. I don't need more visibility. I need people to actually get the product in their hands so that when they touch it, they go, oh, now I see why. And that's what happens in those environments like Costco. They see the stand,

they walk over, they feel it. You watch them interact with the product. And then they immediately, it all starts sinking in. Like I had this idea of like, let me take the 10 million it would cost for a Super Bowl ad. And let me just spend 10 million on product

and just give it away to every single person in the US. Wouldn't that be such a better hack than, like, let me just, do a funny commercial. So that's where I'm at. Oh, man. Oh, this is so good. By the way, going back to what you were saying about like difficult environments,

we tried to scale retail. And it is very difficult. And for a couple of reasons. So we have 16 stores now. We could have had over a hundred had we ramped at the level. We were going to ramp originally because we were so bullish on it because we were like, oh, well, they just got to get in their hands. They'll love it.

What you don't anticipate is that if people don't know that you, it's like old Navy. When you go to a mall, you know there's an old Navy there, right? When you go to a mall now, you're not assuming there's a true classic there. So unless you are like have the best store visibility on the planet and you're right next to a Lulu or an Apple store or somewhere where people are always going in and out, it is so tough to make that P&L work inside of four walls. Plus, how many people are going to walk by that sign, see us go, oh yeah, it's your classic and then leave and then buy online three months later like you're never going to

attribute that sale that they bought online to the store even though the store was the billboard that made it all come together for them yeah so like you see this gap in the p andl for retail and you're like oh we're just losing money like this just isn't working on the surface that's what you would say right yeah and you take all the nuance of the advertising in those malls and if you would be able to put a multiplier to or attribute something to that you would all net out plus some and you would be scaling to the moon so it's yeah that's the hard part of retail you almost have to just make a bet that like it's doing more work for you than you realize even if they're not walking in the store lift so there's lift and it's hard to put a definition on lift but you just

you know it when you see it have to assume it on some level and then help that fill the gap but like imagine scaling retail and then having it not net out on the P&L across like half your stores, what that looks like on the balance sheet. You're just like, this is wildly unprofitable and like we should pull back. And so that's why retail is so difficult. So when it comes to like just pouring money into Facebook ads, how did you grow the business without because you didn't raise any money, right? No.

How did you bootstrap this? Because you got to pour money into inventory, into fulfillment. We're using a third party logistics provider or are you doing it yourself? No, we were doing 3PL from the get. We knew like there was no way we were going to be able to actually. How many? You probably have some 3PL horror stories I imagine. Because I've owned a 3PL.

It's hard. No, it's, most of them have gone out of the business. The ones we use in the early years, no big surprise. Like software would like break and you would be like split shipping stuff accidentally. And if you know what split ships are,

like I've done that. You're paying double for every order. Talk about crushing your profitability on a nuanced software application. And you're just like, dude, what do I got to become a software developer to like figure out your software for you? It's just a nightmare. So you've always had a 3PL from day one till today. Yeah, dude. We knew not to even mess around with that world.

We were like, you know, let's just take that off our play from the get go. So here's some hacks that people can do to minimize cash. Number one, you have to have really solid retention plays to be able to supplement all the acquisition cash that you're burning. So that comes back to like clavio email flows post-purchase upsells and abandoned cart flows, welcome flows, optimizing the crap out of all of that. So that's number one. That'll help you a lot on the cash front because you'll get those people back. Beyond that, what people need to really do, and I never see people talk about this stuff, which is like negotiating is so incredibly important to the life of a business. Negotiating with your manual.

manufacturers, negotiating with banks, and really telling the story of what it could become for them if they invest in you. So one thing we did really well early on, and this goes back to, like, Matt, my kind of makeshift CFO partner who was an amazing negotiator. And I was as well. And we would get on these calls with these manufacturers and we would sell the dream of what true classic could become for them. And through that dream, our ask was give me 20,000 in credit, right? give me terms on that credit. Give me 60 days. Give me 90 days.

Whatever it is. And dude, that was a game changer. And that allowed us to not have to put more money in because the 3,000 went against, you know, 2000 went against Facebook ads. And the other 1,000 went against actually building the shirt to make it great. Yeah. So we didn't actually have to put any money up for inventory, you know, because there's always MOQs on that stuff.

So we, otherwise we would have had to put some significant money in. but we convinced them to bet on us. And look, you have to have some sales skills. It goes back to negotiating. Like, you got to find the right partner too. Like, I bet you had we knocked on 10 doors, nine of them would have slammed in our face. But we found the one guy early on that was like, sure,

I'll bet on you. And now guys make an insane amount of money off of us because he helped us in the early days. So that was a big one. Volume negates luck. Yes. Right. The more bankers you talk to, whatever, the more, quote, lucky you got.

It's a numbers game, right? Absolutely. And then, like, would you guys even be here today if you weren't, like, diligent about negotiating everything you could? No, it's the whole thing, especially once you scale, because we are really tough in negotiations when it comes to SaaS contracts and vendor contracts with 3PLs and even COGS pricing with our manufacturers. is if you don't scrutinize that and you look back after a year of what that could have cost you, it's unbelievable, dude. I mean, we're probably saving the company excess of 40 to 50 million a year in fees and cogs. And I mean, if you really tallied it all up, it would be so astronomical.

Even on the SaaS side, we're probably saving in the low millions a year in just pure negotiation. Just really telling them, look, if you do great work with you classic, we're going to be your best case study of all time, right? I'm going to get on a camera. And if I really believe in the SaaS, I'm not just selling them that story. Like, it's actually amazing SaaS, then you deserve the world to know about it. And I will be your biggest fan. And I will tell the world because I want, I want to send people down the right roads, right? Like young business owners that want to learn this stuff, I really want to tell them that Shopify is the best platform in the world because it actually is, right? And I will go to Batman Shopify. And that goes for triple whale on analytics.

That goes for after sale on post purchase upsells. It goes for like all the really great pieces that we love. We really tell them that story. And of course they're going to buy into that and give us a tremendous discount on the monthly retainer because they see the upside in what it means for their business. Yeah. I mean, well, you said like you're saving 40, 50 million a year on everything you've negotiated. And that's about what your profit is.

Yeah. Exactly. Like in a commodity business and a cutthroat low margin business like this, you have to negotiate. I mean, you've had single digit profit margins for most of your history. Yes. Right. Yes. And I'm sure you notice over time, because I've noticed this, if I'm in the middle of like a super high growth business, my vendors are going to start to like get a little greedy and they're going to rub their paws together and say, we could come up a little on price. They're not going to leave. They're not going to leave us. Right. And if you're not on top of that,

you won't catch it. It should be going the other way, right? Like you should be catching a break as you scale, not like getting taken advantage of. And plus, like, there's, listen, there's so much competition with that stuff that you can always go somewhere else and they know that. And so now where there's not a lot of competition at our scale is the volume. There's not like all these factories doing like unbelievable volume for everybody. So, like it does start to dwindle down towards the top. I will tell you that, like I don't have as much room as I used to on cogs. Like, it used to, to be wide open and now it's like well you know we need hundreds of thousands of units in a particular style there's only a couple manufacturers that can do that and so we don't have as much

leverage there as we used to yeah okay let's say heaven forbid wave a magic wand your business is gone all of your experience is there your business is gone you remember everything you have three to five thousand dollars you have to create true classic all over again what do you do differently What are your first five steps? Well, the first thing I would do differently is go even more narrow on the expansion that I did. So what I was talking about earlier about like just really leaning into the T-shirt and not thinking I had to do the polo or the other excess categories, we would have been gone even faster if that's even possible.

I would have also, if I could go back, I would have invested more time and energy in the creative. You know, I wasted, you know, a good amount of time on really average creative. And yes, we were able to do a lot, but that was really on the product. It wasn't the creative. Had I, like, found comedy early on, it would have gone even faster. And, you know, I didn't find comedy until about a year and a half, you know, almost two years into the business. And then once I started leaning into that, it just, like, took over my life. And now we still do it to turn on comedy.

We've got to talk about comedy because that's the question I meant to ask you. Tell me about comedy in advertising and why it's so important. Oh, man. You know what's funny is that when I started doing it, the reason I loved it so much was because I realized like, oh, remember how I always say like, you got to be customer of centric and you got to provide value. This is the one part where you provide value in advertising. Outside of telling people about value props, that's not that's not a ton of value. That's just education. But like comedy, it's actually value because you're making them happy.

Like the Dollar Shave Club commercial. Yeah, dude. You're changing it from like, I'm forcing you to watch this thing about my company to like, let me create a skit that you're just going to laugh at. And you don't need to even buy my product. But if I make that connection with you and you remember me, someday it may make an impact and you may buy us or you might see someone that knows the product and then you'll remember that story about the comedy at and then you'll tell it and it'll help someone

else buy or whatever it ends up going into. But dude, when I started thinking about like, that is who we are on the advertising front, I became obsessed with finding the most funny guys I could to work with. A lot of that was the Greg Tube guys very early on who have been phenomenal and I give them all the credit for really being our go-to guys. And, you know, I just have so much love for those guys. They've done such tremendous work for us over the years. And then Nicholas, our in-house guy who did a lot of the comedy early on. And we tried to do a lot of it ourselves. But you got to find some people that are just hilarious and really do great stuff.

And then just lean into those guys. So even to this day, we're creating tons of comedy at scale. And it's still, it's just like, it's so much fun to make people laugh. And even when I meet people in the world, a lot of what they remember is just that thing. They're not like, oh, yeah, you're that guy who makes a shirt. It's like, you're that guy that made that funny. ad about this thing. Because the comedy sticks with them forever, dude.

You know when you watch a Super Bowl ad. The ones that always are the takeaways were the funniest ones. And basically you forget about everything else. You think back to like early Bud Lights or whatever it is. It's like that is the equalizer, my man. That's the X factor. And if you can, it's really hard, by the way, to figure comedy out. People try to do it.

And it's really hard to do. But once you crack it, it's just great. good as it gets. What's been your best performing like comedic ad? And what does that look like with regards to return on ad spend or ROI? Really hard to calculate return on ad spend and ROI. Because what happens is that what you realize is that even if something is really funny, it's not DR. It's not direct response necessarily. It is just funny. And that funny can have a long lifecycle. It could be. Yeah. Once again, you're just looking for lift. Dude, we have some people in our post-purchase survey. By the way, another incredibly important piece to this whole thing

is obsessing about the post-purchase survey to figure out where people are actually finding you and whether the money you're spending on marketing is netting out or not. If it's not showing up in the post-purched survey, guess what? It's not netting out. Like people used to say like, oh, snap is like the new thing and we'd spend a much money on snap and it would be like zero percent of responses. It's like, well, look, if it's working, guys, it's going to show up in the sales. If not, shut it off. So now it's just like source of truth. Like I just look to my source of truth for literally everything.

No, we were talking about return on ad spend. And yeah, it goes back to just the lift. The best comedy that we've ever done was two videos. One of them was the very early Greg tube video where the baby carriage goes out in the street. And it's just like a really quick,

like if you go to the true classic channel, you'll just, if you just sort by like highest views, you'll see. I'm going to play this real quick. Let's see. This is the one Gary V put in his book, by the way. Jab jabbed right hook or something different?

No, the day trading attention. Oh, I haven't read that one. All right. Let's do this. Johnson, you're fired. Why? It's not you. It's your shirt.

But it's casual Friday. Well, you've taken it too far. Look at Jipson. He's wearing a true classic tea. It fits in tight in all the right places but leaves the perfect amount of room in the front. God, I hate that guy. He looks so good in that shirt. He can basically do whatever the hell he wants around here.

Jimson! Yeah, boss? You're a good stud. Thanks, boss. True Classic is designed to enhance the male physique in all the right places. Right, Jimson? That's right, boss. I have strong arms, but also a little bit of a gut.

But you wouldn't know because I wear True Classic. That if you're a skinny guy, True Classic fits tight around the arms and accentuates your biceps. But how can Jimson afford premium T-shirts? He's the worst salesman here, and I don't even think he can read! Johnson, we all know Jimson can't read! But at least he knows that True Classic is completely affordable. affordable and if you buy right now you can get 20% off your first order I don't need to know how to read to know that over 200,000 people gave true classic of five

stars good job Jimson that's right five stars five stars let me try one on Johnson I don't know how I never noticed before but you're stunning I want to raise consider it done but wait a minute are those true classic pants that's right I just got them off the website and get this they even have active wear polos long sleeve teas fleeces and even socks and underwear and Incredible. Jipson, why can you be more like Johnson? What should I do, boss? Jepson, you sexy. Isn't it obvious?

You need to go to the true classic website and buy all of those items right now. Click it. Oh my gosh. So good. Oh, my goodness. That is so good. I've never seen that. Breaking a little bit of the third wall at the end. So 35 million views. Was that organic or did you put paid behind that? Well, it was both. The organic was probably a few. Let me see. It was like probably five or six

million, if I remember correctly. And then the rest was propelled by spend. We just like pushed it into the and that's how you know. If it crushes an organic, you got to amplify. Yeah. Okay. So like I love that you've got some first principles like just overtly funny comedic things. Right. And then you break all the rules in some other ways. Right. Like YouTube wants attention. They want you to get to the point as soon as possible and then to end the video right then. You've got like 30 seconds of awkwardly, click it, click it, click it. And the fact that it got millions of views despite that means that people stayed. They stood there and like felt weird in their body watching these two guys sit on each other's lap in an office environment. Like, oh man.

And I also love that it's not a lot of times you see funny ads and like you don't even catch that it's an ad like until the end right that is overtly an ad from like second seven to the very end yes right but you just keep watching you just keep watching which makes it so effective at actually selling product and not just making people laugh and remember you right that's like the holy grail like the then diagram all of the circles are overlapping in there did you use the harmon brothers for this because they're like the best at this type of stuff aren't no dude the harmon brothers are way too expensive are you kidding me this like 500 grand for that, isn't it? More than that. It's in, I wanted to use those guys early on, but that's why

you have to go find your own guys. When I first found Greg and Nate, they were just making TikTok videos. They weren't working with like a bunch of other brands. And I found them. And I'm like, why aren't you guys doing ads? This stuff could be great. And then I tested them in like their first ad with me and any brand they worked with like just crushed right off the gate. We were like, okay, we are on. Now they work with everybody, which has been really great for their career. Are they very expensive? They are now. They weren't in the early years.

But they give me, listen, they're owners in the company. So they, they've earned it. They have ownership. They, uh, your company? Yeah. They still have. That's awesome. You know, they still give me like good pricing compared to everybody else.

Like they grandfathered me in obviously because they're part owners. So they're amazing guys and I love them to death. They really have done great things for us. Okay. So more people need to use comedy in their ads, period, end of story. It's hard because you've got to be comedic, you've got to be creative, but it's worth it. You're saying the juice is worth it. It's worth it if you can nail it.

I would also just say like it's going to take you a little while. Our first couple in-house ads were not amazing. They were decent, but we just got better and better and better and better. And we learned from it too. We learned that like if you really break down that ad, one of the biggest components that you'll notice is that there's this review. moment where it goes from wearing a schlubby looking t-shirt to like this amazing t-shirt. And that is wildly impactful. What we found is that in any comedy ad that we did, if we didn't include that transitional

component, which is really very DR, that the ad really suffered on Roas. Like, we were never able to scale it. And so you have to have that component. Another thing like that you'll notice in that ad is that he talks about a bunch of other product categories. So, you know, originally we would do a lot of ads just. around the t-shirt. And what I started realizing was like, we have got to branch out. And a lot of what you'll see in that ad is my voice in the production phase going, guys, this has got to be bigger than

T-shirts. Like we have to talk about the jeans. We have to talk about. And that's why you see them write that into the script when they talk about everything else. It's so important that people know that we do other things. Otherwise, like, how are you going to grow the business? I know this is impossible to answer accurately. But how many millions of dollars did that one video bring true classic if you just had to guess? My gosh, probably tens of millions, I would say. It's hard to say though because it's one piece of the journey in a broad journey. Like everyone always acts like you do one thing and you do one thing. It's like, no, it starts with, hey, how you doing? Nice to meet you. And then it ends with like, I'm going to marry this woman because she's so amazing.

And when I met her, I didn't realize. But like in between all that is so much nuance in the joke. So like, let's see, let's say someone saw that ad, right? From there, they go back to their life. And they're not thinking about that thing. And then two months later, they see a true classic ad.

And then they make the connection. And they go, oh, yeah, that's that thing. And then they go back to doing whatever they're doing. And then they walk into a target. And then they see it. And now they're converted.

So like to say that one video created 10 million isn't really fair. it's like yes it was a cog in the wheel and it was part of the journey did it make an impact on getting their attention a thousand percent it's not like one to one necessarily right well it just so happens that person in your example like they buy all their shirts from target and that had to be true because if they saw you at target but they just don't buy shirts from target they're still going to keep walking yes and you're going to have to get them on like your 17th touch point with them instead of your ninth touch with them right exactly oh man it's a long life that we all live. And just because you made an impression doesn't mean you made a sale. It is just one piece to the

much larger picture. And that really is like why you need to just keep coming correct in all assets. Because you don't know where you're going to pick them up at and what part of the journey or the funnel. Well, I think that your marriage analogy is so perfect. Because if you meet someone, you're attracted, you know, years later, you get married. Oh, they love me. She loved my personality. She loved my Riz. Well, she loved your background. She loved. love, you know, how you hold the door open for her. She loved that you came from the same area. Like, she loved that you did this when your tire, you know, popped on the side of the road. It's all of those things. It's not because you're fit or you go to the gym. It's hundreds and

thousands of things and decades of compounding all paying off in that one moment. And they don't exist in a vacuum. That's exactly right. Because the person you are today took a long time to get there. They didn't see the upbringing. They didn't see how your parents treated you. They didn't see all the struggle you went with and how much you had to do to get here to be the person that you are. So that's the same way with product. Like it starts in one place and you didn't convert on day one. Big deal. You made an impression.

Congratulations. Now just keep showing up for that customer until they do convert. And now you're really on to something. Hey, guys, if you're still listening to this, it's probably because you haven't had a chance to take your AirPods out. You're still mowing the lawn. You're still driving. What have you.

If you're still here with me, I would really, really love and appreciate a five-star review on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcast. It would mean a lot if you want to go the extra mile, share this episode with a friend that might have an interest in starting a business. It would mean a ton. Hope you have the best day of your life today.