The Tim Ferriss Show - #354: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — How to Generate 8-Figure Revenue at Age 21 (Or Any Age)

Episode Date: December 27, 2018

"I think the role of the entrepreneur in the world is to find ways to do things better or more efficiently and then try to do that as many times over with the help of other people." — Santiago NestaresBenedict Dohmen and Santiago Nestares of Benitago Group, both 21, met as computer science students at Dartmouth College. Both worked very long hours in the library and suffered from back pain. They began collaborating on a prototype for a product that ended up being called the Supportiback, gathering feedback from members of the Dartmouth community, including a local hospital president and professors and students studying engineering and medicine.They launched the product on Amazon in the UK, and when it seemed their first small order was in danger of selling out quickly, they arranged financing from their supplier and were off and running. Since then, they've entered the US market on Amazon, and are on track for nine-figure revenue in 2019. They have introduced 120 consumer products, and are trying to become an alternative to big consumer products companies through a strategy of applying their successful scale-up strategies to brands they acquire.Also joining us in this special episode is Elaine Pofeldt (@elainepofeldt), an independent journalist and speaker who specializes in careers and entrepreneurship. She is the author of The Million-Dollar, One-Person Business: Make Great Money. Work the Way You Like. Have the Life You Want, in which she looks at how entrepreneurs are scaling to $1 million in revenue prior to hiring employees.Please enjoy! Click here for the show notes for this episode.This podcast is brought to you by Peloton, which has become a staple of my daily routine. I picked up this bike after seeing the success of my friend Kevin Rose, and I've been enjoying it more than I ever imagined. Peloton is an indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right to your home. No worrying about fitting classes into your busy schedule or making it to a studio with a crazy commute.New classes are added every day, and this includes options led by elite NYC instructors in your own living room. You can even live stream studio classes taught by the world's best instructors, or find your favorite class on demand.***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Please fill out the form at tim.blog/sponsor.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Hello, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. And this episode is a case study episode, the most requested type of episode that I've been somewhat negligent in providing. And today we have three folks with me, two co-founders, and then Elaine Pofeld. And Elaine, it's nice to have you back on the show. And could you perhaps just describe for a moment, aside from being a very accomplished journalist, you are an author, and what book of yours is most relevant to the conversation we're going to be having? Well, there's only one book so far. It's the Million Dollar One Person Business. And what it looks at is how non-employer businesses, those with no employees

except for the owners, are scaling to $1 million in revenue and beyond. And it's great to be here, Tim. It's a subject that is endlessly fascinating to me and to many of my listeners, one they wish I would explore more. So here we are. And I have two young gentlemen across from me. I don't know them that well, so they may not be gentlemen, but I suspect they are. They're very well behaved so far. We have Benedict Doman and Santiago Nestares, both 21. Is that currently the case? Great, 21. so well-aged silver foxes. They met as computer science students at Dartmouth College. I've heard of that school.

Very good, very, very good institution. And they worked very long hours in the library, both of them suffering from back pain. This is relevant because they began collaborating on a prototype for a product that ended up being called the support-a-back. And in the process of developing, it gathered a lot of feedback from members of the Dartmouth community, including a local hospital president and professors, as well as students studying engineering and medicine. So we will revisit a lot of what we're discussing in this little intro slash summary. They also experimented with pay-per-click marketing, set up a system for testing and tracking keywords using Excel spreadsheets or spreadsheets. They launched the product first on Amazon in the UK. And Benedict,

Ben, who's from Germany, is transferred to Cambridge University to be closer to his family. Santiago is based where we're recording this right now, which is Austin, Texas. And when it seemed their first small order was in danger of selling out, this I definitely want to talk about. They arranged financing from their supplier and were off and running. They've since entered the U.S. market on Amazon. And this year, they're on track for eight-figure revenue. That means this year, 2018. Next year, on track for nine-figure revenue. Revenue. And they are in the process of introducing more than 120 consumer products,

which range across many, many different categories, including beauty, skincare, pet supplies, baby supplies, food, and nutrition. And in a sense, I hope we will have time to get to this. Maybe that'll be a round two, but I think we can get into it. They are hoping to become an alternative to very large consumer products companies through a strategy of applying their scale-up strategies that they have tested successfully themselves to brands they acquire. So that's a mouthful, but I think it gives a nice overview of the landscape. Ben and Santi, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you for having us.

And I thought, Elaine, maybe I'd let you kick this one off. Sure, that sounds great. Well, Ben and Santi, one of the things I loved about your story so much was the wonderful friendship that you have. Tell us how that came to be. Yes, sure. So we met originally at Dartmouth College. We were studying computer science, kind of nerdy coders, up until the library, doing our labs, our classes.

We met because we were one of the last few guys in the library. And it so happens that at those hours, you do eventually approach the other people around and see what they're working on, what their struggles are, and also helping each other out. So that's originally how we got close. And yeah, it really kicked off from there. And so how did you find out you both had back pain? I'll add on to his answer. You needed my help a bit in the lab, so I was always helping him out, and that's why. That is inaccurate.

So, I mean, inevitably, when you're over the computer, you don't have the best posture. And we started getting a bit of back pain that developed over time, especially when it gets to 3, 4 a.m. So we took the really nerdy approach of trying to figure out why is this happening. To us, back pain seemed like something that only happened to really old people.

So we started geeking out and reading research. is happening to us back pain seemed like something that only happened to really old people um so so we start geeking out and reading research luckily we had access to the dartmouth hitchcock hospital which is renowned in back pain um and started to learn more about it and discovered that posture was the core driver for back pain and it's something that a lot of americans are suffering when people around the world because our bodies are simply not designed to be sitting down especially 100 over a computer all day yeah especially given the the new phrase sitting is the new smoking that was kind of the the guideline there good my good my friend kelly starrett would agree he may have even come up with that phrase i'm not sure where it originated how did you guys then go from complaining about a common problem and doing some homework on it and research to considering creating a product or starting a company?

Because I'm sure, especially in this day and age, you guys met how long ago? About two years ago now, two and a half. Two and a half years ago. Two and a half, three years ago. That there are lots of folks now hoping to learn to code or hoping to learn computer science because it has become very clear that that is an enormous asset in entrepreneurship. So I think there are more entrepreneurs than ever within CS departments. But at what point did you guys decide that this is something you might consider as a business? Well, we initially developed the product mostly for ourselves.

We started looking at what products were out there that were already working. Big believer that you don't have to reinvent the wheel, just make it slightly better. So we took products out there, started tweaking with them, initially just for our own use. were we were not trying to make it a commercial it was not in our heads um eventually so we came up with our two versions so you're buying off the shelf and then modifying them the combination of many things so we bought a whole bunch discarded like 95 the few that worked and we started tweaking them and making them better adding padding we're not engineers but we were trying to figure it out just to increase our it's called proper perception is basically our awareness of of back pain of poor posture that was leading to back pain

and made our two versions one for ben and one for myself and with time we started seeing that our friends who were also young which we did not expect to also have a bit of back pain they were also coming to us and saying hey you know i'm pulling on all night or tonight can i use your your product or hey i'm gonna go on a trip to New York. Can I take the product with me? So that's when we took a step back and said, look, there's clearly a need for it. We don't know how we're going to sell it or commercialize it, but let's just sort of burn the ship's approach,

and let's just make an order, and then we'll figure out how we're going to sell it once they land. So that's how the first order came about. There's a bit of a story behind it. And I think that's also where what you just mentioned, the computer science background, especially as a hotbed or a breeding ground for a lot of modern day entrepreneurs.

Now this is a physical product, right? So it's not a software. You're moving atoms around. Not just zeros and ones. But we see computer science as a tool kit or a tool set that enables us to enhance our products per se and the physical products. So it's definitely varied very we've seen a

lot of value in and having that as our background um yeah so something you said there's a bit of a story behind that first order well let's talk about it i mean how much money did you how much money do you guys spend on that first order and where did it come from why did you have the confidence yeah it was under it was under,000. That was our whole budget. We'd put together our savings here and there as college students. So we started figuring out where are things even made. We had no idea. So we figured out China was a main player, especially when it comes to physical products,

and started learning how Alibaba was a great catalog for a lot of suppliers. Not necessarily the product that we wanted to make because it didn't exist. We were trying to make it differently. But you could see through by seeing other similar products who were the key manufacturers out there in China. But obviously with $2,000, you can't get really far when it comes to manufacturing a really big order.

But we refused to take the approach of like, we need an investor and take that as an excuse not to move forward. So we made up this whole story that we were a massive company out of Boston, and we had a big board meeting coming up. And we had over 100 board members that we wanted to distribute samples to so that they would decide together if we were going to place the big order. And the big order was going to be, like, a million but bear with me we only have two thousand right now for this so they they i don't know if they believe they're not but they they did they saw something in it and they they said look let's go with it i'm sure the margins were were great for them for that for

those two thousand but uh um that's how the first 100 units came about. They put it on the ship and sent it. And then we said, no, now we have 30 days to figure out, are we going to sell it? But that was the story. Now, did the reason you have 30 days because it was net 30 terms for payment? Or did you set that for yourselves as a deadline? So the first order, there was no terms yet, as of yet. It was just 30 days that it took to ship via sea. Oh, I see, I see.

To get it over on the containers or whatever was going to take 30 days. So what did you guys, what were you hatching at that time? So Ben, maybe take a stab at this. I'm sure you were starting to think about how you might sell these things. Were there any resources, websites, books, or anything that you guys were using to try to educate yourselves on entrepreneurship, marketing, sales, anything at all? Absolutely.

Um, and at that point we, so we had the time window of around 30 days to figure out how would we sell these first quote unquoteunquote sample unit um we delved into first of all researching what distribution channels were out there looking at retail on and especially online e-commerce distribution channels such as amazon shopify walmart i mean there's a whole range we are big believers in focus so finding one solution and then sticking with that until it works, even though there might be roadblocks on the way. And so what we did was we spoke to some people, actually some friends of ours who had resold a product on Amazon and I think eBay before. They showed us some basic marketing approaches or tactics relevant to Amazon and eBay.

And we decided to go with Amazon and test that out and see if it works for our products. Because obviously there's also a certain dependency. Some channels work better for other products, etc. With that as a starting ground, we then had to figure out, okay, let's use this as a base, but how do we actually market our product specifically on Amazon? Now that entailed multiple parts, just basic marketing principles, essentially. Part of that was figuring out the copywriting. So we read, I personally read around four books on copywriting within those 30 days. I took around a two-day

deep dive in copywriting 101 taught by myself that was reading the Boron Letters by Boron How do you spell that? B-O-R-O-N The Boron Letters. The Boron Letters. Very good.

Any other books you remember? Yeah. There was another one called Cashvertising. Cashvertising. Yes, which was very helpful. Recommended. So multiple. And then I synthesized all the tactics or all the learnings from those books into one big notes document came up essentially with a 20-step sales letter formula, synthesizing the

different advices from the different books and also blogs on top of that. Your copy algorithm for product description. Essentially, yes. And then try to apply that to the Amazon sales page. Do you recall what some of the steps were at this point? That's been a long time ago. I can tell you that the key principles which have benefited us most in terms of copywriting and sales

have been focusing on the benefits rather than the features. A lot of mistakes we see being made or an incorrect approach people often take is they focus on the features of the products. But what consumers or customers actually care about is what benefits them ultimately. So constantly focusing on that is kind of the 80-20 or like the one thing to copywriting as the main guiding principle.

Well, this makes me think of the iPod, which for those of you who weren't born in the dinosaur ages, the iPod was this device about the size of a brick initially that played songs, no telephone. And it was not the first MP3 player that you could put in your pocket, but it was arguably the first to, instead of describing and selling the product in terms of the number of gigabytes it could hold, and on technical specs said something, and I might be getting this slightly off,

but a thousand songs in your pocket, and making the connection much more clear between the purchase and the benefits that you derive from it. Okay, so you guys are figuring out copywriting. How are you at this point at all and in the beginning separating responsibilities or investigating different things? Or are you guys all doing everything at that point? You have 30 days before these, air quote, sample products arrive. How are you thinking of partnering on this?

Because you don't want to duplicate each other's effort constantly because that's redundant and would seem to be particularly abhorrent to computer science students. So how are you thinking about working together? I wish we would have planned it. It was more like we're all in this same boat together. Let's see how we can get there faster.

Now I think it's more we've divided that and compartmentalized that a little bit better. I did gravitate a bit more towards the keyword science behind it, and Ben was more around the copywriting and sales science behind it. We took the same approach at everything. It's how can we make a formula for it to work every time. So I took a bit

more of the pay-per-click approach to it. So I started understanding how did keyword-based algorithms work on platforms like Amazon and why were certain products displayed. How did you figure that out? Or if someone came to you and said,

I want to figure that out, what would your advice be? The first thing I would say is go understand the basics because it actually takes a while. It took a while for me to understand what a keyword-based algorithm, understand what a keyword-based search is and how long-tail keywords are different than short-tail keywords

and different types of matches. So I looked at a course by Brian Johnson. It really starts from the basics, and it's a deep dive into what PPC is, specifically on Amazon. And then once you understand that, what we realized is a lot of those people really had no statistical backing to a lot of the methods that they were using to optimize.

They were good rule of thumbs, but they were not necessarily the best. So to get an edge on that market and to get an edge on the keywords that we're bidding and to understand what truly are the keywords that we want to go after that are most likely to convert to our product, we started developing an algorithm or a simple formula as to what was the right bid for that specific keyword.

And that was all based on when is it statistically significant to discard a keyword, whether it's to keep bidding or to adjust that bid. Am I correct you did this all on Excel spreadsheets at the time? Yes. So a lot of people think when they hear formulas, algorithms, you can even name it AI because nowadays they name a lot of things AI. Don't forget

deep learning. Ultimately it's just a simple formula. You can run it on Excel sheets. Deep learning. It was very deep. It was all run on Excel sheets and that's when we said look and I we i think we got a big edge and that helped us kick start or give that initial momentum to those hundred units that

we had um that then we started to show up organically on the so these these hundred units arrive right just describe the day so you guys are doing all this homework getting educated like describe the day when this stuff lands. We didn't even see it. So it went straight from China to our fulfillment network. We leveraged Amazon Fulfillment FBA as a fulfillment partner. They're the most efficient we found, and yet to this day we still use them. We never saw the products.

We did get some samples to do some quality control, but we really didn't see the whole shipment, so it was very abstract to us. You think about 100 units, and you actually don't even know how it looks. Probably better for you guys in some ways. It was probably better. Yeah.

So they arrived, and I remember I was actually just sitting down at home. I was back with my family. And I think Ben was also back in Germany with his family. And I just looked up on the phone from an hour to the next. And we saw we'd sold the first day a quarter of our inventory. So that caught us off guard. And that's when we said, okay, we're onto something. We've done something right.

And let's figure out what is it that we did right. So we can do it over and over. Now, were you worried that you might just sell out completely and not be able to fill the orders? We knew we were going to sell out by that point. But the worry was nothing compared to the excitement or overwhelm from actually having thought to have found a formula for some sort of success in that marketplace what's

what did you do right when you look back and what i'm also trying to just so you guys have an idea of what i'm going to try to do in this interview there are certain things that people will have trouble replicating if they don't have certain types of training not replicating isn't the right word learning from right and then there are other principles and so on that they can borrow and apply and learn from that you guys have used so i'll try to separate those two at different points just because not everyone coming in is going to have the technical capabilities that you guys have or the statistical familiarity say uh but what what looking back like what do you guys do right so you sold you said a quarter of your inventory?

From one hour to the next, and you're like, on one hand, you're like, high five, awesome, and then on the other hand, you're like, oh, shit. Okay, this is turning out differently than maybe we would have expected. Good news. But what did you do right? What did you guys do right? So I think what we did right after after reflecting we

still reflect on it on it today every every time we do a big move we go back and think what did we do right and wrong and constantly try to learn from our experience um i think what we did right then was take computer science approach at developing the product it all starts in the product you can have amazing copy and you need to have amazing copy. You can have amazing keyword strategy and you need to have it. But it all boils down to the product because if you have a good product,

it'll convert best and you really can outbid any competitor in any keyword or any search ranking. Also, it's due returns, customer service issues, all of that. All of that will take care of itself if you start off with having something good to offer. But obviously, we were not back pain experts.

We still aren't. And we're not experts in the pet industry. We're not experts in the beauty industry. What we did really well was take the customer as the expert. Don't take anyone else or anything else as an expert, but take the customer. And how can we apply what we've learned, like the lean startup methodology, the agile method that a lot of software companies use. Lean startup methodology, Eric Ries.

Yes. That's cool. Very influential. Really, really important book for us. Eric's a good guy. Yeah. So taking that approach that was so common in the software to the product development is,

our only goal at that point was, let's hear what's working out there let's hear what isn't let's put those two things together initially was for us eventually for the market and then it was how can we get those products on the ship as quickly as we can so that we can start selling because the day we start selling is the day we start learning day you start getting feedback and this is sometimes for people who are not familiar, referred to as the MVP. Yes, exactly. I think it's minimal or minimally viable product. So how do you ship in the context of lean startup, very often software, which is very easy to iterate.

Physical products, a little more challenging. But how can you get something out into the real world with real people who are not your friends trying to tell you what you want to hear? So you can get feedback that can inform better decisions yes and a very important concept we learned most relevant to that is there's a clear distinction between feedback and failure so usually what a lot of people react say they ship out a product be it a software or a physical product whatever into the market, and they get zero sales or they get very disappointed with very few sales. A lot of people see that as failure and decide to give up.

If you take the MVP approach, you see that as feedback. So with that feedback in hand, you can then cost correct and actually identify the triggers or the variables that caused the low sales or that caused your miss of expectations and then work on those and tweak them and then iterate again and ship out the next version or the next product and see how that compares to the previous version. So I think that's for us that was very crucial to understand the distinction between feedback and failure.

Failure is when you give up. Feedback is positive because it allows you to iterate to get better. Yeah. And just having that mindset creates a lens through which you look at things very differently and it affects the questions that you ask, right? So before we started recording, we were chatting about podcasting a little bit and the, I want to say it was like the first or second question you guys honed in on, it's like, how do you learn what's working or not in the world of podcasting, which turns out to be somewhat challenging from a technical perspective, given the lack of really deep and specific analytics.

But that was one of your very first questions. And it's, it. And if you do not have that feedback-oriented mindset, it's very easy, whether something works or fails or somewhere in between, to just decide what you're going to do next without looking at what happened. But really spending time on the post-game analysis and figuring out, all right, is this one-off? Is it a problem?

Can we replicate the problem? Right? Do we think it's because the website's taking too long to load? I mean, obviously it's slightly different with Amazon, but do we think it's because the price is too high? You know, is there a way, not necessarily on Amazon where we can offer say an exit pop-up that gives people a discount to test that hypothesis, right? Then your, your approach becomes very, very different. Uh, okay. So you guys are launching your MVP. You've taken a lean startup slash agile development approach to product development. You've now figured out, uh, what was the name of that book? Cash...

Cashvertising. Cashvertising. God, so good. So terrible. So bad, it's good. Cashvertising. And what are you using to track your sales at this point? Is there an Amazon dashboard that you use to track that?

Or what are you watching? Yes, we used... So Amazon has internal dashboards just in the seller central, which is the approach we took, where you can see basic reporting on sessions, conversion rate, the overall sales. As we grew, we then also expanded into third-party softwares, though, that give a more clear picture, more organized, more structured.

Because I, especially in the beginnings, Amazon's internal reports and then their structure can be very confusing. And you can, for pretty cheap or you get a third-party um software that shows you all the key metrics you actually care about in a very clear and structured format what are some of those options so we use one called sellix sellix yes e-l-l-e-x s-E-L-L-I-C-S What does that mean? Is that just a brand name? That's their brand name

We also use Cash Cow Pro at one point Cash Cow Pro Cash Cow Business Cash Cow and then Cash Cow Pro They're really really affordable and knowing your metrics is really important. So yeah. Now speaking as someone who has not sold anything on Amazon and looked at the UI,

uh, or the options for testing, let's just say split testing. Is it pot? This is more for my personal curiosity. I'm sure there's somebody out there wondering the same thing on amazon uh can you test different price points like automatically serve like 29.99 to 30 of the audience and 1999 to 30 another 30 of the audience and so on and so forth it's tricky um overall from a high level there are many different variables like there might be a deal of the day running or a lightning deal or there's so many variables it's very hard to control for say price or for the images there are certain tools out there who have tried to give it some type of testing there's one called splitly that's s p yeah splitly what they do is they subsequently test say image one against image

two or price point one against price point two you can't do it simultaneously so you can't do normal ap testing um but it's a close a close approximation um and even within that, the price range, very tactically on Amazon, you can't jump the price from, say, $19.99 to $9.99, or especially the inverse. So you can't just drastically raise the price because Amazon will then disallow you to own the buy box, which is a crucial part to your conversion rate. So there are certain intricacies,

but some approximations as to get some rough idea and some rough testing. Why did you guys decide on Amazon? Versus was it primarily to simplify the Fulfilled by Amazon component of the entire process, or were there other reasons? I mean, Amazon is of course a behemoth outside of, well, outside of China, certainly in the United States, highly dominant. But were there, were there other reasons you guys chose Amazon as your, as your primary platform?

So what we discovered was, again, it's really easy for new time entrepreneurs to get caught up on reasons or complicating things and making it as hard as possible to get to the ultimate goal, which is get to our customer. We were trying to simplify everything down to how can we get

this product in front of the right customer as quickly as we can. And Amazon offered the fulfillment side which pretty much removed all the operation intricacies for us. And it also enabled us to go to the whole European market as well with a flip of a switch, so to say. And then additionally, it also simplified all the marketing. There's already active people going into Amazon trying to find solutions for their problem. People that are problem aware or people that are product aware. There's people going into Amazon trying to find solutions for their problem. People that are problem aware or people that are product aware. There's people going out there saying, I need

a cushion for my back or I need a pillow to sleep better because I have back pain. And they're searching for that. And they're looking to buy as opposed to find information. They have really high buying intent. So instead of figuring out how do we create awareness, how do we create product awareness and eventually get those down the funnel, which is a game or a science in and of itself. We were like, all we have to figure out is how do we convince those that are already going into Amazon that, look, we are the best solution for them.

And we truly believe in our products. We think they're better than the ones out there. So all we have to do is demonstrate that. So that allowed us to do it really, really easily. And Amazon, additionally additionally it's growing online it's growing over retail so it made the most sense to us um and still today we we rely on amazon as one of our main partners how do you coming back to the mvp and customer feedback, get actionable feedback. So part of the reason I use Amazon as much as I do is to very deliberately avoid interaction with many merchants, right? I do not want to

get email. I do not want to get questionnaires. I do not want to have any more interaction than absolutely necessary. So how do you guys get feedback on products? We aggregate a whole bunch of data. And that data comes from within Amazon, but also off Amazon. Within Amazon, some of the main sections we look at are reviews, feedbacks, competitors' reviews, competitors' feedbacks,

products in the same industry or category, their reviews, competitors' feedbacks, products in the same industry or category, their reviews, their feedbacks. So feedback and reviews from many different sources. Questions too, because you have the questions and answers so you can see what's confusing people. That's another way. And then we

scrape all of that. We have bots that aggregate that and put them into a google sheet essentially analyze it by keyword frequency or some search query frequency and then we try to see some statistical trends as to all right this complaint say with the memory foam this complaint has come up x many times over potentially that many purchases. It's roughly statistically significant. This is something we should add to our list

to then implement on our product development on the sourcing and manufacturing side. And then off Amazon as well, looking at social media engagement, social media postings, et cetera, aggregating all of that, and then combining that and synthesizing with the on Amazon data to come up with a list of features we can then implement

on the sourcing side. And the way that works is, so we have this list of features for every product that we would like to implement, which we, where we see from the real customers that they crave, or in some way desire that. Because it's a different story if people say, okay, this pillow, if you have two people saying it's too firm for me and two other people saying it's too soft, that is in no way statistically significant. So we have this list of suggestions,

and then we speak with our manufacturers in China, depending on where the products are sourced. Some are sourced in the EU, some in the US, all over. We speak with them to evaluate the feasibility of this feature, of incorporating that, the costs of it, how fast can they turn it around, will it affect the lead times as to how fast they're going to even produce them, all the subsequent batches, and a whole bunch of smaller decisions. If we decide to go ahead,

and it makes sense from a cost-benefit perspective, we implement that into the next cycle. So the next order, we already have version N plus one. If we decide at this point it doesn't make sense to implement that, then we keep it on our hold list and we revisit in, say, three, six, nine orders down the line.

We revisit, okay, does it make sense now? Does it complement any of the other features we've just incorporated in the past orders, et cetera? Are the, and I don't know if this is too much secret sauce discussion, complement any of the other features we've just incorporated in the past orders etc are the and i don't know i don't know if this is too much secret sauce discussion but i'll let you decide uh is are the when you say bots right this is a word that gets thrown a lot uh into media that people have seen and it's uh i think generally poorly understood, right? The term scraping and bots and so on. Are you guys using off,

have you used off-the-shelf programs or services for that? Are these things that you guys have coded yourselves? What does that look like? To answer your question, we've, it's a great question, by the way. We have computer science backgrounds, so we coded it ourselves in Python and some libraries that are out there anyone can use.

It's just a way to automate it, to automate the process. Anyone can do this. It's just it will then require more manual work, which would otherwise be done by a script. So anyone can go into 50 listings of competitors' products, look at their reviews, put them into an Excel sheet, and then look over and count the number of words or the number of queries and then map them out essentially these are the queries we had 45 of them over all these reviews etc yeah or just display as many as possible then ctrl f and

search for whichever term right i'll show you right at the top of the browser how many occurrences that's what we did the first time yeah super simple yeah Have you found that the information you gathered in the European market was directly relevant to the U.S. market? Are there differences in terms of the types of feedback that comes in? Did you launch initially in Europe? Yes. Right? Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. That's great. That's a great question. So walk us through that. Yeah. So there are certain differences between consumers in Europe and the U.S. based on what we've seen. Obviously, our data set is very limited based on our own products

as well as our own personal experience. To give you an example, German consumers, I'm German myself, tend to focus more heavily on technical aspects of the product. Shocker. And the American direct response to Germans, it seems very salesy and very off-putting. And similarly, even within Europe you have the Germans you have the French Spanish Italian very different British there are they all have very different consumer behaviors in a sense and so you have to

cater say the the copy and adjust it slightly to each. What about the keywords? Would you change those also? Well, the keywords are independent of that because the keyword pillow, for instance, it's the same. They're generics. Exactly. Then the product copy you use to convert them is different. Why did you choose to launch outside of the US first?

In the US, it would be more uniform, right right in a sense where it's like okay yes people in new york are different from people in louisiana who are different from people in nebraska kind of but culturally they're probably going to be closer or more similar than italians versus germans right i would think so so back then it would probably made more sense to launch in the u.s ben had german background we we believed that we would have an edge at least with the german marketplace um and i probably must have been at some econ class and and taken some macro parallels to it that nowadays i just laugh at myself for it because it doesn't really make a difference. But that, it was mostly serendipity. We decided to go Europe. We've discovered some advantages in terms of they're stricter in terms of regulation. So it forced us to put our products through

regulatory processes that then are really easy to go through once we bring them into the US. The market is considerably smaller. It's about three times as small in terms of Amazon sizes. So it allowed us also to experiment and to get that feedback on a smaller sort of sandbox. And then once those products got to the point where they were very successful and most people were really happy with them, we flipped them over to the U.S.

That is a very common practice for a lot of big companies in the sense that I believe Nike is one of them that does a good amount of their testing in New Zealand. So they want to test on a native English speaking market, but if it is a catastrophic flop, they don't want it to be in Times Square or necessarily in the larger playground or sandbox of the U.S., let's say. So they'll do a good amount of their research and initial testing and iteration in a place like New Zealand. So let's backtrack for a second. Look at the phone. OMG, we've sold a quarter of our inventory. So I'm coming back to what I said I would definitely come back to.

And here's the line. When it seemed their first small order was in danger of selling out quickly, I would say that the story qualifies. They arranged financing from their supplier and were off and running. Walk us through that. Arranged financing from their supplier. This is really important, I think, because, and I don't even know the story,

but most people think, and this is particularly true, I think, in startup land, where people hear the word startup. And I think particularly for a lot of people who are 20, 22-year-old, however old, CS students, it's like, ooh, go out, venture capital, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, raise a bunch of money. And they have that particular narrative when they think of financing. This is something that is not that uncommon, but it's something very few people know about. So can you walk us through this? Yeah. So from the get-go, Ben and I, we went in with the mentality of removing obstacles rather than coming up with obstacles. What do you mean by that?

So this is a great example is, do you need an investor to put your second order? Otherwise, you'll run out of stock. That is an obstacle that you might actually be putting there by yourself. So we had this problem, which was we need to make a way bigger order now. We did have the profits from the initial order. We had a clear proof of concept. And we had heard this narrative where you need investors to scale. But we said there must be a better way out there. There must be a quicker way out there.

So who do we went to? Our biggest partner so far. Our company that thought we were a massive company out of Boston, and said, look, we're going to place this bigger order, but as we are a big company, we expect good terms. So we convinced them to give us good payment terms. And for those people who are wondering, what are good payment terms in this situation?

What did you ask? Did you ask for specific terms, or did you say what are the best did you ask did you first did you ask for specific terms or did you say what are the best terms you can offer what was the approach we we came in really demanding because we're a big company out of boston so we said look um we're going to be placing a bigger order again we we were pursuing cash flow we're pursuing profit we were not pursuing an investor and have a tank and spend that money and then figure out what we're going to do so at all points we were like we we knew that we needed to be profitable and the biggest issue with physical products companies is today you have to put the order that you're going to sell in three months so if your sales are up today um and you expect

them to be even bigger and there's a problem we still encounter on a day-to-day basis we're going to have to put in more capital today to hopefully bake up for the sales tomorrow. So we said, okay, they can be our biggest partner. Came up to them and said, big companies like Walmart expect 60 day credit terms, 100 net. And they were like, no, that's not happening. Now explain for people what that means. 60 day credit. It means they produce the whole thing.

They send you the whole batch. And then 60 days after you get it, you pay for it. And then, yeah. Then obviously they said no, we went back and forth. But what was the second part of the terms? So you said... 100%. Something, something net. 60 day, 100% net.

Oh, 100% net. Sorry, I misread you. 60 day net. I got it. Yeah. So we basically don't put any penny up front, and they send the whole thing, and we pay them 60 days after it arrives. Obviously, that didn't work out very well but it but um the ultimate thing that we understood both of us

is that our scaling obviously after after that point they started understanding we're not that big company we're a small company but we'd been really successful with that initial order um and things came down to down to earth but they understood that we were a key player in their scale and their scalability that we're going to grow with us the same way they're a big player in our scalability. So when you understand that, you're both trying to help each other. And usually the

objections they have to giving you credit terms is not because they don't want to, it's because they have risk objections. They also might be cash-strapped. So you want to sit down with them and have that honest conversation and say, look, what guarantees can I give you over this inventory? Or what things can I do to ease your cash flow? How can I guarantee that I'm going to pay this back in 30 days?

So I think we managed to get somewhere near 50-50. Or maybe it was 70. It was 70 needed to be paid by the time it left, and the other 30 needed to be paid 60 days after. And since then, every time we go back to the table and we always ask for better terms, as we continue to scale, every time we have a bigger order, that's a good opportunity to say, look, can we get better payment terms to do this bigger order? I want to highlight something, which is you didn't assume, well, maybe you did, but you didn't stop at the no. You investigated the fears behind the no. This is really important because there may be other ways to address fears that do not include paying for everything upfront. There may be other ways that you can address it. And that can range from not necessarily in this case, but getting a

cosigner for a particular deal so that worst case scenario, they have someone to hold financially accountable who is not you, right? Or ABC theory, right? Committing to the next four orders in some type of contractual way so that they, they mitigate the risk of getting burned on one particular deal, right? There are many different ways, or maybe they say no because they don't know who you are.

Can you provide them with references of some type who will allow them to sell their supervisor on approving this because they've only been in the job for 30 days and they're not comfortable yet taking the risk to approve that particular one-off deal. There's a, there's a great book I would recommend to folks called getting past no, which I think is the more practical cousin of getting to yes. It's actually, and It's actually written, I think it's authored by one of the co-authors of getting to yes. Did you guys just figure out negotiating on the fly or did you read anything related to that? It was mostly on the fly. Trying to put ourselves in the other party's shoes and then making our decision based on that.

So it's, I guess, principles from game theory, which we took a class on at school. Yeah, that helps a lot. All right. So, and Elaine, feel free to jump in at any time since you know, you're certainly more familiar with their story than I am. But you are then able to achieve what you set out to achieve in a sense, which is to get favorable enough terms

that you can get more inventory. Yeah, all right. What happens then? So you have more product on the way. What were some of the best decisions that you guys made from that point on? Like what were some of the critical decisions that you guys made from that point on? Like, what were some of the critical decisions, right? Because a lot of people try to sell products online, whether they're physical

or digital. And most of them go into it unprepared. Most of them do not learn from their mistakes. Many of them do not apply any type of rigor to their analytics or minding of very basic things. And that's, keep in mind, coming from me, and I am about as innumerate as you can possibly be. I mean, I chose my university based on a lack of math requirements, so I'm not exactly a quant, but very basic. Like, simple arithmetic and not fooling yourself that, like, two customer reviews that say X is cool means that definitively across the board, everyone thinks that's all you need, right?

Really basic stuff, super basic. Uh, so what were, but you guys have done very well. You have a very steep trajectory on sales. You're launching new products. So you, at this point you have the support back, right? And you have more units coming in. What were some of the smartest decisions that you guys made, or worst decisions, both are important, in sort of the months that followed? One of the key decisions, and then Santiago, you can add to that, I'll dive into the first one, was to focus.

And we're big believers in the Pareto principle, in honing in on what's working and keeping on that and getting better at that and not getting distracted removing distractions and Ben you you had mentioned to me your fans of the four-hour work week was that what made you think along those lines absolutely I mean Tim you mentioned it uh in the four-hour work week focus and removing distractions has definitely been one of the key decisions even if it was an unknown decision so unseen so to say because you neglect something you you don't see the thing you neglected um so what that meant in this particular case was we had many options to expand into different channels, say Walmart.com, Jet.com, even eBay, where we could figure it out.

But one of the key decisions we did was to focus in and hone in on Amazon in growing both our expertise as well as our sales on that platform. And unknowingly, one of the effects that had is the way Amazon works from a very high level is the more sales you have, the more sales you have. So it's a snowball or a cumulative advantage, attribution, however you want to call it it in that amazon ultimately cares about transactions on their site so the more transactions you have on their site the more they like you and what the more they like you means is they rank you higher they give you access to advertisement etc to a whole bunch of other benefits based off of that so you classified those other sites then as distractions it sounds like

yes and so we warren buffett and charlie munger are big idols of ours um and warren buffett mentions one of his concepts remove in in distractions and focus is there are 20 things you want to do right now we we're really burning to do, say for us that was expanding to other channels like Walmart. But you have to scrap them all and focus on the one thing that ultimately will push you forward. And real distractions are things you're dying to do.

So we applied that in our case and kept on focusing on amazon i think that was crucial and does one of you reign the other in i mean is one of you better at narrowing the focus or do you both do that for each other it's both for each other and i think there's a lot of value in a partnership in particularly that point because one can easily lose track and get distracted oneself but having kind of a second pair of eyes is definitely where two plus two is way greater than four in that sense you mentioned you you guys have mentioned well before we started recording and also now warren buffett and munger uh why, why are the, aside from, yes, they're very successful investors.

That's, that's great. Uh, and they're certainly, uh, among the best the world has ever seen, but beyond that, uh, or maybe in addition to that, like why are these two so interesting to you guys? And when you say we idolize them, that's great. But does that mean you study them? And if you study them, how do you study them? That's a good question. I think what we admire the most out of them is the ability to, or their constant pursuit of truth and rationality. It's how do we really understand the reality and keep

emotion and irrationality out of it as much as possible they even admit there's no such thing as perfection in that um but they're always striving to do that um so the most the most studying we do is both on on what they have to say i think our I think one of my favorite pieces of Charlie Munger's speech in Harvard, I think in 19... You can look it up on YouTube, Charlie Munger Harvard. Yeah, just look up Charlie Munger commencement. I think it's also in Poor Charlie's Almanac

in the newer editions. What they have to say, pretty much any insight into their lives. I know they're usually pretty private, but there's plenty of content out there for free that you can see. But it's that pursuit of being rational and staying down to earth and keeping emotions out of things that has helped us both in our personal lives and our relationship as co-founders, as in our ability to dissect the business and focus on the few things that actually move the needle.

Ben, what about you? And as it relates to that dynamic duo, are there any resources that you would recommend? Poor Charlie's Almanac is definitely there. I think there's another book, From Darwin to Munger. Yep, Peter Bevelin. Seeking Wisdom, I think, is the there. I think there's another book, From Darwin to Munger. Yep, Peter Bevelin. Yeah. Seeking Wisdom, I think, is the title.

Seeking Wisdom. And then from Darwin to Munger, or Munger to Darwin, is also a really good collection. And then the speeches on YouTube. I think Munger has one at USC. Yeah. It's a commencement speech,

which is very valuable. And I also would recommend to folks who may not explicitly have an interest in what you think of as investing which is picking stocks let's just say to read the annual letters to berkshire hathaway shareholders by buffett there are collections of these letters and it will help you to hone or at the very least test your own thinking so that you become clear or more clear about how you are reaching your conclusions, which translates to better investment of time, energy, attention, capital, which certainly transfers to just about everything. All right, so getting back to the main story, the storyline that we've been traveling along here, when did you begin to expand outside of your first product and how did you make that decision?

So back to when I mentioned that we took a time, a pause to understand what had worked um we understood again it was the our approach to product development um how we took kind of our cs background to developing the best back pain product and may have said you know i'm going to interrupt you because i'm being a jerk uh but also because i i want to uh we are going to we're definitely going to get to the expansion of product line, but I realize maybe we skipped a chapter really early, which was before you ordered your product,

and you were getting feedback from people at Dartmouth. What did that look like? Because this is really hands-on. It's something people can do with communities around them. How did you elicit feedback in the very early days? Because you guys are systems thinkers, right? So you gonna be like hey do you like it they're like yeah i like it you're like okay great let's go buy a container full of product no you're not going to do that so what did you do look bad no limited feedback is better than no feedback

we took it with a big grain of salt we went through we lined up a bunch of people and say look withdraw yourself from the products as much as you can and say what do you think of this use it for a few hours we did a couple different tests um one of us like use it for a few hours and and right beforehand we would ask them how much pain are you in right now and then how much pain are you in after how statistically significant was that or how valid it is probably isn't very valid um but then we reached out to the um the ceo of the Dartmouth Hitchcock. He was nice enough, all his background is on back pain. He was nice enough to meet with us and give us his opinion

on his best practices. But again, that was not the pillar or the core of how the product was developed because ultimately our biggest effort expert is the customer and their behavior, the consumer behavior. So we took that with a bit of a grain of salt, took it as a guiding reference, but it was how can we get to the market as quickly as we can? And that's when the true learning started. What were things that you modified in the product? I don't think we touched upon this yet. So the support back, right? I mean, that was like your undergrad and master's degrees setting you up for the later products, I would assume,

in a lot of respects, right? So what were some of the early changes that you made to the product that were important in retrospect and why? Yeah. So we actually worked on three products initially. They launched in a bit of a different timing, but the three were the brace, the pillow, and the lumbar support all of those were supporting back products i'll give you the example of the of the pillow because it's the most substantial or a clear changes that we did so we started looking at again approach what what do other people are doing we knew that the pillow let me backtrack so there's three core points in your life where you're when you have back pain where're not moving, and when you're in poor postures.

When you're sleeping, usually when you're commuting, if you're commuted by car like the majority of the people in the U.S., and when you're sitting at work. So our customers kept coming back to us for those kind of three products. So we set off to do a pillow, and we started looking at different types of pillows understood that memory foam was the best material again looking at the trends um what what material has gotten the best feedback in terms of solving the issue which is

back pain that was by far memory foam um and there were different densities of it so that's when ben came in and he was like well but some people say people say too hard, too soft. What is the, how can we pinpoint the optimal density? So we pinpointed the optimal density. And then, and then started, once it started selling, we started getting feedback from the customer saying, clear, clear trend saying, look, the memory foam is great, but it retains a lot of heat and it's making our faces really itchy. Within two to three days, we're not really using the product. I'm throwing it to the side and using my normal pillow.

So we were saying, how can we make this cooler or solve this issue? Literally cooler. Literally cooler, yeah. So we started looking at other industries and how high-memory foam products before. We're not trying to reinvent the wheel. We're just trying to solve the issue the simplest way possible. Found that we could add a little thin layer of cool gel on top,

and then even pinpointed down to what was the width of that layer, how big would you want it to make it, and added that specific layer to the product, made that change, and as soon as that product hit the market, it became the best-selling pillow in all of the UK marketplace. It actually became the best-selling pillow in all of home and kitchen

as a category for a few days. Sante, can I just stop you for a second? How did you know about the materials? This seems like it would be totally alien to most of us. We didn't. So that was what we did right. Our own ignorance pushed us to take the right approach and is taking the customer as the ultimate designer so we said

look we don't know what a memory foam is so let's buy all the memory foam pillows um and let's see which ones have the best feedback on on the specific memory foam as the the enabler to solve the problem so you looked at their comments on Amazon about those pillows, and then you extrapolated. And off Amazon, again, same approach. It was just iterating on the same thing that we'd done right.

And then we literally took a sample out of the memory foam, sent it to our supplier and say, can you make it out of this memory foam? They examined it. They said, this is the type of density. This is the color. This is exactly how we're going to do it.

It was very systematic. For us, if we couldn't do it again with any product, we wouldn't even do it. Even if we thought that we could input our own opinions into it and make it different, we said, that is not iterable. Let's not do it that way. Question on manufacturer I don't think I asked. So there are a million and one manufacturers out there. Yeah. And for every one good story I hear,

I hear 20 awful stories. How did you end up, and you don't have to mention the specific manufacturer, but how did you pick them? And did you have to, did you make mistakes in the beginning and have to replace your manufacturer? How did you go about vetting

and selecting who you ended up selecting so overall the approach we took was let's put in the upfront work in the vetting because that will make our lives down the line way easier yeah um instead of having to deal with a lot of issues quality insurance etc um so santiago already mentioned we initially reached out via alibaba to around again very numeric driven approach to to finding a supplier reached out to i think around 30 or 40 different suppliers all within the categories of the products through Alibaba. I think we also looked at 1688.com, which is another comparable site. And within Alibaba, you also have certain metrics. There's a gold star rating. There's metrics on how long they've been on the platform for. And even Alibaba,

I guess, given to their own history, has instituted quality checks from within of their own people or employees going to the factories, taking photos, verifying all the certifications are accurate, etc. So that was a good ground basis to work off. A lot of the vetting came from speaking with the manufacturers themselves in how professional they would behave and how effectively they would communicate, what companies, under non-disclosure, but what type of companies, what size of companies they'd worked with in the past example products they've worked and produced themselves in the past so many different variables we looked at to vet them and ultimately like a checklist where they

had to tick off different different boxes what were some of the questions you asked on the phone and at what see 30 to 40 you reach out to how many of those questions you asked on the phone? And at what, so you have 30 to 40 to reach out to. How many of those would you say you guys called? Well, we contacted all of them. And it's like a marketing funnel, right? You have a certain dropout, and then we obviously cut off a certain percentage because it's a huge time investment on our end to speak with 50 different people simultaneously so like we had an initial cutoff in terms of poor communication and that was indicated by say poor english um there some certifications they could not hold up etc um meaning they couldn't provide

certificates to show you exactly and then so that was a big cutoff. Then another step in the funnel was actually having a lawyer go over the certifications and counter-checking them that they were accurate and not fake. There's basic services or basic lawyers who can do that for 100, 200 bucks. So that was another stage stage how did you find the lawyers google search got it and those were based in the u.s or based those are based in europe based in europe yeah but the lawyer can be from anywhere because these organizations are global the certification what do you search on google for someone like that what might you search yeah um so it depends again, on the category of product you're manufacturing.

A general good certification to have is good manufacturing practice. GMP. GMP. So you can look up for GMP certificate, lawyer, approval, verification, et cetera. And you'll get a whole bunch of results. Very practical again. And were you going to your classes at this time? How did you actually find time to do all of this? And that's a great question.

Going back to FARA Workweek, that's another point where that was very influential to us because we had limited time. We obviously, there was attendance at class we had to do labs etc which took up a lot of time so the time we had available we had to use very focusedly like again Pareto principle focusing on the few things that matter um and let me just pause you for one second so Pareto principle for people who are not familiar with that term, is often also called the 80-20 principle. And in very, very simple terms, there's a lot of nuance to it. But the idea or the premise being, it's more of a conceptual framework, but it ends up

manifesting pretty accurately in a lot of different areas, whether it's agriculture or looking at profit per customer or any headache per supplier, that 80% of, say, in the case of profit, like 80% of the profit that you generate will be produced by 20% of your products, 20% of your customers. And doing that type of analysis to identify the really, really good and also the really, really bad so you can make more informed decisions. And 80-20, it doesn't mean, it doesn't have to add up to 100, right? It could be the 95-5 principle where 5% produce 95% of your headache with your accounts receivable, right? I mean, it could be any number of things like that. But that's named after Vilfredoo pareto um so sorry to interrupt yeah so you've got your

labs you've got your classes you have limited time so you're really having to focus on the things that that matter exactly and a funny note we've actually seen instances where people who dedicate full-time say to to a business or to their entrepreneurial pursuits end up being less effective than people who are only pursuing it part-time just because they get distracted they get lost they don't use their time effectively um and ultimately the people who say have a full-time job or are in college can use the the limited time they have available on the things that matter. Again, parallel distribution. And also use them effectively focused,

not being on the phone, seeing all the messages from the wife, from the partner, from work, etc. So I think, again, that we use that from the 4-Hour Workweek, the concept of focusing in on what matters, systematizing the rest, and that's been very, very influential for us. Yeah, it's true for, I mean, a lot of folks,

which is in part why, whether it's in the four-hour workweek or outside of that, I often talk about the 80-20 principle or Pareto principle being used in tandem with Parkinson's law. And Parkinson's law is a semi, it was initially written about in more of a humorous satire-like context, but the applications are really practical. So the premise of the Parkinson's law is that a task will swell in complexity to fill the time that you allotted. So the more time you have for something,

the more complicated you will be inclined to make it. And this is also not just within entrepreneurship, but even in writing. I mean, you have someone like, I think, Khalid Hosseini, I don't know if I'm pronouncing his name correctly, but who wrote The Kite Runner, who was a, I believe a full-time physician at the time. So he had to use tiny chunks of time here and there to really focus. It was not an option not to focus because his time was so limited. So it can be a very useful forcing function. And the reason I mentioned that is that a lot of people who, there are many people, myself included, I do this all the time too. So it's a matter of

conditioning yourself to use this lens, but it's very easy to look at a perceived lack of time as a weakness. But if you view it instead as a forcing function where when you focus, you have to focus. You cannot get away with checking social media every five minutes and get anything done. Then it can be a real asset. So you guys were using, what, nights, weekends? When were you actually finding the time? Or was it in separate chunks?

So first thing we said is let's apply the 20-80 to the classes. So what are the things that we actually have to do to get you know still get our good grades but uh but not necessarily spend 100 of the time that normally people would spend and then the time that was opened by that then say no we have this little bit of time what can we do for the business and that 20 to produce the 80 of the results and a note on on the 2080 is sometimes so it's really easy to identify, say, when you're not doing the 20 of the 80, say, with social media or with wasting your time. But often it's even harder to identify it when you're doing things that seem productive. When you're saying, okay, I'm going to spend, you spend four hours trying to get the image perfect. And that often is just as bad as spending those four hours

on social media. So it's harder to identify that and always be aware of like, and one big concept or one big book that has helped us fight through that has been the one thing

by Gary Kelly. He's actually in Austin. Gary Kelly. Another local. Huge, huge real estate empire for people who don't know the name yeah gigantic yeah so we we use that concept and we combine the carving out of the classes versus the carving out of the business that carving out that 80% that doesn't make much of a difference and that's how we made time for it and we had we had time

we do work hard we work pretty much all hard. We work pretty much every day of the week. But we do have time for leisure to space out the mind and do things that we also find fun. So two quick notes on that. And then we're going to come back to introducing new products. So I wanted to hit the manufacturing. And then we've taken a slight side road, not a divergence, because it's all convergence. But the two things I wanted to mention are,

number one, that, well, I suppose it's really just one thing, and that is that the less people are thinking to themselves, wait a second, this is the four-hour workweek guy, and these two just said they work all the time. How does he reconcile those two? It's actually really easy, because the title is more of a metaphor, and the case studies within the book even are very, very, very different. And the objective is to maximize your practical output per hour and then if you want to build say a business that covers your expenses and helps you put your kids through school and then you spend the rest of your time exploring other passions that's one path if you

want to build like you guys are doing right now, an eight-figure, nine-figure business, that is another path. But the tools you would use, 80-20, Pareto, et cetera, are all, it's the same toolkit applied to a different project. So products, you started not with one. You started with three. And how did you then go from the initial three to expanding? And was that always the plan? No. Initially, the plan? No. Initially, the plan was solve our own issue.

Then it was getting those products into the market. But what happened is those people kept coming back to us and saying, okay, so cool, I have these products. What else? I'm still getting back pain in this and this other area in my life. Or do you have a solution for this? Or this solves my lower back pain, but what about my getting back pain in this and this other area in my life, or do you have a solution for this? Or this solves my lower back pain, but what about my upper back pain? So start listening to that as much as we could

and start seeing how can we help our customers for longer and with more things. Again, really CS approach, data-driven, started understanding, researching a lot of the keyword. What are the best-selling products in terms of back pain? How can we add value? Created a list of candidate products that we were going to launch and said we're going to launch another 22 into the market. Okay, so you're data-driven.

How did you decide on 22? It was a combination of what we thought we could get out of payment terms from our suppliers versus the profits that we had originally made because we were reinvesting 100% of everything. Got it. So for growth purposes, the max number you could afford to launch based on the assumptions you had, which were grounded in your data you had thus far, was 22. If you launched 30, you were really playing more Russian roulette with potential finances. We were potentially going to run

out of stock. Can I ask a question? Are there any areas of decision making on the products where emotion intervenes? You guys seem like you're naturally very good at applying rules and discipline, but do you ever just say, I just really love this

product, or do you not allow that when you're making the decisions we think we don't allow it i hope we don't we definitely um yeah but emotion is always there um yeah we we try to we try to make it as numerical as possible and as rational but there's always something yeah um there's no perfection but uh but yeah we decided to launch the 22 is also going to be interesting because it was going to force us to do it in a systematic way. We only had a few hours a week from our school, and we would need to develop 22 products.

So everything needed to be formulaic and systematic. So that was when we started laying the groundwork for the systems that we currently have in place for the big launch that we'll talk about after the 120. So yeah, that's how we selected the products and then replicated the same cycle that we'd done for those initial first and three to those 22. What are the other competitors doing? What are they doing wrong? What are they doing right?

What do the people want? And how can we get it all together in a single product? And how can we get it to market as quickly as possible so we set ourselves a deadline of three months from the point we decided to the point that's going to be selling and that includes the sipping three months for 22 products yeah and that includes shipping by sea which is a month uh to europe and and about a month to manufacture so we only had a month to actually get it all ready to order okay so now the two of you guys, clearly very smart. You're very analytical.

And just before I forget, quick pause. If you guys find yourselves getting really fatigued and worn down by the business, you should launch something just for shits and giggles. No, seriously. Seriously, I've done that just to resuscitate my enthusiasm.

For instance, I'm just envisioning in my head, you could have some type of ridiculous rainbow unicorn slippers that you engineer so that every time someone buys one of your products, that's like customers also buy. Just to inject a little bit of fun. Could be worth it. But he... Where was I going with that?

I got off track with the unicorns. Signature series. So you guys are well-educated, smart. You're sort of in your professional sports prime, in a way. You guys have a lot of energetic resources.

And if you have to just live on Red Bull and ramen, you can do that. But that sounds like a task you guys can't do by yourselves and it also sounds like a task that would be very hard to script because i mean god forbid you're scripting the copy i could see some really ridiculous stuff coming out uh don't give ben ideas yeah so do you so do you do you have did you have and do you have help and if so what does that look like okay so we we scaled the team originally i don't know if you guys are familiar with with dartmouth but it's pretty much a little town in the middle of snow yeah so there's really not much room to hire full-time people besides that we were running like we were still in school um so we we

went to a platform like Upwork. There's many of them out there. I started looking for freelancers that would help us execute some of these tasks. And what we actually were surprised to find is the quality and the level of the people in those platforms. They're very, very smart people, very educated. So you mentioned Upwork. Any others that really come to mind for you? For the most part, we use Upwork.

There's freelancer.com, FreeUp. We've mostly stuck with Upwork. With Upwork, yeah. Okay. So we were completely surprised by the quality and the level of specialty of the people on those platforms. And we started hiring remote people that would dedicate one or two hours of their day.

They usually had other clients as well that would do a very specific task. So say copywriting, we would hire a copywriter in each of the languages. Here's our 20 point checklist. Follow this. Or improve it.

Created the SOPs. SOP. Standard Operating Proceded the SOPs. SOP. SOP, Standard Operating Procedures. Fancy word for checklist. And are you communicating with them via email, Slack, something else? Created a Slack for all of us. Everyone's in there. Facilitates a lot of the things.

And that's how we start running those processes and and now much like with the manufacturers on any job board or freelancer community there are going to be some amazing people and they're also going to be some clowns so how do you guys qualify or disqualify people really quickly yeah great question that's our biggest question yeah that's a very big question to which we don't have a full answer, but it's our most pressing question. We took a similar approach to the copywriting initially, so same as those first 30 days. Tried to do as much research as possible, looking at companies who do hiring and, and especially the selection part,

uh, correctly. So we, a really good book is the who interview. Yeah, that is, yeah. Who is a great,

it's a very good process. It's basically a streamlined, shorter version of top grading, which a lot of my startups, which are venture backed, but same, same. I mean,

the best of them still operate with very similar metrics and mentality yeah who who is a very good book another one called work rules which is by laszlo bock um it's on google's inside how they apply how they go about hiring and selecting candidates um and and some other really interesting thoughts my whole library at home i have around 10 books i think um just dedicated to hiring um and and selecting people so it's very important issue so what have you found to be i know you don't have a perfect answer yeah maybe that doesn't exist but what are things that you have implemented that you found helpful for qualifying or disqualifying people quickly? Absolutely. So based on the research we've done, similar processes with the 20 point

copywriting formula. With interviewing, we found a few key principles, which are the main ones are structured interviewing is better. So if you incorporate some structure to your interviewing process, that will give you, on average, better results over the long run. And what structured interviewing means, you have a multi-step process, so that can mean a phone screen and then a cultural interview

where you assess the culture and then a reference call and then maybe a work sample um and who does a good job of that's one example but they provide that structure yes exactly we actually base ourselves off the process in who um so that's a key principle and also having the interview questions predefined, because otherwise what happens is candidates tell their own story and cater it to what you want to hear. And our echo chambers, in a sense, of what you've told them about the position or what they read on the job description. It also makes it very difficult to compare candidate to candidate if you have different interviews.

Exactly. So having those questions predefined and then there are certain questions for the areas you want to assess, which are most likely to yield a better assessment than other questions. Having those predefined and also stating beforehand, this is what a good answer looks like. This is what a bad answer looks like. this is what a bad answer looks like, this is what a mediocre answer looks like, that is very helpful in getting some rigor into the selection process

to avoid just going for people who you like, who you relate with, who have similar backgrounds than you, etc. Secondly, we found that reference calls and heavy referencing, so that means at least probably three to four references and then asking those references to provide another reference. Which is very important because, of course,

job applicants who provide you references are banking on the fact that those references are going to give positive reviews. Yeah. There's ways to frame questions to try to correct for that as well. What would be an example of that? For example, we had a candidate where we were trying to test out

his or her work ethic. Because obviously, if you ask somebody do you work hard, they're always going to say yes regardless of how you ask that question. So the best way is to see how others assess their work ethic. But if they're counting on the reference to give a good reference they won't tell you yeah he has a you know of course he has a good work ethic so the way we've done a couple we obviously won't say all the tricks but one of the tricks is that we we go up to the

reference and say um look say the candidate a like we'll call him Jim. Hey, look, Jim said sometimes he struggles to stay motivated and to work really long nights. What are your thoughts on that? Which Jim has not said. Right. So then based on their reaction, because if somebody is really, really hardworking, they'll say, well, Jim, Jim is never.

Really? That's strange. That's weird. They've always been, you know, they'll react that way, they've they've always been you know they'll react that way whereas if they're actually not yeah jim has been struggling but look it's just because the boss and they'll come up with a reason to kind of save him yeah but then it clearly shows those are a few ways that you can kind of angle the question yeah another one which a friend of mine told me i thought was quite clever which applies which applies in the US. And there are some legal restrictions and guidelines around this kind of thing. Because many people will be terrified to

say anything that might jeopardize the person's hiring for legal reasons. And so one way to get around that is to if you if you ensure that you send people an email, so you don't get them on the phone, you either leave a voicemail or send them an email, which is, I'm interviewing so-and-so for a potential position. I would love to know how much you would recommend them. No need to reply unless it is like an eight or higher, right? And then they have plausible deniability and they can always say, I never got it.

But, and you have to make sure you have a sample size that's significant enough or you know that these people are in contact so that that works uh and you know you don't get a false negative yeah if that makes sense but that would be another approach in terms of quick vetting i'll give one one more up another tactic that was shared with me by a friend who's many, multiple time New York Times bestselling author and runs a number of businesses and hires a lot of contractors. And what he'll do is he'll have some type of, he'll start with a work test, right? He'll start with a test of some type that has a very fast turnaround. It's like 48 hours this needs to be done and they the first step is very often to respond with certain types

of information but at the very end of the work task it will say do not reply via message or email like call this phone number and leave a message with your answer and it's it's it has to be in a larger context that it's easy to miss. And he's testing for attention to detail and doing things on time. That's basically his first hurdle. And it immediately screens out 99% of the people who just do not pay attention. All right. So, how many folks do you have helping you at the moment? So, we use the freelancer approach. By the way, one last thing I want to add to that.

Work samples are the biggest indicator to job success. So if you can make somebody, in a clear way, an easy way to filter people out and say, hey, this is what I need to do, just do a shorter version of whatever they need to do.

Easiest way to clear out through people. But anyway. Really important note there's some really good resources on youtube um i think it's y company combinator y combinator and stanford or y combinator taught a class at stanford and there's some really good lectures there on team building there's one with vinodod Khosla from Khosla Ventures. He's great on hiring. He believes hiring is the one thing to scale.

And there's another lecture with, I think his name is Ben Silberman. Silberman of Pinterest. Of Pinterest and the two Stripe co-founders. Yeah, the Collison brothers. Yeah, and they also talk about hiring, team building, incredible value right there. So I recommend that to anyone who's looking to hire or vet people great it's been of great value yeah that's that's a tremendous series of classes i think they may have made

some of them into podcasts as well so people can check it out i'll put all these in the show notes for everybody uh so you were you were going to say i was saying that um so i was saying yeah so we started hiring freelancers um all from from the college dorm and saying um to work out through those little pieces of the system um compiled everything in an excel sheet and everyone knew what needed to be done and within a month there's 22 products we're live um and And we've kept those people in place. There are about 26 right now. 26 freelancers. Freelancers.

Some of which we only use, say, on an on-demand basis. So we don't have a copywriter sitting along doing copy all day. It's just when we launch a new product, they might come in. But there's about 12 to 14 that are pretty much every day running the day-to-day systems of our company. So that's how we launched the 22 products. They were really successful. As soon as they hit the market,

we started iterating on them. And still to this day, we iterate on them and try to make them better. Have constant talks about how can we improve those 22. And took a step back and said, by then we were already on track to the eight figures, about the 10 million. And we said, look, we've done something right.

We've scaled it up. And we started learning a bit more about how the bigger market and the consumer packaged goods and just packaged goods in general worked. And so Ben and I researched into how CPG companies were doing their development. Again, acknowledging that our key component to success was our ability to use data as the development guidelines, the North Star. And CPG for folks is consumer packaged goods, which can range from protein bars to... Shampoo.

Shampoo to just about anything. Think Procter & Gamble or any of these large brands. Exactly. So we started learning how they were doing a lot of the development. Not any in specific, just in general. But they were doing a lot of the product development. It was usually not very data-driven. They would have focus groups that were not statistically significant.

And there was not real consumer behavior or purchasing intent. And the reason why we discovered they weren't really putting a lot of effort into the development is because they have all the leverage from all the household brands that they use then to push new products into the market and eventually hopefully become a household brand. So they have a lot of leverage into the distributors and the retailers. So there's no incentive there. But the digital era was allowing us to change that. And that's what we've been doing with SupportEback without really knowing it, is going straight to

the customer and saying, look, we can make it better. What can we do better about this product? And how can we make a better product for you? So we said, can we replicate that approach across the bigger industries, such as beauty and skincare and the pet supplies and pet food and baby and even nutrition. So Ben and I said, look, if we want to get to that point, we obviously need to have people that have been there, done that, sort of as professors, come in and tell us how to scale to that point. So that's when we kind of decided to take a big turn in life and put the studies on hold and come here to Austin and build what we call the exec team or the people above us even that will help us scale to that portion.

And one thing that folks might not realize, and I didn't know this until I actually got to Austin, is that some of the best CPG entrepreneurs and investors in the country, maybe in the world, are here in Austin. And a lot of that is thanks to a university known as Whole Foods. Because the alumni and former execs and so on

and serial entrepreneurs who've built, say, consumables companies, right, whether that's like Epic Bar or Deep Eddy Vodka or whatever you might find, tend to stay in the area. And so you have this very dense

network of people who really understand how to build CB the area. And so you have this very dense network of people who really understand how to build, uh, CBG companies, whether that's cold brew coffee or, you know, the shampoo or gluten-free tortillas or fill in the blank. There are many, many examples here. I had no idea before I got here. Uh, are you guys looking to build or buy or both so right meaning yeah are you looking to build all these brands which you guys have have shown you can do are you looking to buy or acquire in some fashion companies or products how are you guys thinking about that so we don't see it as mutually exclusive sure we are very good at ramping a brand up from scratch and we've done that and are doing that many times over now with

the additional products um and then creating a longer term higher growth curve because of our product development process etc. So acquiring right now at an early stage brand or company that would fit our portfolio does not currently justify the premium we would pay for that. However, once these other brands are also up and at the same level as Partyback and growing,

it's definitely within our trajectory to look at other brands we can bring in that fit strategically with our current brand portfolio and then to bring them in, to roll them up, to leverage any complementary products, audiences, etc. So it's definitely a consideration. We've been speaking with other back pain brands already for supporty back um yeah so it's within the trajectory from the early stage

it doesn't justify the price premium and they're also i should say uh there are options C, D, and E, and so on. Not just 100% build or 100% buy. For instance, there are almost infinite number of ways you can structure an acquisition where you might have, not that you necessarily want to get into exchanges of equity, but you could have an equity component where you're giving a piece of the company as

opposed to upfront cash. You could avoid that or in combination with that have a very elaborate earn out clauses where people are, they're getting paid for their brand but only after they've been assimilated and proven that they can transport their skills and or perhaps their customer base and so on to the portfolio products so there are ways to do it where you can mitigate against the upfront cost but it is

fascinating world that we won't get into just yet today but what I want to ask you guys because we're going to wrap up in just a little bit here, is among other things, why? So what I mean by that is a different way to phrase that would be what for. What I mean by that is you're growing, you are going to be hopefully accelerating growth

based on your current enthusiasm for it, which seems very palpable where do you want this to be in three or five years like what are you guys trying to do and uh yeah and i might i might stress test your answer a little bit so we'll see but yeah what do you guys try what do you guys try to do and why is it worth all the time and energy and so on that you're putting into it? So I'll start with the why. I think Ben and I have both really big drive for delivering value. And I know this sounds a bit abstract, but I think the role of an entrepreneur in the world is to find ways to do things better or more efficiently and then try to do that as many times over with the help of other people.

So that's something that's really driving us. So when we find a way to do things better, it's like, how can we do more of it? And it becomes almost like a drug into like, okay, we found a better way to do better products. And we see that direct impact in the people that we're giving them. So the back pain products,

people go back and say, look, it actually helped. And when it becomes to, you know, the few products that we tested in the other industries, like this products, people go back and say, look, it actually helped. And when it comes to the few products that we tested in the other industries, like this product is much better than the one I had. And that fuels a lot of what we do. Now, how does that tie into the company

where we want to go? Is again, all we're doing is replicating that first initial back pain product that we're doing. It's the same concept. How can we deliver a better product, a better packaged good to a customer? And I think that the big companies

have done it a specific way, and that way is changing, and it's gotten better with digital. So we want Benny Tiger Group to become the new, I hate the word conglomerate, but the new group of brands, or a new accelerator for products, a launch platform for new and better products for customers around the world, where we actually give them a voice and that is reflected in the quality

of the parts that they're getting. That's the ultimate vision. How does that look like in terms of size? I have no idea. How does that look like in terms of size? I have no idea. How does that look like in terms of structure? I have no idea. As long as our core focus or the way we lead our actions is how can we do that initial value delivery that we proved with our supportive act back in our college dorms? How can we deliver that same value many, many, many times over?

So we're doing it 120 times. Hopefully, we'll do it more and many times over. So we're doing it 120 times. Hopefully we'll do it more and more times over. But obviously it's not just the one time that you launch it. It's how can we iterate it many, many, many times over. Does that answer a bit? It does. It does. It does.

I'm curious to... I should have had you in separate rooms. It's a bit abstract. And then a lot of the intrinsic motivation for... I speak, I think, both on behalf of Santiago and myself, comes from learning and actually going back to computer science, just solving problems. what seems just i'm using something very non-quantitative right now which is just like my my intuitive feel of you guys is that you get a real high from creating the recipe and seeing if you can replicate yeah yes like did we get it right it's the same feeling you get when you debug a program and it works and you're like boom now I can do the same operation a billion times. Same thing. Yeah, it's exactly that.

And the growth, the personal growth, working on new challenges every day, figuring out solutions to complex problems like hiring, how do we best approach that, what are best practices, how about product development, just constantly learning, finding new problems to solve, even if the problem is on a day-to-day basis, breaking them down, making them small, solving, reverse engineering. Yeah, it's just... And learning from the people that work for us as well.

They're so good at what they do because they've been hyper-focused and hyper-specialized that it's almost like a classroom. A lot of people say, but then you're in pause in school. How does it feel to not continue to learn? It's completely the opposite.

We've continued to learn. It's like having a teacher work with you every day from which you can learn a lot. So that is also a big driving force of why we want to keep going. Who are some of the entrepreneurs or leaders you guys most look up to or think

about modeling or studying? Let's start with you. You got me off base. It depends on what. You can pick the context. If I have to choose one, I obviously choose the Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett because they're...

You can choose as many as you like. There's no limit. It depends for what. There's people that are really good at hiring. There are people that are... Like who? I want names. Vinod Khosla, Ben Silverman,

Paul English, co-founder of Kayak, Brian Goldberg, who's a local here, who runs Skinny popcorn and amplify snack brands um yeah that's just there's paul graham sam altman um sorry for the other people we didn't mention yeah that's okay this isn't an oscars acceptance speech you don't i have a list of around so my personal notes every time I learn something about people and hiring I add it to that

it's a massive list of around I think by now 15 pages all tips on hiring like every note I take every

it's like a personal notebook every time I learn something about hiring how to hire better how to manage people better I add it to my list and I constantly

carry that around and there is 50 plus people, people's advice in there. Yeah, that's, maybe you'll have a book someday. Where does that passion for constant learning come from?

Is that just intrinsic to who you are? Did that come from somewhere external? It's just, I think, intrinsic, constantly wanting to get better and like being a better self tomorrow or going to bed at night knowing I've learned something and I'm a better person in whatever dimension that may be than when I woke up.

Are there any books or resources you guys are going through right now? Or either something you just finished, something you're reading or digesting or thinking about right now, or something you just finished something you're reading or digesting or thinking about right now or something you're about to start reading yeah okay so overall on reading and books a core principle we follow and we've learned our lesson in that we we got distracted by a lot of reading and research it's a great way to procrastinate. Exactly. It's one of those 80 that hides itself. It's a sneaky one.

It's a sneaky one. You feel like you're being productive when in fact you aren't. So taking that into account and limiting the amount of time you spend learning from a book or in a classroom or a course versus executing and actually getting stuff done. That's been a big learning overall.

We take the approach of we try to focus all the books we read, all the courses we take, on anything we can apply within the next 90 days, albeit six months, because we want to read for practicality. So otherwise, you're just gonna have to reread it again later. Anyway, and we do reread a lot of the books. So a mistake, and I'm very ignorant, I'm very young. But something I've seen a lot of people do is they read many, many books and then never revisit them.

So just from a mathematical perspective perspective there's also a distribution in the quality of books and some of the books you've already read are much higher in quality and in potential impact than any book currently on your book list so rereading that and actually honing in on key concepts just normal learning principles like spacing out, repetition can be much more valuable than reading another book. Is there a particular book that you're reading at the moment or about to read? I think it's called High Velocity Hiring, which is how do you hire for scale? Because as we're approaching the next year with nine figures in prediction. That's going to take a whole different organizational structure and with a key constraint being growth in terms of time.

From a personal side, we're reading two of Rolf de Belli's books. One is The Art of Thinking Clearly and The Art of a Good Life. What was the author's name again? Rolf debelli. It's D-O-B-E-L-L-I. He's from Switzerland.

Absolutely great books. They teach psychological concepts. So a lot of biases. How did you guys choose those books? Because we're talking about how much time you can chew up and misspend on books so selection it's kind of like hiring people or vetting people how did you guys end up both reading those books it's referrals is how we source the list so we look for people we've admired that have been successful at that specific thing and we ask them

and we keep a list and then we categorize them depending on what problem it solves so in case of hiring we have like a list of hiring so we're having a hiring issue we go and try to read those um so it's basically mainly we've i don't remember who referred over off the belly um that's okay yeah some of the process yeah but ultimately a note on the reading and the learning is that the ultimate the ultimate teacher is experiences the best way to learn is experimenting and you can sit down and read seven books on hiring but you'll learn way more the time you hire a person and that it ends up being a really bad hire um so you know you can be a victim of like thinking paralysis and sit down and contemplate what are the different options i can different books i can read on hiring. And that's good to have some knowledge ahead of time,

but then ultimately take the leap and do whatever is it that you're trying to do and you'll learn way more from the feedback and reflect on what you did right and wrong as well. It makes me think of something that was imparted to me by a woman named Kathy Sierra, very smart, which was focusing on just-in-time information instead of just-in-case information. Yeah, that's a good way to put it.

Which makes a huge, huge difference. Well, this has been really fun. Lynn, do you have any last questions you'd like to ask before we wrap up with these gents? I do have one question. For the listeners who are not very mathematical, what advice would you give them if they wanted to follow your lead? I would say you have an advantage because you keep it simple.

We've been victims of overcomplicating a lot of things because we find ways to overcomplicate it. So you don't really need math. Try to understand the world from a trend perspective. So all that takes is just read basics on stats. What is a correlation versus just a number and what establishes a correlation. But other than that, if it's too complicated, it's probably not the way. There's very simple ways of doing everything. So you probably have an edge on that.

Yeah, one of my friends, Nick Ganju, is one of the co-founders of ZocDoc, uh, very CS quantitative. Uh, and I want to say, I might be getting this wrong. He's, he's been on the podcast as somebody might be able to correct me here, but I believe you recommended a book called how to measure anything, which is very helpful for taking fuzzy thinking and making it more discreet, just easier to examine. And which doesn't mean I've never taken calculus for God's sake. So I've, I've,

I'm like, you know, I've calculated the what hypotenuse. Oh Jesus. I'm about as, yeah, about as basic as it gets, but you,

you don't need a lot. You just need to really get good at measuring what matters and very few things matter a lot. And, uh, you need to be very good at pausing and checking your assumptions among other things. Uh, so guys, where can people, if you would like them to learn more about you or uh just follow what you guys are up to if if that's even an option uh but for those people like who knows maybe ben silverman who's been in one of my books or one of these people maybe they're listening to the podcast and they're like oh you know maybe i should send a hand wave to these folks is there any is there any way to do

that so it's benny tag benny tago group right b-e-n-i-t-a-g-o benny tago yeah b-e-n-i-T-A-G-O Ben Itago We have bentago.com and we are both on LinkedIn and we pride ourselves on not having any other social media outlet out there We are focused on growing I think that is a fantastic policy Well thank you guys for taking the time

I know that you have lots of exciting things coming up so I wish you well and Elaine thank you for spending time with us as well thank you Tim this was fun and to everybody listening we will have links to everything all the books and so on

resources, upwork the one thing 1688 cash cow pro you forgot cash for ties cash for ties Upwork, the one thing, 1688, Cash Cow Pro, Spooled. You forgot Cash for Ties. Cash for Ties. And don't forget to Cash for Ties. We'll all be available in the show notes

at Tim.blog forward slash podcast. And until next time, thank you for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday

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