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Summary

In this conversation, Caleb Ulffers, the founder and CEO of Haven, shares his journey in building a successful DTC brand. He discusses the challenges of manufacturing a high-quality product and the importance of strategic partnerships and influencer marketing. Caleb also shares his personal wellness routine and the role of fitness in his life. The conversation concludes with a discussion on the struggles faced by some DTC companies and the need for efficient operations and cash flow management. In this conversation, Corey, Colin, Jeremiah, and Caleb discuss various topics related to e-commerce and digital marketing. They explore the opportunity for efficient operations in the retail industry and the impact of VC funding on businesses. They also discuss Thrasio's bankruptcy and the challenges faced by Amazon aggregators. The conversation then shifts to TikTok Shop and its potential impact on e-commerce. Finally, they delve into data trends and insights, including the role of different marketing channels and the importance of click attribution.

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Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Sauna Podcast Idea
03:05 Background and Genesis of Haven
05:39 Strategic Partnerships and Influencer Marketing
07:43 Challenges in Building a High-Quality Product
08:51 Optimizing Wellness and Life Stack
15:09 Fitness and CrossFit
26:33 Discussion on DTC Companies Struggling
31:26 Opportunity for Efficient Operations
35:48 Thrasio's Bankruptcy
40:05 TikTok Shop and E-commerce
45:08 The Future of E-commerce
47:13 Data Trends and Insights

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Transcript:

I've always had my foot in the startup world the startup path was always the way for me and in 2016 classic startup story I was digging through my gym bag couldn't find my headphones classic Nike duffel that we all got in high school we took on like weekend trips and stuff and I was at the gym and emptying it out pulling the plastic piece out of the bottom and finally found him and and it was this really frustrating moment that was the inciting incident that kicked this whole thing off I was like man there has to be something better and we looked around and we're like there's nothing like gym bags haven't changed in 40 years let's do this you don't mind sharing what did your product startup costs end up being roughly so cheap we were bootstrapped as hell have you guys heard about this the Amazon aggregator thio files for bankruptcy after raising billions with a be billions from investors this was kind of wild this made the waves on Twitter for a day or so and basically everyone was trying to have their take on this and yeah what do you guys think about this what if I told you there's a hidden Revenue channel right here in your store research shows 70% of all online shopping carts are abandoned before checkout that's where live recover comes in we help you recover up to 30% of abandoned carts with live agents interacting with your customers through SMS live recover is a tested and proven boost for your sales try it now for only $49 [Music] welcome to the first episode e-commerce live where we're going to be bringing together the best Founders and Friends discussing the latest in D Toc and digitally native brand building both col and myself are recovering D Toc Founders and now working on the software side at live recover excited today we have two very special guests going to turn it over to Colin here yeah absolutely so I'm Colin we have two guests with us today we have Caleb Caleb is the founder and CEO of Haven Haven makes Incredible bags if you guys were wondering for athletes he just concluded a partnership with CrossFit games so that's absolutely crushed Caleb's also super into health and wellness amazing if you need any health advice go to Caleb we also have Jeremiah who is former founder of Colorado glasses and now he's the CEO of no Commerce which basically provides the best post-p purchase surveys you could find anywhere in the world and he has a treasure Trove of data for us that we're going to be going into later today but it's exciting he's just sitting on Amazing data and trends that we're going to dive into yeah awesome so wanted to kick it off and start just with a little bit of background from you Caleb I find always one of the most interesting things and most useful things for the community is hearing the story of how you ended up what's the Genesis of Haven how did you end up starting that what were you doing before yeah I've always had my foot in the startup world I I was Premed in college for a long time that's part of why health and fitness but then I switched over to business and that was right around the time that Gary Vayner was like pushing Facebook for businesses so I'm older than I look and I was like I don't know that kind of makes sense and so I got my feet wet in social media and social media management earlier than basically anyone else in my school and then that led me to this startup event then I managed a startup event where we got people like Gary ve to speak in the Midwest for about four years I was running that and then I started working with startups running growth then started a couple of my own Tech so I've done the opposite of what you guys have done I started in Tech and now I'm in e-commerce and the startup path was always the way for me and in 2016 classic startup story I was digging through my gym bag couldn't find my headphones classic Nike duffel that we all got in high school we took on like weekend trips and stuff and I was at the gym and emptying it out pulling the plastic piece out of the bottom and finally found him and and it was this really frustrating moment that was the inciting incident that kicked this whole thing off I was like man there has to be something better and we looked around and we're like there's nothing like gym bags haven't changed in 40 years let's do this dude I can totally relate to losing things under the plastic it's so ridiculous uh super cool and that you've just been entrepreneurial kind of thread throughout was that in you even earlier in high school before that did you just always have this urge to lead or create or build like what where did that come from do you think yeah to a certain degree I mean I had some like traditional jobs like at restaurants and stuff but then I also had like a mowing business but I wasn't like the kid who like built an Empire as a high schooler or something like I know some people like that and I was like no that wasn't me and somewhat entrepreneurial always like very like leadership focused always like LED groups and got involved at the highest levels I could in anything I was involved in one of the cool things you've done with Haven has been on strategic Partnerships and influencer marketing could you speak to kind of that path what you've learned and what you think's most interesting in that space yeah it all stems with product for us so we didn't just do a better version of what's out there and that leads to a lot of things it's it's all centered around this idea of category creation and doing that in our space and with the product that we have and how much it costs to make and so therefore how much we have to charge for it we end up with this really premium product it's a $300 gym bag and that's quite higher than every other bag out there unless you're talking about like a luxury option and that lends itself to seaing in a way that most products don't smaller products or subscription products you're going to try to send to influencers and sometimes you get some sometimes you don't we kind of have the reverse thing happen to us which is very special and very rare and that is that people come to us asking for our product it had happened with some really cool people early on and then the last year has really taken off where you know our tagline is we an organized bag for high performance in professional athletes and we say that because professional athletes weekly DM us and ask to get their hands on the bag they want the product they literally tell us like I have NFL players making millions of dollars a year and they're like don't talk to my agent like I don't I don't care about all that like I just want your bag and I'll film a video for you and you can have ad rights like they're just like super supportive really interested what we're doing they get it right away when they see it and that's what's we've kind of built the company on the last three years there's a lot of influencer seating with these kind of like special relationships and it all stems back to like it's an interesting product they actually want and it's a high price point so it actually like adds quite a bit of value there did you find it challenging to build that high of a quality of products sounds like that's your first time diving into manufacturing and I think feels like that's the benefit of having a higher ticket item where even a reasonably well-known athlete says still hitting you up to get a hookup I just ordered one I had to think about it though for a couple days I was like man this seems like an awesome bag I definitely need to solve this problem but it's not yeah totally it took us the better part of a year to find a factory that would actually work with us so it was in the early days that was back in like 2019 or so and everyone told us no and it's this really kind of wild part of our story where we had a lot of grit and a lot of resilience because every single person we talked to was just like that's impossible you can't make that we even talked to this um we talked to this back in my hometown in Nebraska and this person had made bags for Nike and rebok and like you know $100,000 or 100,000 unit runs like somehow we had heard about her from someone you know because we were telling everyone like yeah we're working on this bag project we have no idea what we're doing we're trying to figure it out and a few people were like oh have you talked to this person you know she's been involved in in bags and we're like wait in Omaha that's crazy and eventually through person to person to person we get a meeting with this person we're like oh my God she's going to like solve all their problems she's gonna help us figure this out and we sit down and we talk with her and she just obliterates our dreams just shit's all over them she just like you're going to need $50,000 for molds you're going to have mqs minimum order requirements of 10,000 units it's going to cost you hundreds of thousand and she's just like stacking up and at this point we had spent no money we just like we're designing we're asking questions we're figuring it out and she's like you're going to need hundreds of thousands of dollars and we're like cool and so we just kept figuring it out we kept asking people and we finally got a factory to make a sample it took forever and they make it and they're like hey this is really hard to make it's not mass manufacturable there's no way you can make this at scale and so we just kept going this was just like a year of hitting dead ends and then getting a glimpse of Hope and then hitting a dead end and kind of rinse and repeat and then we eventually went to outdoor retailer in largest outdoor show in Colorado and we connected with a couple of Brands there that we had been talking with a really big camera bag company and long story short they introduced us to their Factory we knew their quality because they're making these really high quality camera bags really great brand doing volume and so we're like we bet they can do it and they did it and we've been with them now for four years did you literally go to O to find a manufacturer like go talk to companies and be like hey who is manufacturing for you yeah we did it the opposite way though cuz it was like a last ditch like we have no idea what to do here and one of my good friends was like have you thought about going to Outdoor Retailer I'm like what am I supposed to do like talk to people people like and then we saw there's like four levels to the building that it was in and the bottom level was Factory sourcing and I was like there's factories there and so we're like that's how we're going to find it and we talked to those factories and they weren't very good and just by happen stance we talked to this camera bag company and we were working with them on some other like climate neutral stuff and then at one point they had asked like hey do you need help with anything else and we're like actually we're on the hunt for a factory and they're like we'll introduce you to ours like oh my God would you be able to share the camera B company oh yeah it was Peak design oh I love the peak design guys cool they're great like arguably the most successful Kickstarter company ever they've sold over like $20 million on Kickstarter you can find this out you have to kind of dig for it but they're roughly like an 80 to100 million do a year company like they are massive and they're producing really high quality products and there's some really cool articles about like their business work culture like during the summer they do like 35h hour weeks they've only got like 30 people on the team they obviously really emphasized design and super high quality and the founders started climate neutral which is I I think probably one of the best carbon negative things to be a part of you don't mind sharing what did your product startup costs end up being roughly so cheap we were bootstrapped as hell and we took the principles of Lean Startup to this you know coming from technology I was like step one talk to people does anyone else have this problem step two how do we fix the problem okay it's structure it's organization it's durability it's ventilation it's a spot for your shoes okay why is this so hard why has no one done this we don't know we're confused we're going to keep doing it we ripped up an old Nike bag we duct taped it we put in cardboard cereal box like we ripped up a cardboard cereal box and that made the dividers we put in a grocery sack that was the original shoe garage stuffed that in there I took this monstrosity to the gym for three months to test it and to show it to people and be like hey is we're making this organized bag and they're like what is that piece of trash you're holding I'm like it's our prototype and then by the time we had gotten to the point where we could Mass manufacture or we could run our first sample we're like okay let's pre-sell it like that's the last step of Lean Startup right like will some stranger on the internet give you money for your product and if they will you have a business and if they don't you have nothing which is why we do the Lean Startup process rather than putting all the money in ah head so to get to that point we were maybe like $2 to $500 in of like literally Scrappy as hell it's incredible want to Pivot a bit your life stack and optimizing Wellness what's your protocol what do you do in terms of you're a fit guy you're in Fitness there's a lot of things I've always been in kind of health and fitness and like eaten pretty healthy and been somewhat involved in some type of working out and over the last I would say like five years have gotten a lot more serious and it's in this idea of creating capacity in my life to be able to take on more like as a founder of a company the stress levels really get to unmanageable places and I was like okay so I can either be destroyed by this and like kind of end the company and like end this journey and like go just get a job and be like hey that was too much or I can figure out a way to like grow and absorb and not just like survive but actually Thrive and so I just started listening to what people were saying around me and this is kind of generally how I take on everything in life is you know what does the expert say can I test that and then once I get into it how do I tweak it so it works really well for me and a lot of the basics that Andrew huberman talks about work really well but I have like all the protocols like I have a morning routine I have an evening routine I am really consistent on my sleep I shut my work off at a very specific time there's always more work as a founder and I've had some bits where I've been really deep in it and like working the super late nights but then you work a super late night and then you're just trash the next morning so like was it really worth the trade-off like generally no and sometimes you're trash for like two days because you're like well I worked till 1:00 a.m. I was grinding out and then you're just like well the next two days were actually like an offset to that or if you did keep grinding like we all know the science behind like you know you really only have like 4ish hours of like deep solid work in you per day and that was like from some of the smartest best people in history if you read Cal newport's a deep work and so you kind of like start putting these things together and you just start thinking logically about it and you're like okay cool like staying up late to work on this is actually pretty stupid and so the computer gets shut off at 8: the red light goes on at 9:00 we read and then fall asleep at 10: and then up at like 6: to 7 Morning Routine manifestation meditation all of the morning stuff either walking or if I currently I'm doing two a days so I'm like running in the mornings and then a healthy breakfast and some coffee and some new tropics and part of this is also I've ADHD and I was on Aderall for two years and I eventually kind of got tired of that cuz it basically made me feel like a piece of wood I had like no emotion and no feeling and I was like hey I'm really effective I can Crush an 8 hour day but like I am dead inside I was like I'm tired of that and so it's been like a three-year journey of being off of that and finding out what works for me to help get my brain on track and it's all of these other things that are related to healthy lifestyle Health and Fitness and Wellness and structure and finding the freedom in that to be able to still be really effective and really focused I believe there's a lot more that as humans we can tap into and I'm currently on this Bend of talking to people Cheryl sanberg came out with this really famous thing like Health Family Fitness business friends like choose three or whatever and I'm I'm I'm like on this thing where I'm calling on it because I've been able to choose all five and I know a lot of other people in my circles who've been able to choose all five and it's just a matter of being disciplined and creating capacity and stacking those things like you can't just cold turkey do all of those things like I couldn't two years ago step into where I'm at now but over the last two years I've added this on this on I've added this on and it's all been net positive net benefit things and I think that's possible for everyone that's interesting I love hearing like what you're doing because I think it's super interesting I am a dad of a one-year-old and a three-year-old and just a startup founder as a so like 2020 pandemic hits when my wife's three months pregnant with our first child and then we started business later and so like the last four years have been crazy and so I just signed up for a half marathon in two months because I'm like I got to get f it so that's my my thing so anyway I love hearing what you're what you're working on I did buy into the Cheryl Sandberg pick three but I think part of that's maybe season of Life oriented like at this stage of like small kids it's like literally like mornings are just like get the kids out the door then it's like get the work done then it's like get the kids fed to bed and then it's N9 o'clock or like 8:30 at night right at that point I don't know I'm curious what your take is on that because I I know you said you've got some people that are doing all five well so I'm curious is that like do you think that that's always applicable or do you think that maybe there's certain seasons of life where you do have to pull back a little bit based on like what you've seen from your experience I love the word you just used I'm the biggest fan of it and that's seasons and a season could be a couple weeks or a month a season could be a couple years and not having children myself like I'm definitely I'm definitely not going to like anyone who has kids can definitely do this like I don't know all my older siblings have like three to five kids and I see them like living their lives and whatnot but I have seen some people and this is what kind of gives help with kids and they're also fit and they're also running a business and they also have a friend life and so I don't exactly know how to do that with kids but I see some people doing it and it's probably still a little bit more paired back than let's say what I'm doing in my life because exactly what you're saying you know that you've got so many things to do with your kids and managing that but I think there's a way to kind of like still build some capacity and not use it as an excuse like you're looking at a marathon now and I think a lot of people can use like kids or or anything you know work as an excuse to not add anything and just let it completely take over your life yeah yeah for sure and I like what you said about you don't just start with doing everything you start with like build all those pieces in so anyway it's cool to hear your journey of over the last few years I also have ADHD so I tried the Aderall thing for 60 days I was like I can't do this so it's cool to hear that I I appreciate all right we're gonna pivot to some news Colin can you pop up our headlines we going to go over little intro for Haven right here beautiful little intro for no look at that okay sweet so we can start right here so first one is why directed consumer darling such as Casper alurn and pelaton are now struggling we got some serious companies declaring bankruptcy including the wick wine subscription Box Company what do you guys think about this like is this the path that a lot of companies are taking is this just weeding out the herd so to speak or is this kind of a macro thing that's interesting somebody was posting on Twitter the other day talking about Yeti and like what Yeti been doing and how like they're absolutely crushing buying back stock and all this kind of stuff so my inclination would be that like it's not necessarily that all of DC I mean but Yeti also didn't really start DC so there's there's like a lot more Nuance there for sure I wouldn't think that like everybody is going towards bankruptcy in this space but I do think that like depending on the one downside to starting a business with a lot of financial backing is that sometimes you don't build efficiencies early on like Caleb your story is a great example of like when you're hustling for and and you're like trying to make every dollar count and you're bringing in the revenue before you've actually got the product and all that like that just builds a different muscle and it does seem like a lot of the companies that are going out of business were heavily funded companies from the outside on some level it feels like these businesses are just really easily to run poorly and lose a lot of money while not growing or having great margins and I don't know if that's different from other businesses where you can be kind of a less efficient operator and still pull off good profits but it feels like in D to see kind of have to be a mastermind to not just take on these massive losses and actually scale like Caleb did you end up taking any outside capital I know we met through an investor where you were considering it so kind of interesting to hear where that lad you're where your head's at there yeah we haven't taken any institutional we have a we did a small like friends and family round and we've mostly just worked with debt and that's worked really well for us and it's also like very limited and you're not quite as splashy with it and I that you know if you dump a bunch of cash in yeah you've got an opportunity to grow fast and like get into the market and like run but then if you're just kind of pushing off profitability because you've got that stack of cash or you know you're going to just raise another round like I think we all have kind of come around to understand that DTC is not Tech you can't just raise five rounds get to a Series F and be like now we're going to be profitable I think warie Parker is still posting like $80 million losses and I like them but like it's just not sustainable Cory I think what you said about like the you do have to be really good you have to be a really good operator like the nine operators podcast I love listening to those guys because I I listen to them I'm like wow the stuff that they're talking about is applicable to every single business like every business needs to be thinking about things at that level like when I had my own d2c Brands I just got into this weird cash cycle that ultimately killed it where it was you know buying inventory selling and you're just like using debt to like get the inventory and then the next thing you know like everything seems like it's going well and if you're not on top of the numbers you go from like oh this works to we just hit a slow season we can't pay the debts anymore and now it's over that's what happened to me anyway because I didn't know how to manage the the cash flow the right way yeah I see this as a huge opportunity for anyone who does operate efficiently when you look at the VC Market it was a exceptionally high amount of VC dollars over the past 20 years went into retail it was like 30 40% over 50 60 billion of capital on that just as competition in the ad Market you know for talent all these other things that made it really easy to inefficiently run one of these things I feel like this will open up more opportunity for Brands like Caleb and our friends over at Ridge and other businesses that know how to run a tight ship yeah I think that's the goal is I mean we're kind of always looking at Deb options and like you know what as we grow like what becomes available to us and we're not closed off to even the equity conversations but a lot of them were also like just very repetitive and just kind of seemed like there was an amoeba of people moving around saying like oh it's got to be subscription it's got to be cpg and I was like hi have you heard of the 14 other billion dollar luggage companies that aren't subscription or cpg and they're they're doing great and now like as we for like us like you know as we've kind of like tipped over a couple of different numbers and I think if you're looking at debt or investment like looking at it as like fuel on the fire like we're going to do this regardless we'll be profitable by the summer we just got net 90 payment terms like we've got some really great things set up and if were to put cash on it now it just allows us to move a little bit quicker but with the same goal in mind of being profitable being strict about how we're growing all that Y what type of debt did you do like inventory financing or receivables every single type of debt available to us yeah both yeah Shopify Capital sellers financing I've had a conversation with every other person out there we have small SBA loan we have a small loan from like an angel group not an investment just a a loan that they do and now we're talking to a couple of like private Equity larger groups that are interested in larger forms of debt and so they might there might be an option to kind of like refy some of that and then add on some growth Capital as well yeah and that's another thing too is like you know we all know like you know you listen to some smart people break down how Shopify capital and like rev based financing is absolute but also if you're a founder and you're like looking at what you're doing and you're like well I need money and so I could shut the company down or I could take this really crappy loan like I guess I'm going to take the crappy loan like Shopify Capital like you know might be bad but like I've taken it five times and they've given us nearly a million dollars that we've paid back and like it's been incredible it's the reason that we're here well sweet guys let's move on to the next one have you guys heard about this the Amazon aggregator thio is that did I say that right thio y files for bankruptcy after raising billions with a B billions from investors this was kind of wild this made the waves on Twitter for a day or so and basically everyone was trying to have their take on this and yeah what do you guys think about this I love this was someone posted this financial if you look at their revenue so in 2019 for I guess the UK business I don't know if this is overall but only 65 million of Revenue and they're showing iaah from amortization of intangibles but if you look at their income from operations negative 5 million on that 65 mil rev so I guess yeah pretty pretty rough but I don't know too much about this business I don't know if you guys I did read the scammed earli the tech article on it it was interesting because it it sounds like they're kind of writing the ship so to speak so I don't fully understand how all of it works but it sounds like they're you know doing the bankruptcy thing and then they've got they'll have some cash in the bank and they think they can kind of like get it straightened out so I don't think they're like gone gone but it is interesting to see something that looks so promising a couple years ago billions raised like 10 billion doll valuation I think the last I think what I saw I may be misquoting this but the last valuation put it at like a couple hundred million that's got to be tough at this stage of my life nobody would ever give me 3 billion so I don't want to like trash the people who who built this because obviously like they did something incredible just getting to that point but it's got to be really hard being on the inside of that having to like kind of get get all that right and move forward so yeah hopefully for them they're able to do it it's interesting I think it's kind of like you know those movies that occasionally come out that have like 12 tier one actors in them and you're like whoa look at that lineup and then you watch it you're like that movie was mid and I feel like at this point we kind of know like if a company raises billions of dollars and gets every celebrity and top level business person in like what was that stupid video thing like quirp or quip or whatever and like they raised billions from all the like Yeah from all the like Time Warner people and then it like it lasted like a week and everyone was like this sucks I feel like we should kind of like see see this now like here's there's a pattern so this is Aaron over at bre so they just launched on Tik Tock shop and then I think within a couple days I think the first week they did about $28,000 I guess both of you guys could talk to this like how have you seen Tik Tock shop oh look this we got it right there sponsored how have you guys been seeing kind of Tik Tok shop play out I mean Jeremiah you probably have a ton of insights into this with how how brands are doing it and then Caleb are you considering it like pretty seriously with you guys or for a scale that matter yeah so from our side last year the question how did you first hear about us was answered 16 million times on our platform so we got like Trend analysis over time what's interesting is we saw Tik Tok in October we're just looking at website conversions right so basically if somebody purchases on Tik Tok shop they're getting pulled out of that so they're they're no longer in that equation and so starting in October we saw a a big drop that kind of flattened actually like October it dropped and then it slowly fell down a little bit more November December no other channels had any drops like that throughout the year and that lined up with a launch of Tik Tok shops so I think what we're seeing and that was about a 20% drop give or take a little bit so I think that that's pretty indicative of shops like immedi medely grabbing a lot of impact I'm really curious to see how that plays out over this year so we'll we'll be tracking those Trends we haven't followed up with Tik Tok specifically on that to be like does this line up with what you all are seeing and then the other thing we saw there is that we also asked how long did you know about us before placing your first purchase some of that earlier purchase Behavior like less than a day less than a week people who are who just like today or this week found out about the brand that number was shifting longer on Tik Tok in the back quarter of the year as well which tells me that like Tik Tok shops really is doing a good job of introducing and getting somebody to convert immediately is my take on it so could be wrong there's a lot of a lot of missing data we don't see there but I do think that that's what's happening so I think overall it's going to be a huge positive for brand you guys touching it Caleb we are not touching it yet what we've seen so far with Tik Tok and Tik Tok shop is it does work a lot better for shorter consideration period products I.E cheaper products so a $300 gym bag I mean even like you said like you've been kind of mulling it over a few days before you pull the trigger like it's just not typically it doesn't typically work super well on Tik Tok or Tik Tok shops and we've been pretty hyperfocused on like being the one channel that works really well for us which is Facebook ads we have great return on those and so that's kind of where we're at I'm curious to see I'm like stoked when anyone sees some success anywhere like you know cheer my friends on I think Isaac actually from mini Katana has a great take on Tik Tok shops which is like it's cuz like most of the products on there are just like Teemu knockoffs so it's I'm stoked to see that Aaron and anyone else can like get some traction on there but as a whole of a product they need to fix this very quickly because all of the everything else on there is really just garbage and I would imagine they are I think I saw somebody post recently they're hiring like 500 positions for shops something like that it was like a crazy number so yeah wow well moving on to the near and dear Shawn Frank 2024 best year ever for Ecom ever US Census Data shows eccom peaked at 16.1% of all retail do you guys think it's only up from here I think it'll be slow just like it kind of was pre-co right it's like slow continue I'm on board with anything that's positive right like someone's going to be like it's going to be the best year I'm like hell yeah it is brother let's go well that's that's the thing when ecom's at 16% penetration even if the macroeconomy is going down as long as e-commerce is taking a bigger share of the wallet if you're playing in that digital space you can capture that and when you're a small smaller or upand cominging brand and there's only opportunity for you right like those things don't affect you you're just growing audience until You' peaked audience like a Nike but yeah China is at like 45 40 to 60% e-commerce penetration so seriously so much opportunity yeah let's move on oh yeah there you go there's the chart 46% there you go w we can share this in confirming not Cory just confirming the stats he's pulling from right there honestly the number that's most interesting to me here from a US standpoint is UK because I think like the reality is like culturally the US is very different from South Korea the US is very different from China but like UK and us are much more similar culturally I do think UK is obviously a smaller country so it's probably easier to move Goods around lot the same day delivery yeah that so like that probably helps a lot but I do think like tracking what what the UK is doing over time is probably a good indicator of what's possible in the US over time well that's it for us Jeremiah do you want to go into the data I'm curious about the data you're seeing the trends you're seeing yeah I want to see some some juicy tasty trends that we can we can give to the people all right sounds good so Caleb I'm actually gonna touch on something here that I I'm I want to get your take specifically on this because you were talking about like hiot and Tik Tok and stuff I'm gonna cover just real quick like what we saw last year for survey responses and Discovery Trends so we in our platform we have five questions that there's more than that but five specifically that we're looking at all the time that are what we call Benchmark questions so how did you first hear about us what brought you to our site today if they said they came from an ad asking them where the ad was that they saw and then who how long did you know about us before placing your first purchase and who is this purchase for those five questions so specifically looking at how did you first hear about us this data set that I'm going to show here is a subset of people that answered both that question and the question of how long they knew about the brand so that's like 9 million respondents but still a good data set over the 12 months what I thought was really interesting is if you kind of think about the theme of 2023 a lot of it was about profitable growth right and so looking at word of mouth and other that those two channels saw a pretty strong consistent Trend over the course of the year now word of mouth is always up in November and December and the reason for that is gifting right so people are buying gifts around the holiday season so you can see here this blue line Word of Mouth 19% of purchases in November and 21 and a half% in December said that they came from word of mouth and that's B basically like you know my my mom is like hey Jeremiah what do you want for Christmas and I tell her and she goes and buys it right so I thought that was an interesting Trend as you can see just like throughout the year there's a little bit of an upward Trend and then a strong upward Trend at the end and these other channels were really trending up strongly and what other usually is is like smaller sort of opportunities that we're maybe not picking up in our our larger data set so a lot of times that is some word amount things that are just described differently we're actually going to be like kind of restructuring and cleaning this data more over time so I think think we'll hopefully have a little bit better view but regardless we would kind of consider this like organic non-paid and we saw a pretty strong upward Trend throughout the year in that like organic sort of growth which I think lines up with Brands trying to be more profitable in in 2023 looking at paid channels specifically there was a little bit of a downward Trend it's harder to see that overall in this chart so this is basically filtering out the those two organic buckets and then showing the percentage of total you can see Facebook led the way so this is people saying that they discovered a brand on Facebook Instagram was second and so you can see Instagram has like a little bit of a slight downward Trend this is Google really trended up throughout the year so especially Q4 this is kind of common too again gifting somebody says Hey I want this thing you go you search for it and you buy it so that makes sense but then we also saw like TV and YouTube have a pretty strong upward tick at the end of the year too and I think that if you look at the data which I don't show here but a lot of times those channels take a longer time to to convert but regardless basically the overall trend is throughout the year Facebook which has a pretty good like click to conversion tracking path trended up Google which has a good clicked conversion tracking path trended up and everything else trended down just slightly here's what that drop off by the way that I was talking about Tik Tok so you can see Tik Tok was up here around 10% and then just dropped down to about eight and it just slowly dropped down a little bit more in Q4 and shops launched right here so timing wise I believe that's probably because of launch of shops but anyway we'll we'll keep doing more research on that this year if you plot this against eyeballs where people are actually YouTube is the big opportunity for Brands because yes that is where people spend the that that's like the growing Caleb you guys doing anything on I guess you guys work with influencers so there's some natural distribution there yeah we're not deep in it yet but it's definitely high priority for this year to be pushing out our own content and working with more you YouTubers as well cool yeah and I think I'm going to show you something on YouTube specifically here in a moment because I I think that's spot on Corey so what I want to highlight here that I think is really interesting is so we we looked at the first click Source associated with these survey responses so in this context so these bars are the survey responses so black is people who answered Tik Tok red is people who answered Instagram yellow people who answered Facebook green people who answered Google and then these are the click sources so like Facebook click Source 35% of people who answered Facebook had a first click associated with Facebook in terms of like the Click data we have this unknown Bucket over here means that we just don't have a click so it's missing click data come through as direct and this is to be clearly too this is Shopify data so it's missing some data compared to other sources but directionally it's always been really accurate so it's interesting to see this so you see basically like about a third of all of these don't have a click but among the ones that have a click Facebook 35% of respondents have a Facebook click Google 38% 39% basically of Google respondents have a Google click but then you look at Tik Tok of people who answered Tik Tok only 10% have a Tik Tok click of people who answered Instagram only 11% have an Instagram click this one is interesting though so the other bucket here is actually really high on Instagram we need to dive into the a little bit more but my theory is that this actually is coming through into platforms like triple whale northbeam I think it's the the UTM tagging messed up our tracking here a little bit so likely we're actually seeing you know probably a little bit higher percentage that is actually coming through to the visualization that brands are actually seeing in Instagram but the point here is that the channels that we're trending down throughout the year YouTube Tik Tok often times are the ones that are least likely to have a click associated with the Sur response so real quick looking at this YouTube Tik Tok and TV specifically you can see people who answered YouTube 8% had a YouTube click 30% had a Google search click so and then in Tik Tok again that 10% 34% had a Google search TV obviously we don't have a TV click that just doesn't exist but it's interesting to see 27% from Google search this one actually crushes other search engines so I think this is probably indicative of just the older demographic looking at you know they're probably using Bing and some of those other tools so just to kind of recap here though I think it leads to less confidence and spending in those places because you don't see that click data come through it's not showing up in your MTA data it's not showing up in Google analytics it's not showing up in those kinds of places so while there may be some impact happening there that's actually not getting measured there it can lead to like a little bit less confidence in whether that platform's actually working so I'm curious if that's if that resonates with you or not we are a sub $10 million brand and like I said I like to take advice of the people who've done it and who have been there and who are smarter than me so like Sean Frank and The Operators are like stop using triple whale no offense stop using North beam no offense and go in platform and look at myrr and so that's what we do we run on myr and we look at in platform and we know it's not perfect but I know I typically make3 to five dollar for every dollar I put into the system and when product is in stock that jumps to like five to 10 awesome I know we're up on time and really appreciate your guys time know you're super busy thank you for joining first episode hope to have you guys back at some point I've always had my foot in the startup world the startup path was always the way for me and in 2016 classic startup story I was digging through my gym bag couldn't find my headphones classic Nike duffel that we all got in high school we took on like weekend trips and stuff and I was at the gym and emptying it out pulling the plastic piece out of the bottom and finally found him and and it was this really frustrating moment that was the inciting incident that kicked this whole thing off I was like man there has to be something better and we looked around and we're like there's nothing like gym bags haven't changed in 40 years let's do this you don't mind sharing what did your product startup costs end up being roughly so cheap we were bootstrapped as hell have you guys heard about this the Amazon aggregator thio files for bankruptcy after raising billions with a be billions from investors this was kind of wild this made the waves on Twitter for a day or so and basically everyone was trying to have their take on this and yeah what do you guys think about this what if I told you there's a hidden Revenue channel right here in your store research shows 70% of all online shopping carts are abandoned before checkout that's where live recover comes in we help you recover up to 30% of abandoned carts with live agents interacting with your customers through SMS live recover is a tested and proven boost for your sales try it now for only $49 [Music] welcome to the first episode e-commerce live where we're going to be bringing together the best Founders and Friends discussing the latest in D Toc and digitally native brand building both col and myself are recovering D Toc Founders and now working on the software side at live recover excited today we have two very special guests going to turn it over to Colin here yeah absolutely so I'm Colin we have two guests with us today we have Caleb Caleb is the founder and CEO of Haven Haven makes Incredible bags if you guys were wondering for athletes he just concluded a partnership with CrossFit games so that's absolutely crushed Caleb's also super into health and wellness amazing if you need any health advice go to Caleb we also have Jeremiah who is former founder of Colorado glasses and now he's the CEO of no Commerce which basically provides the best post-p purchase surveys you could find anywhere in the world and he has a treasure Trove of data for us that we're going to be going into later today but it's exciting he's just sitting on Amazing data and trends that we're going to dive into yeah awesome so wanted to kick it off and start just with a little bit of background from you Caleb I find always one of the most interesting things and most useful things for the community is hearing the story of how you ended up what's the Genesis of Haven how did you end up starting that what were you doing before yeah I've always had my foot in the startup world I I was Premed in college for a long time that's part of why health and fitness but then I switched over to business and that was right around the time that Gary Vayner was like pushing Facebook for businesses so I'm older than I look and I was like I don't know that kind of makes sense and so I got my feet wet in social media and social media management earlier than basically anyone else in my school and then that led me to this startup event then I managed a startup event where we got people like Gary ve to speak in the Midwest for about four years I was running that and then I started working with startups running growth then started a couple of my own Tech so I've done the opposite of what you guys have done I started in Tech and now I'm in e-commerce and the startup path was always the way for me and in 2016 classic startup story I was digging through my gym bag couldn't find my headphones classic Nike duffel that we all got in high school we took on like weekend trips and stuff and I was at the gym and emptying it out pulling the plastic piece out of the bottom and finally found him and and it was this really frustrating moment that was the inciting incident that kicked this whole thing off I was like man there has to be something better and we looked around and we're like there's nothing like gym bags haven't changed in 40 years let's do this dude I can totally relate to losing things under the plastic it's so ridiculous uh super cool and that you've just been entrepreneurial kind of thread throughout was that in you even earlier in high school before that did you just always have this urge to lead or create or build like what where did that come from do you think yeah to a certain degree I mean I had some like traditional jobs like at restaurants and stuff but then I also had like a mowing business but I wasn't like the kid who like built an Empire as a high schooler or something like I know some people like that and I was like no that wasn't me and somewhat entrepreneurial always like very like leadership focused always like LED groups and got involved at the highest levels I could in anything I was involved in one of the cool things you've done with Haven has been on strategic Partnerships and influencer marketing could you speak to kind of that path what you've learned and what you think's most interesting in that space yeah it all stems with product for us so we didn't just do a better version of what's out there and that leads to a lot of things it's it's all centered around this idea of category creation and doing that in our space and with the product that we have and how much it costs to make and so therefore how much we have to charge for it we end up with this really premium product it's a $300 gym bag and that's quite higher than every other bag out there unless you're talking about like a luxury option and that lends itself to seaing in a way that most products don't smaller products or subscription products you're going to try to send to influencers and sometimes you get some sometimes you don't we kind of have the reverse thing happen to us which is very special and very rare and that is that people come to us asking for our product it had happened with some really cool people early on and then the last year has really taken off where you know our tagline is we an organized bag for high performance in professional athletes and we say that because professional athletes weekly DM us and ask to get their hands on the bag they want the product they literally tell us like I have NFL players making millions of dollars a year and they're like don't talk to my agent like I don't I don't care about all that like I just want your bag and I'll film a video for you and you can have ad rights like they're just like super supportive really interested what we're doing they get it right away when they see it and that's what's we've kind of built the company on the last three years there's a lot of influencer seating with these kind of like special relationships and it all stems back to like it's an interesting product they actually want and it's a high price point so it actually like adds quite a bit of value there did you find it challenging to build that high of a quality of products sounds like that's your first time diving into manufacturing and I think feels like that's the benefit of having a higher ticket item where even a reasonably well-known athlete says still hitting you up to get a hookup I just ordered one I had to think about it though for a couple days I was like man this seems like an awesome bag I definitely need to solve this problem but it's not yeah totally it took us the better part of a year to find a factory that would actually work with us so it was in the early days that was back in like 2019 or so and everyone told us no and it's this really kind of wild part of our story where we had a lot of grit and a lot of resilience because every single person we talked to was just like that's impossible you can't make that we even talked to this um we talked to this back in my hometown in Nebraska and this person had made bags for Nike and rebok and like you know $100,000 or 100,000 unit runs like somehow we had heard about her from someone you know because we were telling everyone like yeah we're working on this bag project we have no idea what we're doing we're trying to figure it out and a few people were like oh have you talked to this person you know she's been involved in in bags and we're like wait in Omaha that's crazy and eventually through person to person to person we get a meeting with this person we're like oh my God she's going to like solve all their problems she's gonna help us figure this out and we sit down and we talk with her and she just obliterates our dreams just shit's all over them she just like you're going to need $50,000 for molds you're going to have mqs minimum order requirements of 10,000 units it's going to cost you hundreds of thousand and she's just like stacking up and at this point we had spent no money we just like we're designing we're asking questions we're figuring it out and she's like you're going to need hundreds of thousands of dollars and we're like cool and so we just kept figuring it out we kept asking people and we finally got a factory to make a sample it took forever and they make it and they're like hey this is really hard to make it's not mass manufacturable there's no way you can make this at scale and so we just kept going this was just like a year of hitting dead ends and then getting a glimpse of Hope and then hitting a dead end and kind of rinse and repeat and then we eventually went to outdoor retailer in largest outdoor show in Colorado and we connected with a couple of Brands there that we had been talking with a really big camera bag company and long story short they introduced us to their Factory we knew their quality because they're making these really high quality camera bags really great brand doing volume and so we're like we bet they can do it and they did it and we've been with them now for four years did you literally go to O to find a manufacturer like go talk to companies and be like hey who is manufacturing for you yeah we did it the opposite way though cuz it was like a last ditch like we have no idea what to do here and one of my good friends was like have you thought about going to Outdoor Retailer I'm like what am I supposed to do like talk to people people like and then we saw there's like four levels to the building that it was in and the bottom level was Factory sourcing and I was like there's factories there and so we're like that's how we're going to find it and we talked to those factories and they weren't very good and just by happen stance we talked to this camera bag company and we were working with them on some other like climate neutral stuff and then at one point they had asked like hey do you need help with anything else and we're like actually we're on the hunt for a factory and they're like we'll introduce you to ours like oh my God would you be able to share the camera B company oh yeah it was Peak design oh I love the peak design guys cool they're great like arguably the most successful Kickstarter company ever they've sold over like $20 million on Kickstarter you can find this out you have to kind of dig for it but they're roughly like an 80 to100 million do a year company like they are massive and they're producing really high quality products and there's some really cool articles about like their business work culture like during the summer they do like 35h hour weeks they've only got like 30 people on the team they obviously really emphasized design and super high quality and the founders started climate neutral which is I I think probably one of the best carbon negative things to be a part of you don't mind sharing what did your product startup costs end up being roughly so cheap we were bootstrapped as hell and we took the principles of Lean Startup to this you know coming from technology I was like step one talk to people does anyone else have this problem step two how do we fix the problem okay it's structure it's organization it's durability it's ventilation it's a spot for your shoes okay why is this so hard why has no one done this we don't know we're confused we're going to keep doing it we ripped up an old Nike bag we duct taped it we put in cardboard cereal box like we ripped up a cardboard cereal box and that made the dividers we put in a grocery sack that was the original shoe garage stuffed that in there I took this monstrosity to the gym for three months to test it and to show it to people and be like hey is we're making this organized bag and they're like what is that piece of trash you're holding I'm like it's our prototype and then by the time we had gotten to the point where we could Mass manufacture or we could run our first sample we're like okay let's pre-sell it like that's the last step of Lean Startup right like will some stranger on the internet give you money for your product and if they will you have a business and if they don't you have nothing which is why we do the Lean Startup process rather than putting all the money in ah head so to get to that point we were maybe like $2 to $500 in of like literally Scrappy as hell it's incredible want to Pivot a bit your life stack and optimizing Wellness what's your protocol what do you do in terms of you're a fit guy you're in Fitness there's a lot of things I've always been in kind of health and fitness and like eaten pretty healthy and been somewhat involved in some type of working out and over the last I would say like five years have gotten a lot more serious and it's in this idea of creating capacity in my life to be able to take on more like as a founder of a company the stress levels really get to unmanageable places and I was like okay so I can either be destroyed by this and like kind of end the company and like end this journey and like go just get a job and be like hey that was too much or I can figure out a way to like grow and absorb and not just like survive but actually Thrive and so I just started listening to what people were saying around me and this is kind of generally how I take on everything in life is you know what does the expert say can I test that and then once I get into it how do I tweak it so it works really well for me and a lot of the basics that Andrew huberman talks about work really well but I have like all the protocols like I have a morning routine I have an evening routine I am really consistent on my sleep I shut my work off at a very specific time there's always more work as a founder and I've had some bits where I've been really deep in it and like working the super late nights but then you work a super late night and then you're just trash the next morning so like was it really worth the trade-off like generally no and sometimes you're trash for like two days because you're like well I worked till 1:00 a.m. I was grinding out and then you're just like well the next two days were actually like an offset to that or if you did keep grinding like we all know the science behind like you know you really only have like 4ish hours of like deep solid work in you per day and that was like from some of the smartest best people in history if you read Cal newport's a deep work and so you kind of like start putting these things together and you just start thinking logically about it and you're like okay cool like staying up late to work on this is actually pretty stupid and so the computer gets shut off at 8: the red light goes on at 9:00 we read and then fall asleep at 10: and then up at like 6: to 7 Morning Routine manifestation meditation all of the morning stuff either walking or if I currently I'm doing two a days so I'm like running in the mornings and then a healthy breakfast and some coffee and some new tropics and part of this is also I've ADHD and I was on Aderall for two years and I eventually kind of got tired of that cuz it basically made me feel like a piece of wood I had like no emotion and no feeling and I was like hey I'm really effective I can Crush an 8 hour day but like I am dead inside I was like I'm tired of that and so it's been like a three-year journey of being off of that and finding out what works for me to help get my brain on track and it's all of these other things that are related to healthy lifestyle Health and Fitness and Wellness and structure and finding the freedom in that to be able to still be really effective and really focused I believe there's a lot more that as humans we can tap into and I'm currently on this Bend of talking to people Cheryl sanberg came out with this really famous thing like Health Family Fitness business friends like choose three or whatever and I'm I'm I'm like on this thing where I'm calling on it because I've been able to choose all five and I know a lot of other people in my circles who've been able to choose all five and it's just a matter of being disciplined and creating capacity and stacking those things like you can't just cold turkey do all of those things like I couldn't two years ago step into where I'm at now but over the last two years I've added this on this on I've added this on and it's all been net positive net benefit things and I think that's possible for everyone that's interesting I love hearing like what you're doing because I think it's super interesting I am a dad of a one-year-old and a three-year-old and just a startup founder as a so like 2020 pandemic hits when my wife's three months pregnant with our first child and then we started business later and so like the last four years have been crazy and so I just signed up for a half marathon in two months because I'm like I got to get f it so that's my my thing so anyway I love hearing what you're what you're working on I did buy into the Cheryl Sandberg pick three but I think part of that's maybe season of Life oriented like at this stage of like small kids it's like literally like mornings are just like get the kids out the door then it's like get the work done then it's like get the kids fed to bed and then it's N9 o'clock or like 8:30 at night right at that point I don't know I'm curious what your take is on that because I I know you said you've got some people that are doing all five well so I'm curious is that like do you think that that's always applicable or do you think that maybe there's certain seasons of life where you do have to pull back a little bit based on like what you've seen from your experience I love the word you just used I'm the biggest fan of it and that's seasons and a season could be a couple weeks or a month a season could be a couple years and not having children myself like I'm definitely I'm definitely not going to like anyone who has kids can definitely do this like I don't know all my older siblings have like three to five kids and I see them like living their lives and whatnot but I have seen some people and this is what kind of gives help with kids and they're also fit and they're also running a business and they also have a friend life and so I don't exactly know how to do that with kids but I see some people doing it and it's probably still a little bit more paired back than let's say what I'm doing in my life because exactly what you're saying you know that you've got so many things to do with your kids and managing that but I think there's a way to kind of like still build some capacity and not use it as an excuse like you're looking at a marathon now and I think a lot of people can use like kids or or anything you know work as an excuse to not add anything and just let it completely take over your life yeah yeah for sure and I like what you said about you don't just start with doing everything you start with like build all those pieces in so anyway it's cool to hear your journey of over the last few years I also have ADHD so I tried the Aderall thing for 60 days I was like I can't do this so it's cool to hear that I I appreciate all right we're gonna pivot to some news Colin can you pop up our headlines we going to go over little intro for Haven right here beautiful little intro for no look at that okay sweet so we can start right here so first one is why directed consumer darling such as Casper alurn and pelaton are now struggling we got some serious companies declaring bankruptcy including the wick wine subscription Box Company what do you guys think about this like is this the path that a lot of companies are taking is this just weeding out the herd so to speak or is this kind of a macro thing that's interesting somebody was posting on Twitter the other day talking about Yeti and like what Yeti been doing and how like they're absolutely crushing buying back stock and all this kind of stuff so my inclination would be that like it's not necessarily that all of DC I mean but Yeti also didn't really start DC so there's there's like a lot more Nuance there for sure I wouldn't think that like everybody is going towards bankruptcy in this space but I do think that like depending on the one downside to starting a business with a lot of financial backing is that sometimes you don't build efficiencies early on like Caleb your story is a great example of like when you're hustling for and and you're like trying to make every dollar count and you're bringing in the revenue before you've actually got the product and all that like that just builds a different muscle and it does seem like a lot of the companies that are going out of business were heavily funded companies from the outside on some level it feels like these businesses are just really easily to run poorly and lose a lot of money while not growing or having great margins and I don't know if that's different from other businesses where you can be kind of a less efficient operator and still pull off good profits but it feels like in D to see kind of have to be a mastermind to not just take on these massive losses and actually scale like Caleb did you end up taking any outside capital I know we met through an investor where you were considering it so kind of interesting to hear where that lad you're where your head's at there yeah we haven't taken any institutional we have a we did a small like friends and family round and we've mostly just worked with debt and that's worked really well for us and it's also like very limited and you're not quite as splashy with it and I that you know if you dump a bunch of cash in yeah you've got an opportunity to grow fast and like get into the market and like run but then if you're just kind of pushing off profitability because you've got that stack of cash or you know you're going to just raise another round like I think we all have kind of come around to understand that DTC is not Tech you can't just raise five rounds get to a Series F and be like now we're going to be profitable I think warie Parker is still posting like $80 million losses and I like them but like it's just not sustainable Cory I think what you said about like the you do have to be really good you have to be a really good operator like the nine operators podcast I love listening to those guys because I I listen to them I'm like wow the stuff that they're talking about is applicable to every single business like every business needs to be thinking about things at that level like when I had my own d2c Brands I just got into this weird cash cycle that ultimately killed it where it was you know buying inventory selling and you're just like using debt to like get the inventory and then the next thing you know like everything seems like it's going well and if you're not on top of the numbers you go from like oh this works to we just hit a slow season we can't pay the debts anymore and now it's over that's what happened to me anyway because I didn't know how to manage the the cash flow the right way yeah I see this as a huge opportunity for anyone who does operate efficiently when you look at the VC Market it was a exceptionally high amount of VC dollars over the past 20 years went into retail it was like 30 40% over 50 60 billion of capital on that just as competition in the ad Market you know for talent all these other things that made it really easy to inefficiently run one of these things I feel like this will open up more opportunity for Brands like Caleb and our friends over at Ridge and other businesses that know how to run a tight ship yeah I think that's the goal is I mean we're kind of always looking at Deb options and like you know what as we grow like what becomes available to us and we're not closed off to even the equity conversations but a lot of them were also like just very repetitive and just kind of seemed like there was an amoeba of people moving around saying like oh it's got to be subscription it's got to be cpg and I was like hi have you heard of the 14 other billion dollar luggage companies that aren't subscription or cpg and they're they're doing great and now like as we for like us like you know as we've kind of like tipped over a couple of different numbers and I think if you're looking at debt or investment like looking at it as like fuel on the fire like we're going to do this regardless we'll be profitable by the summer we just got net 90 payment terms like we've got some really great things set up and if were to put cash on it now it just allows us to move a little bit quicker but with the same goal in mind of being profitable being strict about how we're growing all that Y what type of debt did you do like inventory financing or receivables every single type of debt available to us yeah both yeah Shopify Capital sellers financing I've had a conversation with every other person out there we have small SBA loan we have a small loan from like an angel group not an investment just a a loan that they do and now we're talking to a couple of like private Equity larger groups that are interested in larger forms of debt and so they might there might be an option to kind of like refy some of that and then add on some growth Capital as well yeah and that's another thing too is like you know we all know like you know you listen to some smart people break down how Shopify capital and like rev based financing is absolute but also if you're a founder and you're like looking at what you're doing and you're like well I need money and so I could shut the company down or I could take this really crappy loan like I guess I'm going to take the crappy loan like Shopify Capital like you know might be bad but like I've taken it five times and they've given us nearly a million dollars that we've paid back and like it's been incredible it's the reason that we're here well sweet guys let's move on to the next one have you guys heard about this the Amazon aggregator thio is that did I say that right thio y files for bankruptcy after raising billions with a B billions from investors this was kind of wild this made the waves on Twitter for a day or so and basically everyone was trying to have their take on this and yeah what do you guys think about this I love this was someone posted this financial if you look at their revenue so in 2019 for I guess the UK business I don't know if this is overall but only 65 million of Revenue and they're showing iaah from amortization of intangibles but if you look at their income from operations negative 5 million on that 65 mil rev so I guess yeah pretty pretty rough but I don't know too much about this business I don't know if you guys I did read the scammed earli the tech article on it it was interesting because it it sounds like they're kind of writing the ship so to speak so I don't fully understand how all of it works but it sounds like they're you know doing the bankruptcy thing and then they've got they'll have some cash in the bank and they think they can kind of like get it straightened out so I don't think they're like gone gone but it is interesting to see something that looks so promising a couple years ago billions raised like 10 billion doll valuation I think the last I think what I saw I may be misquoting this but the last valuation put it at like a couple hundred million that's got to be tough at this stage of my life nobody would ever give me 3 billion so I don't want to like trash the people who who built this because obviously like they did something incredible just getting to that point but it's got to be really hard being on the inside of that having to like kind of get get all that right and move forward so yeah hopefully for them they're able to do it it's interesting I think it's kind of like you know those movies that occasionally come out that have like 12 tier one actors in them and you're like whoa look at that lineup and then you watch it you're like that movie was mid and I feel like at this point we kind of know like if a company raises billions of dollars and gets every celebrity and top level business person in like what was that stupid video thing like quirp or quip or whatever and like they raised billions from all the like Yeah from all the like Time Warner people and then it like it lasted like a week and everyone was like this sucks I feel like we should kind of like see see this now like here's there's a pattern so this is Aaron over at bre so they just launched on Tik Tock shop and then I think within a couple days I think the first week they did about $28,000 I guess both of you guys could talk to this like how have you seen Tik Tock shop oh look this we got it right there sponsored how have you guys been seeing kind of Tik Tok shop play out I mean Jeremiah you probably have a ton of insights into this with how how brands are doing it and then Caleb are you considering it like pretty seriously with you guys or for a scale that matter yeah so from our side last year the question how did you first hear about us was answered 16 million times on our platform so we got like Trend analysis over time what's interesting is we saw Tik Tok in October we're just looking at website conversions right so basically if somebody purchases on Tik Tok shop they're getting pulled out of that so they're they're no longer in that equation and so starting in October we saw a a big drop that kind of flattened actually like October it dropped and then it slowly fell down a little bit more November December no other channels had any drops like that throughout the year and that lined up with a launch of Tik Tok shops so I think what we're seeing and that was about a 20% drop give or take a little bit so I think that that's pretty indicative of shops like immedi medely grabbing a lot of impact I'm really curious to see how that plays out over this year so we'll we'll be tracking those Trends we haven't followed up with Tik Tok specifically on that to be like does this line up with what you all are seeing and then the other thing we saw there is that we also asked how long did you know about us before placing your first purchase some of that earlier purchase Behavior like less than a day less than a week people who are who just like today or this week found out about the brand that number was shifting longer on Tik Tok in the back quarter of the year as well which tells me that like Tik Tok shops really is doing a good job of introducing and getting somebody to convert immediately is my take on it so could be wrong there's a lot of a lot of missing data we don't see there but I do think that that's what's happening so I think overall it's going to be a huge positive for brand you guys touching it Caleb we are not touching it yet what we've seen so far with Tik Tok and Tik Tok shop is it does work a lot better for shorter consideration period products I.E cheaper products so a $300 gym bag I mean even like you said like you've been kind of mulling it over a few days before you pull the trigger like it's just not typically it doesn't typically work super well on Tik Tok or Tik Tok shops and we've been pretty hyperfocused on like being the one channel that works really well for us which is Facebook ads we have great return on those and so that's kind of where we're at I'm curious to see I'm like stoked when anyone sees some success anywhere like you know cheer my friends on I think Isaac actually from mini Katana has a great take on Tik Tok shops which is like it's cuz like most of the products on there are just like Teemu knockoffs so it's I'm stoked to see that Aaron and anyone else can like get some traction on there but as a whole of a product they need to fix this very quickly because all of the everything else on there is really just garbage and I would imagine they are I think I saw somebody post recently they're hiring like 500 positions for shops something like that it was like a crazy number so yeah wow well moving on to the near and dear Shawn Frank 2024 best year ever for Ecom ever US Census Data shows eccom peaked at 16.1% of all retail do you guys think it's only up from here I think it'll be slow just like it kind of was pre-co right it's like slow continue I'm on board with anything that's positive right like someone's going to be like it's going to be the best year I'm like hell yeah it is brother let's go well that's that's the thing when ecom's at 16% penetration even if the macroeconomy is going down as long as e-commerce is taking a bigger share of the wallet if you're playing in that digital space you can capture that and when you're a small smaller or upand cominging brand and there's only opportunity for you right like those things don't affect you you're just growing audience until You' peaked audience like a Nike but yeah China is at like 45 40 to 60% e-commerce penetration so seriously so much opportunity yeah let's move on oh yeah there you go there's the chart 46% there you go w we can share this in confirming not Cory just confirming the stats he's pulling from right there honestly the number that's most interesting to me here from a US standpoint is UK because I think like the reality is like culturally the US is very different from South Korea the US is very different from China but like UK and us are much more similar culturally I do think UK is obviously a smaller country so it's probably easier to move Goods around lot the same day delivery yeah that so like that probably helps a lot but I do think like tracking what what the UK is doing over time is probably a good indicator of what's possible in the US over time well that's it for us Jeremiah do you want to go into the data I'm curious about the data you're seeing the trends you're seeing yeah I want to see some some juicy tasty trends that we can we can give to the people all right sounds good so Caleb I'm actually gonna touch on something here that I I'm I want to get your take specifically on this because you were talking about like hiot and Tik Tok and stuff I'm gonna cover just real quick like what we saw last year for survey responses and Discovery Trends so we in our platform we have five questions that there's more than that but five specifically that we're looking at all the time that are what we call Benchmark questions so how did you first hear about us what brought you to our site today if they said they came from an ad asking them where the ad was that they saw and then who how long did you know about us before placing your first purchase and who is this purchase for those five questions so specifically looking at how did you first hear about us this data set that I'm going to show here is a subset of people that answered both that question and the question of how long they knew about the brand so that's like 9 million respondents but still a good data set over the 12 months what I thought was really interesting is if you kind of think about the theme of 2023 a lot of it was about profitable growth right and so looking at word of mouth and other that those two channels saw a pretty strong consistent Trend over the course of the year now word of mouth is always up in November and December and the reason for that is gifting right so people are buying gifts around the holiday season so you can see here this blue line Word of Mouth 19% of purchases in November and 21 and a half% in December said that they came from word of mouth and that's B basically like you know my my mom is like hey Jeremiah what do you want for Christmas and I tell her and she goes and buys it right so I thought that was an interesting Trend as you can see just like throughout the year there's a little bit of an upward Trend and then a strong upward Trend at the end and these other channels were really trending up strongly and what other usually is is like smaller sort of opportunities that we're maybe not picking up in our our larger data set so a lot of times that is some word amount things that are just described differently we're actually going to be like kind of restructuring and cleaning this data more over time so I think think we'll hopefully have a little bit better view but regardless we would kind of consider this like organic non-paid and we saw a pretty strong upward Trend throughout the year in that like organic sort of growth which I think lines up with Brands trying to be more profitable in in 2023 looking at paid channels specifically there was a little bit of a downward Trend it's harder to see that overall in this chart so this is basically filtering out the those two organic buckets and then showing the percentage of total you can see Facebook led the way so this is people saying that they discovered a brand on Facebook Instagram was second and so you can see Instagram has like a little bit of a slight downward Trend this is Google really trended up throughout the year so especially Q4 this is kind of common too again gifting somebody says Hey I want this thing you go you search for it and you buy it so that makes sense but then we also saw like TV and YouTube have a pretty strong upward tick at the end of the year too and I think that if you look at the data which I don't show here but a lot of times those channels take a longer time to to convert but regardless basically the overall trend is throughout the year Facebook which has a pretty good like click to conversion tracking path trended up Google which has a good clicked conversion tracking path trended up and everything else trended down just slightly here's what that drop off by the way that I was talking about Tik Tok so you can see Tik Tok was up here around 10% and then just dropped down to about eight and it just slowly dropped down a little bit more in Q4 and shops launched right here so timing wise I believe that's probably because of launch of shops but anyway we'll we'll keep doing more research on that this year if you plot this against eyeballs where people are actually YouTube is the big opportunity for Brands because yes that is where people spend the that that's like the growing Caleb you guys doing anything on I guess you guys work with influencers so there's some natural distribution there yeah we're not deep in it yet but it's definitely high priority for this year to be pushing out our own content and working with more you YouTubers as well cool yeah and I think I'm going to show you something on YouTube specifically here in a moment because I I think that's spot on Corey so what I want to highlight here that I think is really interesting is so we we looked at the first click Source associated with these survey responses so in this context so these bars are the survey responses so black is people who answered Tik Tok red is people who answered Instagram yellow people who answered Facebook green people who answered Google and then these are the click sources so like Facebook click Source 35% of people who answered Facebook had a first click associated with Facebook in terms of like the Click data we have this unknown Bucket over here means that we just don't have a click so it's missing click data come through as direct and this is to be clearly too this is Shopify data so it's missing some data compared to other sources but directionally it's always been really accurate so it's interesting to see this so you see basically like about a third of all of these don't have a click but among the ones that have a click Facebook 35% of respondents have a Facebook click Google 38% 39% basically of Google respondents have a Google click but then you look at Tik Tok of people who answered Tik Tok only 10% have a Tik Tok click of people who answered Instagram only 11% have an Instagram click this one is interesting though so the other bucket here is actually really high on Instagram we need to dive into the a little bit more but my theory is that this actually is coming through into platforms like triple whale northbeam I think it's the the UTM tagging messed up our tracking here a little bit so likely we're actually seeing you know probably a little bit higher percentage that is actually coming through to the visualization that brands are actually seeing in Instagram but the point here is that the channels that we're trending down throughout the year YouTube Tik Tok often times are the ones that are least likely to have a click associated with the Sur response so real quick looking at this YouTube Tik Tok and TV specifically you can see people who answered YouTube 8% had a YouTube click 30% had a Google search click so and then in Tik Tok again that 10% 34% had a Google search TV obviously we don't have a TV click that just doesn't exist but it's interesting to see 27% from Google search this one actually crushes other search engines so I think this is probably indicative of just the older demographic looking at you know they're probably using Bing and some of those other tools so just to kind of recap here though I think it leads to less confidence and spending in those places because you don't see that click data come through it's not showing up in your MTA data it's not showing up in Google analytics it's not showing up in those kinds of places so while there may be some impact happening there that's actually not getting measured there it can lead to like a little bit less confidence in whether that platform's actually working so I'm curious if that's if that resonates with you or not we are a sub $10 million brand and like I said I like to take advice of the people who've done it and who have been there and who are smarter than me so like Sean Frank and The Operators are like stop using triple whale no offense stop using North beam no offense and go in platform and look at myrr and so that's what we do we run on myr and we look at in platform and we know it's not perfect but I know I typically make3 to five dollar for every dollar I put into the system and when product is in stock that jumps to like five to 10 awesome I know we're up on time and really appreciate your guys time know you're super busy thank you for joining first episode hope to have you guys back at some point

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