$50M in 4 Years: The Skincare CEO Who Refuses to Chase Revenue

$50M in 4 Years: The Skincare CEO Who Refuses to Chase Revenue Speaker 1: We use a system that I call scaling spiritually and that is essentially creating an angle. An angle is made up of a problem and avatar and then when you have that, that's one angle and then we look at the five different market awarenesses and then we have the different formats and then different delivery pieces. But essentially, you want to create very specific marketing towards one angle, towards one stage of awareness and then you scale it out by different formats. The way we do performance marketing is just trying to create as many diverse creatives as possible that are very hyper-focused on a specific angle. And Facebook is really going to push you forward if you're very specific to a certain audience and you're going to solve their problem. I think people are going way too broad. Just because the targeting is broad doesn't mean the creative should be broad. I think the better you can niche down and actually solve a person's problem, the better you'll be. Speaker 2: Welcome back to another episode of Chew on This. Today we have Matt, who's founder of Cure Skincare, which is an incredible wellness company that he's built, and he's had some really interesting ways of how he's been building it. So we're gonna break down some of those really cool tactics when we break down how he's been building his brand, but also, before we get started, Matt, first of all, thank you for taking the time out to grace your presence with our guests who are, I think, gonna get a kick out of how Some of the ways you think about things and build things, but for the few people who don't know you, maybe you can give a little bit of background of who you are and how you kind of got to even building Cure. Speaker 1: Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me on. So I've been in business about 20 years. The first 10 years of my entrepreneurial journey was I used to build brands and sell them to mass retailers. So I probably built about 13 to 14 different brands in those first 10 years. And it came to a point when I was like 25 years old where a billion-dollar retailer, one of my biggest clients, went bust and I lost like $5 million overnight. I was like, all right, I can't do this shit anymore. I have to pivot, think of something else because I was just too vulnerable with the whole distribution layout. So then I said, next brand, I'm going to start going direct to consumer online. So that was Skywalkers back in 2016, I think, and we took that brand from zero to two million in the first three months. And I was like, all right, you know what, this feels a bit better than the whole retail landscape as you guys are familiar with now. And from then, we just try and build brands online. And from that, we built a great internal team, which then created Inspired Digital Agency, which would then help other brands. And we have brands like Woody, you guys know Davey, from like $4 to $250 million. And you guys have Maranon Later, who's the partner in that agency. And that's where it kind of started. And Cure Skincare was born about four years ago. Started with my sister. She's a co-founder. And we went from, yeah, pre-zero to 50 million in four years. Speaker 2: Incredible. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: You kind of talked about this even pre-show. It's like you really invest in people. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: You really invest in creating systems so that it allows you to do whatever you're best at and not trying to figure out how to get better at some of the other things. But Tell me a little bit about that philosophy. Where is that born from and how have you been able to apply that at Cure as well? Because I think it starts with that fundamental, especially when you see numbers like in four years, zero to 50, you don't see that with every other brand. So tell me some of the fundamentals that even started with building this brand. Speaker 1: Yeah, I think the philosophy we have in-house is build the people to build the business. And that starts with everything, the way we hire people, the way we educate people. I think you train dogs, but you teach people. So a lot of times, we're teaching everyone in-house, trying to be better. A lot of my time goes into learning and teaching. That's it. So I probably work a couple of hours a day in the business, but the rest is on it. I think that's where a lot of founders, especially ones that I coach today, are missing, especially in the DTC space. Everyone's very tactical. Everyone's talking about how they're going to get in the weeds and they're trying to get into the campaign level, stuff like that. We let our team do that. And because of that, I think we had a different perspective on how to build a business because we're allowed to sit on top of the business and make better decisions. And that really benefited us from the get-go. That's really cool. Speaker 3: Makes sense. I mean, if you look back at the first thing that actually makes a brand, right? It goes into product, right? Product development. I would imagine you guys have some background in what makes you excited to work on a brand like this, right? Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. I mean, the background came from when I used to develop all those products to mass retailers. So our product development side of the business is very strong. But when we went to launch the brand, we spent probably two years in developing the product first. So we're very much a product first, people first company. And that's what we've always been because the product, as you guys know, creates a beautiful flywheel. You create a distinct product in the market and there's like a framework that we use internally where there's five pillars. First, we change the experience. Then we change the style, then we change the material, then we change the perceived value, and then we add an emotional benefit to it. So when you try and attach that, I guess that kind of, we call it distinct pentagon framework to our product development, then everything else gets easier. Because when we go in the market like LED face mask, we're super saturated. You look at our face mask and what we've been able to do in such a short amount of time, it's because it's so distinct. And then when we approach say influencers, Who they want to work with, a brand that's clearly spent a lot of money in product development that's distinct from anyone else. It's not a me-too product because they're obviously concerned about how it's going to affect their brand. So then we get the best influences, then we get sales, then we get profit, then we can reinvest into more product development and it just works like that. Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that is the biggest problem a lot of brands have is that they come out with a product, they probably see what's trending, they try to maybe do their take on it, and brand becomes like their moat, but product isn't their moat, right? So I'm very curious, like, when you guys started, how did you start with I guess understanding what the market needed and how did you kind of fill a gap? Because I do find that a lot of, especially in our industry, it's very competitive, right? The supplement space is you have, by the time we're finished recording this, there's six other supplement brands that have just started, right? So how are you guys taking on just understanding what the customer needs, what's the gap in the market, and then actually filling that gap? Speaker 1: Yeah, it's an interesting question because There's no real framework to it, I believe. It's like a lot of our gut instincts is where we drive the business because we want to create products that we like, that we believe in first. And the LED mask in terms of the way we developed it was solving a problem my sister had. Because she had acne around the jaw and then she wanted to do anti-aging around the face. Then we made it the world's first customizable LED face mask so she can customize her own treatment. So I think a lot of the time the founders can even just look at their own situation, see how they can better it for themselves. And then if you're better for themselves, there's another million people like you that are going to benefit from it. I think people overcomplicate it as long as it's a product development and they try to be too fancy with it. But if you solve a problem for yourself, there's a high probability you can solve it for a lot of other people as well. Speaker 2: I love that. That's a great way to put it. So I'm curious now, I want to get into a little bit about the category you're serving here, which is skincare, wellness, and obviously female. Right out of the gate, when you look at the space in general, I love that you guys have a framework of following how to make sure that you're different. I'm curious though, talk to us a little bit about how you guys go about performance marketing, right? Because I think it's really interesting to understand when you take something that is in a saturated space, you still, even though you create a really different product, you still have to be able to market this, right? So from brand to performance, where we want to start first, I'm really curious to understand Especially when you go into a space like this, that too just in the last four years, how do you attack that and what's been some of the maybe the early wins you got? Speaker 1: So we use a system that I call scaling spherically. And that is essentially creating an angle. An angle is made up of a problem and an avatar. And then when you have that, that's one angle. And then we look at the five different market awarenesses. And then we have the different formats and then different delivery pieces. So when we're going to our market, we have like a kind of, we have actually a project system in-house that we extract our creatives from and try and help us dissect and see where we're at. But essentially you want to create very specific marketing towards one angle, towards one stage of awareness. And then you scale it out via different formats. That's the way we've thought about it. So the way we do performance marketing is just trying to create as many diverse creators as possible that are very hyper-focused on a specific angle. And that's what we've kind of done, rinse and repeat. And when you really boil it down, there are so many different types of creators you can create if you go really, really narrow. And I think people just aren't going narrow enough. And we see it in Facebook and today, right? Because creative diversification is key. And Facebook is really going to Push you forward if you're very specific to a certain audience and you're gonna solve their problem. I think people are going way too broad. Just because the targeting's broad doesn't mean the creative should be broad. I think the better you can niche down and actually solve a person's problem, the better you'll be. And I think the way you can put fire on this, and there's one, you get that one angle, right? Then you have the one market awareness. Then you get white listing that matches that angle, matches that avatar, matches that market awareness. And that's how we've really been able to, I think, drive our performance marketing. Speaker 3: Okay, so this is the playbook, right? Creative diversity, creative volume. Obviously the messaging needs to resonate and carry through to the landing page and things like that, right? That all has to be dialed in, in my opinion, and I think if you don't have that, it's like this uphill battle, right? Once you have creative dialed in, once you have that experience dialed in, I think the next thing is probably like offer, right? I know you guys do a ton of testing, so I would love to kind of dive into that side of, you know, the success. Speaker 1: Yeah, offers is huge for us. It's literally angles and offers. I think people should be more creative around their offers. Like, sure you have your stereotypical bogos, you have your gift-free purchase, but what's set us apart is having Probably a wide space of different products that we can bundle and create really unique different bundles based on specific concerns. Like if you have an acne concern, then we can bundle a water filter and a microinfusion kit with them. Do you know what I mean? That can add a lot of perceived value and then we can create different offers around that. And then obviously the marketing calendar is critical for us. We plan about six months ahead and we have a You know, probably every month we have something going on in terms of our marketing calendar. And then we have so many different products, we're able to re-engineer different offers every single month for our different products. And I think that's what's really, really helped us scale, to be honest. Speaker 2: I'm really curious because, you know, it seems like you guys have a lot of, you know, well-planned elements in your business, right? Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: At the same time, there is, at least the ecosystem faces a lot of unplanned changes, right? Whether it's, you know, meta and its performance one day, or you're dealing with the tariffs battle, or you're just seeing consumer, you know, sentiments going down. How have you guys been able to stay true to being well planned, you know, maybe even being months ahead, but still taking on some of the headwinds that brands face nowadays? How do you pivot during those times if needed? Speaker 1: To be honest, we haven't had to pivot. It doesn't matter what the landscape was up until now. For example, the tariffs came but because our business is fairly well-planned where we've got stock for six months cover and stuff like that because we are profitable and we don't have maybe cash constraints other businesses have, we don't really have to move. We don't have to be as nimble. Maybe other brands have to be because we're in a better cash position, I think. So, we're fortunate in that regard. Speaker 2: That helps a lot. And so I think on the flip side of that, you know, building a profitable business, right? Tell us a little bit about the economics of that in terms of, have you guys always been first order profitable? Was that like, is that for you a, hey, this has to happen? Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: And how does that framework work? Speaker 1: So I always kind of had a rule. I always wanted to be super profitable for number one reason, because of product development. So like I wouldn't go on the 20% net for a very long time because if I wasn't operating a 20% net, I didn't have the money, the cash flow to actually invest in product development. That's all we really cared about as a company. So I made no sense for me to grow and let's say run a 10% net and do $20 million but then I have to buy more stock which then I don't have any free cash to invest in this product development. That made no sense to me for this business because we are product first. So I would only grow to a point where I had enough profit. That was my limiting factor and that's why I kept it probably at 20% for a very long time for that reason. I think brands rush to scale revenue way too quick, add a lot of operational stress to the business. Cash stress and then they have no money product development and then that's why I think a lot of brands start to deteriorate. We're very different in terms of what I speak to other brands. Speaker 3: I mean, you're alluding to the fact that retention is such a big key thing here, especially when building a brand. We can all talk about customer acquisition and saying, oh, we need to be first order profitable. We have to figure out our funnels, this and that. How do you guys view retention? How do you guys focus on it? And how do you guys keep that at the forefront of building the brand? Speaker 1: I think it's just creating unbelievable products. And world-class products, but paired with this expectation effect, I think when we're doing our marketing, we're so conscious, especially my co-founder and my sister, is of not over-promising things, especially in skincare. Like we are so, so intentional with the language we use to sell our product. So when they get the product, they know what they can expect and we're delivering on that promise. We don't say wrinkle-free skin in two weeks. We don't say we're gonna remove your wrinkles, we're just gonna say we'll reduce it. We're not gonna say it's gonna take maybe three to four months of consistent use. And I think that plays into the retention piece because when they get a product, they know they have an expectation of what's going to happen and we meet that expectation. Where it was the opposite, you know, maybe in really early days we did that a bit too aggressively. Then we see that, you know, through the customer journey and the post-purchase surveys like, hey, my skin didn't get better in three, four weeks. We're like, well, it actually takes six to eight weeks. Well, our marketing actually led them to think for like three, four weeks. And I think those two things, so creating a world-class product and in building expectation of what the actual product's going to deliver. Speaker 3: Are you guys doing anything different than most, like for your retention strategy? I mean, you know, the key channels here, right? Email, SMS, but how do you guys feel about community? Are you guys doing anything there? Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, I think we took it out of your playbook, to be honest. The community stuff, yeah, yeah. We sent that straight to our team. So we've influenced that. Yeah, we're a private community. We do a lot of product testing before we come back. If we have renders, we have new product designs, we get their feedback first and then we iterate on it. So it's definitely a key for us, yeah. Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, what else are you guys using community for outside of like product development? Are you guys, I guess, maybe even tying it back to the marketing side? I know for us, you know, we've done a lot of interviews with like, you know, customers in the community, a lot of people that are vocal about their results. Kind of pull them aside and say, hey, like, we'll pay you, you know, Amazon gift card just to get on a Zoom call so we can do marketing, right? How have you found that, you know, community to be, you know, accessible for marketing efforts? Speaker 1: Yeah, we're actually looking at testing Listen.ai at the moment. Have you guys used that? Speaker 2: No. Speaker 1: No, Listen.ai, it's like an AI platform where they do your customer, 250 customer interviews. I think it's like 20 grand and it's all driven by AI, so it's really efficient. So we're looking at that to go deeper because we have found a lot of benefit into speaking to the customers that you guys have. It does inform the language you use in terms of your marketing, it does inform product development stuff. So it's been critical, I guess, just for ideation purposes on marketing and product development for us, yeah. Really cool. Speaker 2: It's good to see someone else mention different tools that they're using because I think sometimes you don't even know what's out there because you're so used to doing it in a more manual fashion. So it's called Listen AI, you said? Speaker 1: Yeah, Listen AI. It's 20 grand for about $250, which is pretty efficient, like $80 an interview. They analyze it after and do all the details, so it's just literally like a white glove service. Speaker 2: Wow, that's really cool. I just want to get into a little bit about How you're talking to your customer to in just general right like I know Branding for you guys, especially your voice and how you've built trust has been super key. Yeah Where where's that stem from right because I think even when you're trying to train a good team You still have to enforce and you kind of have to also teach somebody else this right? What where's kind of been the learnings from that? Are you are you? Able to understand your customer so well because, like you said, your co-founder is the customer. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: And is that where a lot of the core messaging stems from and is guided through? So curious on how you guys have been able to also empower the team with that. Speaker 1: Yeah, you hit the nail on the head there. It's definitely Christina, my co-founder. She is the DNA of the company, I mean. And she's very, very intentional about having a playbook of what we can and cannot say. And that runs through all different communication strategies across the whole business, right through to attention, to our marketing. And she's, you have to inspect what you expect. And she's very good inspecting. She's like a detective. So she's constantly inspecting what the team is doing to make sure that he's that playbook that she's created. And a lot of the time we've created just like a Custom ChatGPT prompt based on the guidelines that people have to run through before they actually send it for approval. That's helped make it a lot more efficient. We use Kronos as an email agency. And yeah, like if you speak to them, they hate how meticulous we are about it. Like honestly, they said they're losing money in our account. I'll probably believe them because literally that's how strict my sister is on the language we use. Speaker 3: I want to get back to maybe some of the team building kind of things, right? Even for us, I feel like we know the missing pieces or the gaps in the team and even when we bring people on, it's like almost a struggle to make sure that one, they have set KPIs that they need to follow or even on our end, it's like, dude, even after making a hire, did we still make a good hire, right? Three months down the line, is this still the right person, right? So we'd love to understand your approach on one, I guess, identifying when you need a key role. Two, Understanding how to measure success after hiring somebody and kind of maintaining and growing a team after that. Speaker 1: I think success starts from the screening phase for us. So we use Predictive Index. Have you guys heard of it? It's like a quiz, right? Yeah, it's a quiz for behavioral and cognitive. So everyone goes through that before they come onto the team. And then we have a performance psychologist that works for us part-time. She reads these tests. Then she looks at the team members and the pods they have to work in, see if they're compatible. She looks at their behavioral and their cognitive skills, see if they're right for the role as well. So there's multiple different matches going in play. And then she does a screening with them and she uncovers anything she thinks is necessary. And then she works, everyone in the company now, on a one-to-one basis on making sure that, you know, it's like, you know, the billions. So it's like my Wendy, right? And that's been huge for us. Because since we've implanted Predictive Index, the performance psychologist, We haven't really had any mishires. And when you have the right people in the right seats, everything else kind of works itself out. So that's really been the key for us, to be honest. And there's nothing magic about it. It's just getting the right people in the right seats. And I think people don't put enough effort into that screening process because we're all so busy and we've got a million things on. But if you put More effort into that than anything else, I think it's probably the biggest leverage we can make in the business because the company is a group of people. And once again, we're so much people and product first. We spend so much time making sure we're the right people. Everything else kind of works itself out. And then the KPIs and stuff like that, that's just details for me because when you have the right people in the business, they're A players, they want to grow, they want to push the envelope forward, you know what I mean? They will manage themselves. Speaker 2: Yeah, that's great. Great call out. On that same kind of breadth, I'm curious, so when it comes to even just your team structure, can you maybe break that down for us a little bit? Whether it's org chart or even you mentioned pods, what's kind of the culture of how your team works? Speaker 1: Our head office is in Croatia. We have about 14 people there and then the rest is scattered across the world. I'm pretty much acting as CEO. Well, my sister and myself both co-CEO and then I'm CMO. And then we have like in the marketing side, head of growth, the standard. We outsource retention and we outsource CRO to Ned. He's fantastic. Thanks for the recommendation. And the rest we do in-house. Influence marketing, we have three people full-time in-house, two in-house designers. What else do we have? Yes, supply chain. We don't even have a CEO, we just have a supply chain manager and we have about 30 people in terms of customer service. It's very simple. It's not really complicated, to be honest. Speaker 2: Break down that customer service fees at 30 people. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Is that given just the amount of inbound or you guys do fairly amount of outbound too? Speaker 1: No, it's inbound. Yeah. I think because our product is a high OV product and there's a lot of, there's a big education element to it. So I think we get a lot more inquiries around that. So it requires a lot more work here. Speaker 2: Chew on This is sponsored by, if you want to build a profitable e-comm brand these days, then you need retention. Lifetime value is the lifeblood of your brand. Especially when CACs keep going up. Being first purchase profitable is great, but you only really start to print money when that customer comes back over and over and over again. It's why subscriptions are such a big piece of our strategy here at Opti. There's a big reason Brands, no matter the size, are using a tool like Recharge. What we like is that they're not just adding a subscribe button on your site, they're a complete subscription engine, helping you convert buyers to subscribers, preventing cancellations, winning back churned customers, and they're even driving more revenue through smart upsets. That's why big brands such as Dr. Squatch and even Vital Proteins are using Recharge. So if you're looking for a powerful all-in-one subscription platform, head over to Get Recharge today to see how you can pump up your LTV for your brand. Now, let's get back to the episode. Speaker 3: What's your take on agencies versus in-house, right? Obviously, you have a good mix of both, but I know a lot of brands are like, you know what, I don't even want to touch an agency. I want to build out everything in-house and then you have other brands where it's like, well, we just run everything through freelancers and agencies. So, curious your take on kind of the split between the two. Speaker 1: The founder needs to know what business they're in. What I mean by that is that if you're selling a commodity product, you're a marketing first company. You should never outsource any of your marketing. Full stop. I don't agree with it. Where maybe you're a product development company and you're a founder that's very much into the product, then potentially you should use agencies for the marketing aspect because you're developing a unique patented product or whatever it might be. So that's kind of my stance there. Now in terms of why we use agencies in some departments and not others is because You know, for email, you probably need three different roles to make that efficient, and it doesn't make sense for us hiring for those three roles. It's limited. And for CRO as well, it's kind of the same thing. So they're two things that I think, while we've been growing, we didn't see any added benefit of taking in-house, but everything else is critical. Like creative strategy, for me, was the first thing people should take in-house, and that's where a lot of your focus should be, especially for zero to $10 million. And design is kind of part of the DNA of the company. And even like development, like depending on how much your chain offers and changing your website and stuff like that, I think it's always going to be in-house to make it more nimble. But yeah, I think agents could be a great interim fix but ultimately you need to go in-house with everything. You need to build that IP in-house if you're going to build a brand that's going to be a legacy brand that's going to last. Speaker 2: You know, you talked, you kind of just touched on right now, you mentioned the word legacy brand, right? I want to get into a little bit about like how you choose to make certain investments, right? I think we come across a lot of founders, maybe even battle it ourselves sometimes, which is like, Oh, if I had to choose between putting a dollar more in meta or maybe take this like, you know, unconventional route, nine out of 10 people are probably gonna put the dollar in meta. And then you come across the one out of 10 that says, you know, I'm going this route. I feel like you've chartered down that other territory. So walk us through that. What are some of the things you guys have done? What are some tests you've maybe taken? What are some things that have failed or didn't work? I would love to understand how ulterior marketing methodologies have shaped up. Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean like we're trying to this year go organic first. We really want to try and humanize the brand and to do that, you know, we've said that if the brand's gonna be around for the next 20-30 years, we want to create a legacy brand, then we're gonna go all-in on creating organic. We have to learn how to do this. And we probably spent on agencies doing 20, 30 grand a month trying to learn the organic first strategy that hasn't really played out for us, you know, favorably. But it's a decision we made because we wanted to learn and learn quick. And yeah, like other things around product development, even we rush product development on it on the early stages. And as a consequence, we brought a product that we weren't proud of and we want to apologize to our fan base or to our customers. So we replaced all the previous customers with a new product. It cost us hundreds and thousands of dollars. But they're kind of decisions we're trying to make when you have a 20, 30 year outlook. That money is irrelevant to you, you know, because you think that in 200 what's 200 grand gonna mean to me in 20 years time? Nothing and then then we make different decisions about the own integrity of the brand because of that. Speaker 2: That's incredible If you break down even further How You know receptive your customers are and if how they notice some of these things, right? How is that feedback and can you? Utilize that in many more ways than just one or is it typically more like hey We're doing this and it's for you guys and you not you're not really looking for a reciprocal, you know Acknowledgements because sometimes people are like I'll do this. Yeah. Yeah, I'm gonna get this back So I'm curious on your thoughts. Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's a good point like even let's say Let's say when you're late, delivering a product late, right? And then you say, I'll give you a free gift card. And like, in our perspective today, that's not good enough. The customers come, they've spent their time. Energy to try and buy something, they haven't got the product and then what we're trying to do now is give them a gift card or maybe buy them a massage down the road. It's got nothing to do with the brand. It's not like, okay, here's a gift card so you can spend more money with us. We're trying to think about ways that we can really go over and above to say sorry to the customer and build that brand trust or just do the right thing for the customer because we're conscious of all the effort they made to buy our product and if we haven't delivered, then let's try and give them something back that's not tied with them coming back to the brand to show that gesture of goodwill. And if they do, they do come back. But I think that is real goodwill when you do something not expecting anything in return. And a gift card is expecting something in return, let's be honest. Speaker 2: Really well said, really well said. Speaker 3: What are some of those things that you guys are doing for those customers? Speaker 1: I think just some of the buying flowers, stuff like that as well, as a sorry, a token of gesture. Massage parlor down the road or hair salon thing or something like that. I know the customer support team is starting to do now. Just anything that's outside of our brand. Humans are human, we fucked up, we're sorry. Speaker 3: Are you guys doing anything on the outbound approach? Obviously you have a ton of inbound questions about how to use the product, there's an educational layer to it, but what about outbound? Are you guys, you know, reaching out to people and, you know, whether it's like something that we just started was, you know, people who are coming to the website, maybe abandoning cart, trying to, you know, give them a call back and say like, well, what were some of the reasons you didn't purchase, right? And then tackling that head-on. But anything you guys are doing on the outbound side? Speaker 1: We used to do that, but not for this brand, for previous brands. But I think the rate we've grown, we haven't been able to actually keep up with what's coming inbound, so we haven't gone the outbound route yet. But what we're starting to do is set up live video calls for consultations online. We just set that up I think about a month ago. People can do a live video call and do a consult or if it's like they don't know how to use the product, do a live video call. Once again trying to humanize the brand some degree and do things that make no sense maybe from a dollar and cents perspective but they do make sense from a brand perspective. Speaker 2: Curious on where AI stands in your guys' org right now. I think it's varying from different people we talk to. What's your overall take on it and are you mobilizing to implement it in different ways? Speaker 1: Yeah, I think the initiative to the team was they have to think AI first and we're giving them training sessions on how to utilize AI. But I think fundamentally we also want to empower the people. To be better operators by using AI. We're not trying to replace anyone at the moment. We're trying to tell them that you can be more valuable to the company if you use AI. If you're more valuable then we can actually pay you, remunerate you more. So that's kind of the take we're taking. It's just to educate them on AI. Not trying to replace any roles for now because I think the people that we have are great people and they can, with the use of AI, they can be more valuable no matter which way we look at it. So that's what we're trying to do at the moment, to try and make everyone else more valuable with AI rather than replace people with AI at the moment. Speaker 3: Makes sense. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 3: I feel like even my struggle is like there's something new that's coming out like every week. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 3: And then for us, it's like, okay, well, how do we learn it or are we falling behind on certain things? I think last we've got a conversation, it's like, well, this new thing just came out. Like who's gonna go and learn it and then who's gonna teach it, right? So how are you, you know, kind of tackling that problem? Like are you On the forefront, you're learning anything that comes out or you're kind of putting the team to do it themselves. What does that look like? Speaker 1: So the way it looks is that I'm trying to work out how we're going to educate the team at the moment, but it's up to everyone individually to implement AI within their own departments. And in order for them to do that, they have to understand how agents work, how we make flows and workflows and stuff like that. So we're bringing consultants externally to come and teach everyone internally on how to do it. And it's up to everyone individually to do it for their department. Because I played with another concept of getting someone like a full-time person, but then that full-time person doesn't understand and is not at the same level of the context per department and has access to information. So they're not going to be in the same position, right, to actually make judgments. So the only way to do is to once again empower the people, build the people to build the business. And it's up to everyone individually to draw those efficiencies, I think. Speaker 2: I want to go a little bit now into the brand side of things. I know we touched on it a little bit, which is obviously you guys take a lot more steps and bets into things that may not be as conventional as like Facebook. But over these course of the four years, right, hitting zero to 50 is incredible, but what are some of the challenges you've had that you've had to overcome, whether it is on the brand side, performance side, whatever it may be, and how have you guys tackled some of those, if you've come across many? Speaker 1: The biggest challenge was early days, selling products that we didn't have. I mean, we're selling them pre-order for a long period of time, like anything, probably. Speaker 2: Would you do it that way again? Speaker 1: Probably not, yeah. Probably not. Yeah, I think we should have extended the horizon and moved the expectations of the customers when they would have received it. If it was supposed to come July 1st to stock, I would have said, you're going to receive it first of August and then deliver it early. If I was going to do it again, then that would have been a big win for us. But as it is, you're trying to optimize the conversion, so you're trying to push that window as close as possible so they do buy and then you shoot yourself in the foot. So if I did it again, I would just push that window out and I think we would have been a lot better off, yeah. Speaker 2: And then what are some of those additional kind of brand efforts you guys are taking? I know you said you're investing heavily in organic, but talk about maybe TV, Applovin or some of these other platforms. Speaker 1: Applovin didn't really work for us, but we are investing and working with Marathon at the moment, the guys from Chubby's. So we're doing a lot of like YouTube subscriber campaigns, Facebook like campaigns. And we're just trying to advertise to people a different campaign objective, they're not in market now. Assuming that they will be in market later on. And I think it's paying dividends. It's early days it was paying dividends because the hypothesis is that there's only 2-3% actually in market buying and you're paying for a campaign objective that's very expensive. But in reality, 2-3% are going to buy. So then let's go further down the funnel. And let's do, yeah, let's build a brand by doing subscriber campaigns with the same piece of content. You know, we're getting like a dollar per subscriber, which I don't see how that can't work long term. I mean, there will be an argument as to what's the quality of that subscriber. Who knows? But they're the things we're trying to engage in now. The different campaign objectives go further down the funnel and see what happens. Speaker 3: I think the one thing you just said is like, what is the quality of a subscriber, right? Obviously, it's tough to know on day one or even day seven, right? But how are you guys measuring the success of kind of going after this upper funnel audience Obviously when there is a typically delayed attribution but what are you guys looking at initially to determine that this may or may not be successful? Speaker 1: So we're looking at organic revenue and organic clicks if that is rising over time. If that is rising over time incrementally with the amount of money we're spending on different campaign objectives, we're happy. I think it's a pretty good read, if you ask me. It's not going to be accurate like anything else, but it's a good enough read to say, you know what, the best we're making on the brand building side, there's an increase in organic search. Where's that coming from? It has to be coming from that. Speaker 3: Are you guys looking at, because you said you guys were doing Facebook Likes or even Instagram Follows, are you guys measuring engagement or anything like that? Speaker 1: Pretty much just cost per subscriber, cost per like. That's the main metric we're looking at, yeah. And the guys at Marathon obviously help us also denote a value to that, which kind of helps. That's what this software does. But once again, it's early days. But yeah, I suggest everyone have a look at it. And having that chat to them, they think that it doesn't matter what scale of business you are. Even if you're doing a million dollars a year, you can still benefit from these campaigns. You spend like 2-3% of your budget, that's it on those campaigns. Speaker 3: I don't think enough people are thinking of this. I think last year was probably when we were focusing on it a little more heavily with organic efforts on TikTok. I want to maybe go into some of the other channels you guys are marketing on. I know Facebook is a big part of the strategy here, but how do you guys look at TikTok shop and things like that? Speaker 1: Yeah, we just started TikTok shop because our ARV is a bit too high. At the start, so now I think one of the first ones to be approved in terms of LED masks that's on TikTok shop and stuff like that. So we're testing that out. But I think back to your point earlier, what we did end of last year was create some pop-up stores, beautiful pop-up stores and shopping centers. And when I launched that Skywalker business I mentioned earlier, the first one after retail, I launched a pop-up stores as well. And I think a lot of DTC brands are just so autistic in terms of the way they're going to market their brand and they miss out on these opportunities of doing these pop-up stores where you can go, set up a pop-up store during Christmas time for six weeks, cost you a thousand bucks a week rent, speak to customers every single day, learn so much about your brand. Build some awareness and there's such a great way to also market the brand offline which is going to create bigger market audiences online. Speaker 3: I love that. How about other channels like Amazon? I feel like if you're building this brand awareness play, you're definitely going to have people that You know, I'll buy on the website or I'll buy if it's on TikTok shop or I'll buy it on Amazon. What are your thoughts on kind of expanding the marketplaces in terms of where people can buy? Speaker 1: Yeah, we're on Amazon. We haven't seen much success on Amazon either. I think skincare device category is a unique category for stuff like Amazon. But what we're doing a lot of is YouTube, I think. When you look at the cost per 10 second view or 3 second view on these YouTube ads, it's so stupidly cheap to see someone has awareness on your brand for that price point. It can't not pay off. And attribution obviously for YouTube is harder than it is for Facebook. But stuff like that, if I can pay a dollar and I know someone's going to watch 30 seconds of my video, to me that's a pretty good indicator that ads work in some degree and that I haven't clicked or bought. So I think for us mainly it's Facebook and YouTube because our product does require a level of education. And those platforms seem to be best for us. And I think once you go wider you lose that focus which then The quality suffers from a team perspective and team level. And because I'm so much around, you know, the team being focused, like we have a creative strategist that's focused on one product, not four products at once. And same with the team, you know, I want them to be super focused on certain channels. Once we max out those channels, let's go to another channel. Speaker 3: Would you potentially go back into retail with this brand? Speaker 1: Yeah, we're currently in talks with some of the retailers. But as you guys know, it is tough. But I think we have a lot more leverage today than we did, you know, before when I used to do retail. But I think we might be patient with it. Blue Mercury seems to be like something that's coming up. Go small, not go to Sephora, alter straight away, potentially. But that's what we're thinking about it. Once again, if we build a brand for 20 years, why have to be in Sephora next year? Let's just relax. Let's build slowly. Let's make sure that we don't break anything along the way. Because we're not concerned about that. We're concerned about getting 20% growth year on year. If we do that, man, that's still a world-class brand. Sure, we'll be getting a lot more. Lately, but that's what we're thinking about, like how can we grow super steadily, maintain our brand integrity, quality, and yeah, what happens, happens. Speaker 3: Makes sense. I think one of the bigger problems that even we face, right, when we got into retail, you kind of see this like slump on like DTC, right? And so the question ends up becoming, well, do you expand door and shelf count or shelf space and kind of allocate all of your marketing towards just retail? Or do you try to keep it separate and see if you can grow DC and hopefully stay in these stores on the retail side? Given that you kind of had experience with a little bit of both, where do you think your focus would end up being? Or how would you be able to make both successful? Speaker 1: I would look at the retail side from a branding perspective and brand awareness perspective only. That's the only reason I would do it for now. And when we're looking from that perspective, it's just like, how do we just get more awareness for the brand at a fraction of the cost? And my cost is doing it on Facebook these days. That's the way I'm looking. I'm looking at it as a marketing stunt rather than actual revenue or profit stunt, to be honest. So that's why I think, and speaking to a couple of agents this week we've been interviewing, it's like if we do an end cap in a retail store, I'm not looking at that in-caps to deliver ROI in that retail channel and that retail program. I'm happy to be a break-even because I know that that awareness is going to carry fruits online at potentially a later date. That's the way I'm looking at it. Where before, I had to be profitable. Speaker 3: I mean, this was amazing. I mean, the way that you've kind of approached the brand and how you're building it is definitely like refreshing to hear compared to some of the other guests that we've had on the show. So thank you again for taking the time. Before we wrap up, would love just like one more takeaway, something for the audience and listeners to kind of take back and implement in their business today. If you have to give that one piece of advice, what would it be? Speaker 1: Stop focusing on the how and focus on the who. I think business owners and founders today don't understand that business is 90% mindset, 10% skill. And if they worked harder on themselves than they did their business, the business would grow. Because I think the business is just an extension of you. And the only thing limiting a lot of founders' success today is literally their belief systems that they have about how to do certain things. And that's the only difference between me and another guy who's got a hundred million dollar brand or a billion dollar brand. They just think about business in a different way. It's not the skill set. And I think that if they did a deep dive into their certain belief systems and saw what beliefs actually holding them back from their growth, that'd be the best strategy they could possibly hope for. And that's what they should go first. Speaker 2: Okay.