How to win in ecom in 2025 (from a $200M/yr marketer)

How to win in ecom in 2025 (from a $200M/yr marketer) Shaan Puri: I'm glad you guys invited me here because you're slumming it down with like the e-com millionaires again. Jason Lemkin: This is like a Make-A-Wish type of episode for us. Unknown Speaker: There's really two things that I need to talk to you about. Jason Lemkin: There's two reasons you're here. Number one, I cannot believe that you sell hundreds of millions of dollars of this stupid little wallet. This is unbelievable to me. It's been blowing my mind ever since I found that out. And now you're here finally to give us some answers. And two, I think you're very opinionated when it comes to ecom. You don't hold back. You don't pull punches. And so we like that. We like spicy guests. And I think you're going to be able to have both of those things for us. Shaan Puri: I think you should smack Shaan right now for calling it stupid little wallet. Jason Lemkin: Did you hear that? Stupid little wallet. I'm just trying to get him fired up. I told you he gets fiery. He gets feisty. So I wanted to stir the pot a little bit. Shaan Puri: You better play nice. I'll dox your e-commerce brand. Jason Lemkin: He knows too much. He's got some compromise on me. Shaan Puri: Dude, I've been a Ridge wallet owner since 2016 or 17. Ridge sponsored the hustle. Well, dude, thank you for the support. You guys were super early for newsletter sponsorships. We probably run a pretty big sponsorship ecosystem now. We sponsor a ton of newsletters, YouTubers obviously. You guys were one of the first people selling that ad space. Yeah, and you know what I learned about your guys' industry? Well, just any marketer who's savvy is people like you and Shaan. You guys know how to find early interesting stuff and you take all of the risks and you understand the arbitrage, like the underpriced opportunity. And so we had a lot of smart people who would buy these ads with us and I'm like, I can't believe they're doing this. It's so unproven. And then I realized that that's like the theme of a smart marketer, which is throw dollars at a variety of things and then exhaust it once everyone else comes and finds it. Yeah, it's ad arbitrage, right? Like everything's attention. So if I'm giving Facebook at this point $15 per thousand views and if I can get a better price off of newsletters or influencer or YouTube, like it's all just an attention economy. And it's so funny to watch that like pendulum swing back. Linear TV, like the TV your parents probably watch, is so cheap to run ads on because nobody's buying it. So like, you know, I'll probably spend... Jason Lemkin: What's like the CPM of linear TV? Shaan Puri: A dollar like, oh wow, because there's all these channels, right? There's been like, you know, thousands of channels that have come out that like have 800 people who watch them. So like you just buy like big blocks of random ad space that are just very male targeted. And like, yeah, literally like a dollar to reach a thousand people. Jason Lemkin: Do you know what our best performing ad channel is? Our marketing channel for my brand? Postcards. You would not believe it. Postcards. It's not super scalable. Like you can't just like spend to infinity on it, but you know, you put a dollar in, you'll get eight or $9 out of revenue. It's amazing. Shaan Puri: That's great. You use Postpilot? Jason Lemkin: Postpilot. Yeah. Nice. So, okay. So, Shaan, we should start at the start. So, What's cool about y'all's story is you sell a simple product. It wasn't like some Mark Zuckerberg innovation or anything like that. And you've scaled it up. You've built it brick by brick. But you said you started in sort of a sweaty services business. You didn't start the company, and you didn't start off in the product game. So can we just do your story for a little bit? And then I want to brainstorm other G2C ideas with you afterwards. But first, let's do your story. Shaan Puri: Sure. Yeah, you got that right. The show is My First Million. So I made my first million dollars off of an ad agency. So, you know, Facebook ads came out in 2012. That was like when it was probably like an open beta, anybody could join. And I learned how to do Facebook ads. I worked at an agency with my CM O'Connor, and the agency sucked. Like, you know, it was 200 people working there, probably 500 clients. You were an employee? Yeah. Yeah. I was just an employee. And then I was like, Oh, I should do this. I could do a better job of this. The ad agency I worked at, the average client was around for four months. So imagine that sales cycle. Like it takes 60 days to onboard them. They get 30 days worth of work and they're like, this sucks. And then 30 days to off-board. The average client was four months. Right. And I'm like, imagine if I just did this, but I kept them for a year. I'm like, I'll make so much money. Right. So I started an ad agency. I have 10 clients. Jason Lemkin: So you're saying this like it's simple. So you you're working at an ad agency. How old are you roughly at this time? I was 22. You're 22 years old. You're not like a marketing expert yet. Right. You're like, you know, you're learning on the job, I would assume. Shaan Puri: Yeah. Yeah. But like it was. It's kind of like TikTok shopped us today. Like nobody's an expert, right? Like it's a brand new thing that came out. Like I was, we're probably two and a half years into Facebook ads. People still thought Instagram followers were the most important metric and they're like wanting to run campaigns to get followers, right? Jason Lemkin: And was your agency super bullish on Facebook as a channel or it was kind of like this new thing that, you know, you got really interested in because it was new, but was the whole agency like, Hey, this is going to be a really big deal. Shaan Puri: Yeah, it was like a cookie cutter D2C agency like in the heyday. This is probably like 2015, right? So Facebook and email was the services we were providing. Like there was no other services. Maybe there was one guy doing Google ads, right? But it was really all in on Facebook as like this brand new channel. If I could go back in time, I would have been even deeper into Facebook. The biggest challenge with Ridge, we're skipping a couple of years in the future, but we try to diversify too fast. I was doing newsletter sponsorships and they worked. I should have put all of my dollars into Facebook back then up until 2020. I would have just been better off putting as much money into that as possible. And Ridge was one of your clients. Were they an early client? I'm at an agency. It sucks. I think I can do a better job. Me and my CMO, Connor, we ended up starting an agency together. We take 10 clients with us. Eight of them you have never heard of. They've just gone extinct. One of them was Ridge and then one of them was actually Mudwater, which has actually gone on to crush it. We did their Google ads at some point in 2016 or whatever. Take and Ridge over father-son best friend. They start this business. They get to like five million dollars a year in sales and they are you know, like The dad was a special ed teacher. Like, you know, Daniel was going to go to be an accountant and this thing just kind of caught fire. And he really didn't want to be an accountant. So like their expectations for the brand, when they got to $5 million a year, they're like, this is the best thing that's ever happened. Right. And me and Colin were being hella young. And I'm like, I think we can get to $15 million a year. I think we can get this thing to $30 million a year. I remember Telling Connor, I'm like, I think we can do a hundred million dollars a year selling this wallet. And he looks me down the face and he's like, there is no fucking way in hell we're going to do that. Right. This was like 2017, but they didn't really want to run it all that much anymore. Right. Like they didn't want to manage people. So I'm like, cool, we'll do everything else. So my agency kind of gets built around running Ridge Wallet. We do their customer service. We do their product importation. We do all of their marketing. We do their web dev. And then I'm charging them like $200,000 a month. Like all of the money is coming from Ridge Wallet. They end up being like 60% of all agency billables for my tiny agency. And at a certain point, they're like, hey, we should just merge, right? So me and Connor take an equity stake. Every one of my agency just goes in-house to Ridge. I ended up selling off the agency to one of the people who was running it. And that was probably 2018. And since then, Ridge has gone from, you know, $30M a year to over $200M. Jason Lemkin: That's amazing. What I love about that story is that it sounds like when you were running the agency, nobody in a business school would recommend, hey, you're running this marketing agency. And then for one client, you're going to start doing customer service, logistic support, all these other things. It sounds like wrong to do that. It's like, wow, one customer is going to make up 60% of your billables. From a business school perspective, that would be like a bad move. But Dharmesh said something once on the podcast. He goes, with my first business, He goes, I got mixed up later. He goes, just because I was ignorant doesn't mean I was wrong. Meaning, I didn't know the right way to do it, but my instincts actually were leading me in the right direction. It just wasn't, you know, I didn't have like some sophisticated game plan and maybe it wasn't typical, but it was, my instincts were correct. And it sounds like your instincts were correct that you should just keep leaning into the Ridge thing, even though it was like, maybe not what a normal marketing agency ever would have done. Shaan Puri: Most clients suck. If you guys have ever done client work, most clients fight with you. They don't pay you. They're always trying to fire you, right? Ridge as a business was ran by really cool guys who didn't want to take any reins away from us. They were very happy with the $5 million a year business and they're like, we could always go back to shipping the orders ourselves, right? The guys are like, you know, Buddhists, like raised Buddhists their whole lives. I think that's part of it. But they were very much like, hey, this is a good thing. These guys are growing this business. Let's give them more responsibility. And, you know, you can't really exit agency businesses for all that much, right? One reason why we went all in on Ridge and did the merger is like an agency is probably worth Maybe 1x client contracts and maybe at the peak it was 2x client contracts, right? So like if your clients, you know, if you have a guaranteed million dollars in revenue, you might be able to sell it for a million or two. Where Ridge, at the time, we're like fucking $10 billion a year business right here. We're going to grow this thing to the fucking moon. So it just made sense to put all our chips in that basket. What was the metric that you saw that gave you the aha moment where you were like, all right, they're doing $5M now, but this could be $30M. This could be $100M. Was there one or two metrics or was it just a guess? What was that research process like? It just seemed like they could always put another dollar into Facebook and it could work. The limiting factor wasn't marketing or awareness. It was the operations of the business. We had a year where we didn't have any wallets because we couldn't keep them in stock. We went from $15 million to $18 million one year. That was just because we couldn't make enough of the fucking product. You know, so often demand is the thing that stops these brands. Like you can only get to so big of an exam. And that wasn't the case here. You know, we did like a wearable and it was so hard to get people to buy the wearable. Like the CAC on Facebook was $400 back then. Okay. It was like so fucking hard to get people to buy these wearables where the wallet, it was like a $6 CAC. Like we just put up a new ad and they were just static images and they were just selling. That was the metric, man. That's like an interesting process because a lot of people, myself included, will say, focus, focus, focus, get it right, make it great. It's going to take a decade plus. But your story is more so like, I tried this, I tried this, I tried this. None of it worked. This thing was clearly the winner. I should go all in on this. Is that what your recommendation is? Well, my recommendation as a person trying to make it is you should make the best decision At the time. So whatever the facts are, when the facts change, make a different decision, right? Strong beliefs held loosely. So like, I'm like, I'm at an agency, I could have just like did that grind and be like, I'm gonna be a VP at this agency when I'm 26, I'll make like 200 grand a year. But I was like, no, these people suck. I think the best decision for me is to just do what they're doing better, right? And Then from the agency to Ridge, I'm like running an agency business. I'm like running an agency sucks. The Ridge thing seems to be going better. So I should just do that instead. I should find a way to encroach myself inside of this business. And then at Ridge, it was just like, I mean, for so long, we did not launch any other products. For eight years, it was just selling more of the wallet because that's what was working. As soon as it started to get a little hard, then we pivoted to everything else. Which is funny because I would have thought early on, I would have the paralysis of analysis would have been like, well, there's not that many wallet, like if you told me $200M a year in revenue, I would say, well, you've sold every man in America a wallet. Like there are no more wallet buyers. You know what I mean? That's like one of my uneducated, self-limiting belief a little bit would have been on that. If you said $200M a year, I'm like, well, there are no more people who need a wallet. It's a weirdly big TAM. In retrospect, I could tell you all the reasons why Ridge Wallet worked. It's a $10 billion a year TAM. Most of that is luxury brands. LVMH sells $4 billion a year in men's wallets. Curing, they own Gucci, they sell a ton of men's wallets. But then Tapestry, which owns Coach, Coach does a billion dollar a year in men's sales. So it's men's accessories. No men are buying those products. They're all gifts that are given to them and nobody's ever excited about getting those products. So the reason why I'm very public that I think Rich can get to a billion dollars in revenue is because Tapestry has a men's business doing a billion dollars a year in revenue with nobody loyal or passionate about that. So I'm just going to make whatever they make in all of our cool colors and our cool materials. And, you know, I think it's been so sexy to be talking about tech and AI these past 10 years, right? Or, you know, tech for 10 years, AI for 10 months. But I was at the All In Summit and I'm looking at those guys and the products they're talking about exist inside their phones, right? They exist inside some server somewhere, but they're all wearing fucking cool suits and watches and leather belts and I'm like, okay, I'll just sell them all that shit, right? I was going to sell like all the most practical thing ever because also smart people don't enter the space, right? The reason why Ridgewall was able to be so successful is because we're the only people running Facebook ads for wallets. Then there's been a bunch of other people who've started up and have tried. They've all ended up going out of business because it's really difficult to get right, right? There is no repeat business. You can't like I believe that the LTV will come save you later. It's very much like, can you tactically acquire customers profitably every single day? Hey, hey, Brown Shaan. White Shaan's got that immigrant energy that I love. You know what I mean? Jason Lemkin: What do you call it? The Korean restaurant? Shaan Puri: I call it a Korean convenience store owner energy. You know, it's just like there's not like too much overthinking it. It was like, well, you guys are all wearing this. I'll just sell that. Right. Jason Lemkin: And I think you'll keep wearing this. So, you know, Munger has these great quotes where he's like, his main thing is like, instead of trying to be brilliant, just avoid stupidity. Or he'll be like, you know, the best thing in the world is stupid competition. And we just have not much and stupid competition. It sounds like that's part of what, in retrospect, made Ridge work was you were like, Hey, look, we took the simple idea and there's not a lot of other really smart, you know, D2C marketers that were doing this. And so we were able to make hay. Shaan Puri: Yeah, totally, man. I mean, and to this day, the best D2C marketers are working on stuff like, you know, AG1, right? Like they're selling supplements and it's because it's a better business. Like undoubtedly, if there's an LTV tied to your business, like it's going to be better. It's going to be more valuable. It's going to trade at a higher multiple. But the other thing is like the best marketers have more or less left the industry, right? Like in 2021 running an ecom brand was incredibly cool. It has gotten less cool every single year. So there's less people doing it. There's less voices. There's less people talking about it. It's because it's fucking hard. I'm unjokingly called like the blue collar work. It's like You know, everyone wants to be shipping cool AI products or everybody wants to be shipping, you know, something that isn't physical boxes to people's doors of products you actually have to like make. Everyone wants to build, you know, the services of whatever. So anyway, yeah, over the past four years, it's gotten really uncool to do what I do. On $200M in revenue, are you able to make a good cash flow and profit? I know so many friends who have these companies and their numbers are huge, but cash is always an issue. Are you able to manage this well? Or at that scale, do you still struggle? I think the reason why you guys asked me to be here is to talk about the fact that you can, in fact, make a profit running ecommerce brands. Ridge has never raised any money. We have no debt. So every dollar in this business, every dollar on my balance sheet is profit that has been reinvested. I've been able to make millions of dollars a year for the past couple of years running this business. So yeah, it can definitely be done, man. I bought a house in L.A. directly because of selling wallets on the internet. Jason Lemkin: Give us a sense of a timeline. So you said kind of like, I don't know, it was 2016-ish, right, when you guys merged or you took over the brand. But can you just give us kind of like a year one, five million when you started working with them, then it went to 10, then it went to 22. Give us a timeline. Shaan Puri: Yeah, and I'm fucking horrible at timelines, so I'll give it my best. It's basically been, it's like a 50% kegger since I started working with the business. So I think they did a Kickstarter in 2013. The first year, they do like a million in revenue. In 2015, they probably do two or three. When I meet them, 2016, they do like five million bucks. So I think it went from five to 10 to 15 to 18. And that's like the hardest year of the business. When it went from 15 to 18, that was like we had no inventory with this massive fucking tax bill. That sucked. That was probably 2018 or 19 when that happened. 2020, we do $50M. So that must have been 2018. It must have been 30. So 18 to 30 to 50. And then the 50, this is the COVID year, so it went from 50 to 100. And then it's been like, Yeah, last year was a, I'll just say a multi hundred million dollar year. So let me, let me, let me, let me recap that for the listener. So you started in 15, I didn't hear what you said, but in 2016, 5 million. And then each year for that was 5 million, 10, 15, 18, 30, 50, a hundred with last year being multi hundred. That's incredible growth. Yeah. Something like that. Uh, so it's been super fun, man. Um, you know, and, Sam, you brought up, have I sold every wallet in America? That was like one of your concerns, right? So like I said, it's a massive TAM, right? And I always say like we're a great uncle gift. Like you guys are going to go to Christmas or you guys are going to go to fucking a birthday or whatever and you have to buy some guy in your life a present and you don't know his size, right? The Ridge wallet's a perfect price point. You can get one on sale today for like 76 bucks. And it is sizeless. And like every guy in your life, you'd be like, hey, look, it has your favorite sports team on it or it has carbon fiber or whatever else, right? So it's a perfect uncle gift. And most of our products are probably sold as gifts, right? Some woman in their life buying it for some guy in their life. And the wallets are about half of revenue right now. The other half of revenue is all the other stuff we've launched. So the biggest unlock we've ever had was in 2022, we started selling men's wedding bands. And once again, this is a category where people thought I was so fucking dumb to sell men's wedding bands. They're like, it is a commodity good. Like who the hell is buying this? The first year we do eight figures. It is the highest margin, fastest growing part of my company is selling men's wedding bands on the internet. Jason Lemkin: So let's talk about this because we're in this group chat that you have which is like a bunch of A bunch of DTC brands. I don't know what the cutoff is. I think I'm like below whatever the cutoff was supposed to be, but you let me in, which was nice of you. Shaan Puri: You're like the charisma hire. Jason Lemkin: Yeah, exactly. I'm the personality hire. So you talked about like going into new categories and like the wedding band was obviously a smash success. You've said the wearable thing maybe wasn't as big of a success. And you had this kind of interesting way of looking at it, because I just thought Ridge Wallet's that kind of like the carbon fiber metal wallet company. And you were talking about like Montblanc and you were talking about these other almost like luxury accessory brands and that was the vision you had for the company. When did that vision kick in? So like when did you reframe what the company is? Because I think Entrepreneurs, we hear stories where somebody already has the vision and they already have the right frame and it sounds beautiful and big and really appealing. But at the beginning, they don't always have that. You know, Mark Zuckerberg, there's a video of him on a couch somewhere and somebody's like, are you going to expand past colleges? He's like, no, that wouldn't be cool. And now he's like got satellites above India, giving people Internet so they can use Facebook. Like, you know, your vision expands as you grow. When did your vision kind of change or when did you reframe it? And secondly, how do you think about going into new categories? Shaan Puri: Yeah, well, I'm a very paranoid person. So like in 2018, I'm like, this is going to end. We have to fucking find some other shit to sell. So we got into backpacks and phone cases and all this stuff pretty early in 2018. And we, the first year we did like $4 million in backpack sales, or maybe it was $3 million. It was like a big chunk of revenue. And we canceled that program because I was too stupid to know that was like actually a good amount of backpacks. I was like, I'm like, the wallet's doing $20 million. How come we can't do $20 million in backpacks? In retrospect, we've since relaunched backpacks. So I was just too stupid, right? So we were always looking for new products to sell, mostly because I was worried that I was going to sell every wallet to every man in America. But as you learn more about the industry, the very common thing is very large holdcos holding lots of accessory brands. LVMH is just an accessory brand. Everything inside their portfolio just sells accessories, mostly to women, but there are occasionally pop-ups of very strong men's accessory brands. Montblanc is owned by RichMont. They own Cartier. That is the strongest men's accessory brand, and they do $500 million a year. You think it's going to be pens. Pens were like, 18% of revenue. It's mostly just like small leather goods, right? And it's across the world, people buying each other gifts, like wallets and backpacks and belts and everything else. So it's there's a playbook here. It's like, You have to find a group of customers who like you. You have to continue to make products that they like and sell it to them. I am more ruthless with product expansion than I think a lot of brands are and I think more people should just try. They're really worried about hurting brand and I'm like, your customers never fucking think about you. You're lucky if somebody is mad you launched something. You know, I always go to, uh, like Bic is one of my favorite brands. Like they make lighters and they make pens and they make razors. Right. And we buy all of those products independently and they're best in class. I didn't even think of the, I didn't even think of those three. Yeah. But you saying that I'm like, Oh, that's same. Yeah, yeah. And they're the best in class in all three of those. If you want a disposable razor or a cheap pen or a lighter, that's the only one. They own those markets. And it's just because the guy had a plastic factory and he's like, it's a French company. And they're actually, they got into tattoo removal now, right? Like they're making like, they just bought a bunch of tattoo companies because they're like, yeah, Whatever takes plastic, we're just going to do those things, right? And it doesn't violate anything in your brain because that's just the way it's always been. So I think it's more elastic than a lot of people want to admit. And brands die of being too rigid by that. Like Allbirds should have got into fucking betting and like all these other things, but they didn't. So now they're just a fucking dead shoe company, right? Like you should just be so ruthless with that product expansion. You're a very charismatic guy. You have a lot of interesting parts of your personality that I enjoy. What attributes would you say are most responsible for the origin of success, do you think? One, it's a very trust-forward organization. It's a very transparent organization. When I say trust-forward, six of us own it. Three of them are father, son, best friend, like literally would die for each other. And then me and my CM O'Connor, I lived with him for fucking five years. I was talking last night, there was a time when we were running the agency where we did not have $1,000. Like we would have to take... His dad gave him a car and it was like a 1997 Honda Civic that smelled and like paint was peeling, windows didn't work. We would take it to meetings. We would have to park it behind buildings so people didn't see us get out of this fucking junkie car. And you know, tying it to that, it's like not being, not being scared to go back to zero, right? Like I'm from like a very poor, bad area where kids died of fentanyl overdoses. And like I lived in a flop house with like fucking, Like there was like 14 guys living in bunk beds when I moved to LA. And so I'm like, dude, not scared to go back there. So just more willing to take risks. Things are never that bad. Also being willing to eat shit. I'm like, bro, if I have to fucking be a waiter, we'll figure it out, right? Yeah. So yeah, that fortitude, like not being like so ego tied to whatever the fuck you're doing. If I have to pack boxes, I'm gonna pack boxes, right? Jason Lemkin: What are the ways people get ecom wrong? So we've talked about Allbirds, right? It was a product that was hot. And now the stock is, you know, dead. There's, you know, a bunch of other kind of famous examples of that. And then there's companies like yours, which is keep scaling profitably, you know, never took a dollar of debt, never took a dollar of investment and made it work. Give us like your version of the do's and don'ts and maybe just start with the don'ts, like the dumb shit that people do, the bad decisions that people make or the The common traps you see people fall into, because I'm sure, you know, that's your network is ecom. So you see the full spectrum, people who totally flop, people who grind away for years and get nothing out of it, and people who excel and succeed. Shaan Puri: Yeah, so you can't out-muscle a TAM. So understand what you're selling and how big the market actually is. I see amazing operators waste time with horrible opportunities, right? The TAM is what the TAM is and if you're the number one fucking garlic press seller, that's kind of a meme in the community. Dude, you're executing ruthlessly to be the number one garlic press seller. That is worse than being the 12th best creatine gummy, right? Because that market is exponentially growing. There's LTV tied to it. Like, so many people just waste energy and time on these horrible fucking product categories. So, you can't beat a TAM. You're not better than the trend. So Bone Broth, there was companies that exploded, got to $80M in revenue. It was like, dude, this is the new way people are going to consume calories, Bone Broth. That is now at a 30-year low because that's not the cool thing anymore, right? Same with keto stuff. Yeah, exactly. So there's a guy from IQ Bar, his name's Will, he's incredibly smart. He talks about his trend surface area. So it's like, look, people talk about their luck surface area. He's like, I make products to have as much trend surface area as possible. So if keto's hot, I'll be keto. If gluten-free's hot, I'll be gluten-free. If it's sugar that's cool or non-sugar, like whatever, I'll make those products to just hit whatever the trend is and I'll just change my packaging so I'm always top of trend. You're not better than the trend, right? So that's the point I'm trying to make is you can ride it up, but as soon as it crashes, you'll crash with it. And then my third one, the most controversial one is that LTV isn't real. Like lifetime value only works if you're alive. So most brands die waiting for LTV, right? Jason Lemkin: And what you mean by that is you got to be profitable early on on that customer you acquired. If you acquire the customer for $200 and you only made, you know, $20 and you're saying, oh, the LTV, it'll all pay off. That's kind of what you're talking about, right? Versus the way you guys do it is you're trying to be profitable either first purchase or are you guys profitable first purchase? Or is it like, you know, a month or two later, where are you guys at? Shaan Puri: Dude, I have to be profitable in the first purchase. You think people are coming back to buy a second wallet in a month? I'm like, dude, the LTV from wallet customers is like maybe in 90 days I get 10%. So like it's very much I have to be. I have to turn, not a contribution margin, like actual true paying for all my fixed costs every time I sell a wallet to somebody. Can we play a game called Change My Opinion? And this is for both of you guys. I have a bone to pick with your industry. I think Shaan's heard me with this spiel before. What frustrates me sometimes, not exactly you guys, but I'm going to use you as an example, but people who all they worry about is like the CAC and the LTV and the TAM of these industries, and they don't spend any time actually thinking, is this product awesome? Is this the best? You know, like, is this truly solving a problem? And it bothers me sometimes that it's more of an arbitrage, not Exactly thinking about, can I create a widget that makes a customer's life better and is of high quality? I wish that more people in this industry sort of talked about that a bit more. Do you think that's a fair criticism or where am I wrong on this? I think it's a fair criticism. My industry has been washed out though. So the people you're talking about probably have all left. There's so few people left in ecom. Like Shaan brought up the group chat. Maybe two people respond every single day and one of them's me tab. It's like we're at a multi-year low of interest in the industry. So yeah, all those people have left. The people who are still here and shipping, bring up HexClad. You guys want to talk about amazing. You tweet about them all the time. They inspired me because you said they worked for three years finding the perfect pan. When I met Danny, it was 2020. They didn't have a website. He says they did, but you couldn't check out on the fucking website. They were Fucking selling pans at trade shows and like county fairs, cooking up eggs themselves, right? In Costco Roadshow, so not even in Costco, they had to pay to show up at Costco and fucking cook up these eggs. And they, from 2020, they'll do, I mean, it's documented at this point, over a half a billion dollars a year. Like they got to Hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in annual turnover with a hundred million plus in profit. Danny will fucking shoot me for saying all this stuff, but like, I think it's all pretty, pretty rare public, you know, Gordon, Gordon joined the brand. They have Fox as an investor now, pre all that. They were doing nine figures in EBITDA a year. Jason Lemkin: Didn't Gordon Ramsey write a huge check? He didn't just join the brand. He invested a pretty sizable amount. Was he part of a round or was it him personally investing in it? Shaan Puri: That's all public. He came in with Fox on something. It's like a three-way deal. Fox wants to give him money to make shows and he wants to get more equity. And HexClads, it's like a big three-way deal. Jason Lemkin: Gotcha, gotcha. Dude, I have like 12 HexClad pans in my kitchen right now. Shaan Puri: Are they awesome, Shaan? Jason Lemkin: They're great. You know, I don't know if they're the best pans. I don't try 100 pans, but they're way better than the pans I had before and to the point where I bought a second set of them because I was like, these are great. I'm happy with these pans. Shaan Puri: Yeah, and they put years into that product development. Like they actually care about their customers. What it comes down to is respecting your customers. If you're just like, that's why I don't like info products. Like if you don't respect your customers, if you're just like trying to arm them or like, you know. We have a customer name. So our customer's everyday dad, we call him Ed. And I'm like, almost every meeting, I'm like, are we respecting Ed? Are we delivering value to Ed, right? Everyone has an Ed in their life. Think about like your guys' brothers or your dads. He's just like a guy, he likes widgets and like, he loves fishing and like, he loves NFL. Like that's fucking Ed. And I'm like, look, Ed has paid for everything in my entire life. We need to take care of Ed. We want to make sure Ed gets the best, coolest shit possible, that we give him great value and great deals. And that's what HexClad did. And we're talking about, I think this industry needs a bad rap because so many people have entered it and so few people have left with any amount of money. Or the people who did leave with money, it was like a greater fool theory. They were just tricking somebody to give them money and then they bailed out. But then there's companies like HexClad where They'll be a 50-year brand. They'll be a generational brand and they're fucking crushing it. So it's possible. They're buying Super Bowl ads. Like, I mean, this is, you know, they were bootstrapped up until like two years ago, like a bootstrap brand getting that done. It's fucking amazing. Jason Lemkin: Yeah, I think, Sam, what you said is true, that marketing skill is the core competency for most of the winners in this space. Most. There's a few. There's a couple who just really nailed product or community, right? And then they just they built slowly brick by brick over a decade. But for the most part, the people you'll hear about and people you'll meet, They're great because they are great at doing Facebook ads, Google ads, or now TikTok content. And so that's true. But at the same time, you're like, oh, I hate that it's this CAC to LTV thing. Well, it's like, guess what? When you sit down with your team, you're like, how do we raise LTV? Right, like there's some natural gravity, like Sean's saying, like you buy a wallet every seven years. You're not really going to change that. But like for my product, you do buy it way more often. You know, in the first six months, we double our double the amount that they paid us on the first order. Right. So it's really it's a it's it's it's a movable number. Right. We can actually affect that. And then you're like, all right, well, how do we increase LTV? It's like, yeah, you could spam them with emails. You could spam them with text messages. But guess what? The better way to do it is to make an amazing product that they're going to want to buy again and like lower the return rate. How do you lower the return rate to get more profit? Right. It's like make a better quality product. And so I think that for anybody who's actually going to try to win, you will have to make an amazing product. Otherwise, you won't be able to do the ad arbitrage you're trying to do, because how else could you increase the LTV if everyone hates your product or it's not doing anything for them? And so, you know, I think the people who stick around and actually win in the long run are the ones who do what you do. Shaan Puri: Yeah, I think those are good answers to the to the question. I think that like, you know, when I see someone making like a boost your testosterone like thing, or I'm like, dude, I don't know if any of this works or if they're just really good at making a label that's appealing. And so I like start to lose confidence in the industry as a whole. Oh, totally. Well, actually, and that's actually, I'm actually curious if you guys have any of these like DTC brands where you're like, this product is amazing. And so it's actually really good to hear that HexClad is one of them. Do you guys have any other favorites? Well, going back to the supplement side, a lot of it is like, I mean, a lot of this work is being done for like the co-manufacturers, right? Like there's co-packers that actually do all the formulation. So a lot of times people are just showing up and buying stuff off the shelf. So if you're getting any sort of supplement, it's probably the same supplement white labeled 100 times and that's just the way the industry works. So I would put hard goods in a special category and we talk about D to C brands. I mean, all of my favorite fashion brands are small and independently owned, right? Does that count? This is Buck Mason, these pants are James Purse, right? I just got a suit from Billy Reed. These are all small, independently owned companies that are running. They have Shopify websites. Does that count as D2C, right? It's very much like there's a black box of bad rap products and I think a lot of it is supplements that come from co-mans, right? Or anything to do in the health and wellness space. That is typically where there's a bunch of shit. But if you buy a Ridge Wallet, you're gonna get what is on the package. You know what I mean? Or one of our phone cases or whatever. It's like a fucking phone case, man. It's pretty good. Jason Lemkin: Who else is crushing it? So what are some GDC brands that we wouldn't know or we wouldn't really realize how well they're doing just because we're not in the space, we're not paying attention? Shaan Puri: Yeah, the other reason you guys called me here to talk about the Woobles. Okay, the Woobles is fucking crushing it. The Woobles. Jason Lemkin: Okay. So what are the Woobles? Shaan Puri: So we are three young adult men. We're not the core customer, right? It is a crocheting product. So it is like you make little characters and they have licensing and like there's little education. It's like basically like either it's, you know, young people doing it to have less screen time or it's you're doing with your kids so they have less screen time. And that's awesome. Yeah, dude, when I met them, They might have been doing $10M a year. In two years, they've gone from $10M to probably $150M in revenue. No capital raised. They are still, and I like them and I respect them, they will not fucking launch subscription boxes. They're like, yeah, we don't think it's that important. I'm like, Jesus fucking Christ. If I could shoot these people, I would because they won't do subscription. It's like the perfect product. It is educational. It's fun. It's connecting with your family. It's this movement against screen time, which is a big trend that they can take advantage of. Every month they can have new characters. They can just show up in your door. You do them. There's a little community aspect. It's the single best brand and execution that I've ever seen. This will be a billion dollar exit because they're so fucking good at it. They've never raised any goddamn money. It's two people just putting it together in North Carolina. Jason Lemkin: How did they even think of this? Were they big crocheters? What is the origin story of this? Shaan Puri: Yeah. So I think it's a husband and wife team. I think she was just crocheting and she's like, yeah, I would love to have little guides. And there was like an Etsy community of people like selling crochet guides. And she's like, she would buy them and then she'd be like, okay, I'm going to make my own. And then she would, you know, release them. And then it's like, Oh, maybe I should just sell the, my, my little crochet kits and bam, fucking explodes, dude. So like, if you're listening to this and you're thinking like, okay, I want, I'm not washed out. I want to try ecommerce. I highly recommend getting into services first. Okay, like you should learn how to make money on the internet via services. And if the show's called My First Million, you'll make your first million dollars delivering good value to people like me or like Woobles, whoever else. Then find a trend that's very fast emerging, right? Like I think no screen time. I think creatine, those are the two biggest ones for the next two or three years. Like if you can do a no screen time creatine crochet kid, something, fucking, you'll figure it out, right? Dude, I've spent so much money on Legos lately for that no screen time trend. What are other no screen time products? Jason Lemkin: I feel like the microplastics is another trend, right? Shaan Puri: And air quality. Yeah. Dude. Yeah. So like just glass, everything. Glass bottles, glass containers, whatever. Just like imagine if you could just buy a backpack and they're like, we guarantee there's no plastic in it. Fucking awesome. You wrap it in paper, ship it to people. That's another trend I think is going to be fast emerging. Yeah. No screen time. Just more physical, tactical toys, right? Like bringing back the fidget spinner, but as like a focus tool, right? Like I think there's a bunch of shit you could do in there. But anyway, those are fast emerging trends right now. Protein was a trend that's basically probably dead, right? Pre-protein was collagen. There's always these just like pockets of success you'll find. And that's the beauty of the space. It's like- You know what it is right now in that space? What's the early boob milk? What's that called? Colostrum? Yeah. Oh my God, I'm getting so many ads for Colostrum. You know, the other one will be like, I think Raw Honey. It had like a small moment. I'm sure it's going to come back, right? There's like a bunch of New Zealand honey companies. Jason Lemkin: And if you were a founder, where would you kind of look for these? Are you a proponent of look in your own life? What are you doing or what is your wife doing that seems unusual, but actually there's a passionate community? Are you like, I scour Etsy and Reddit? Is that where you would look? How would you do this if you didn't know which trend to start with? Shaan Puri: Right. So you should look in your own life because You probably don't have the skills to actually go out there and like, you know, or I'm assuming you have no resources to actually pick a trend and double down and actually deliver on those promises, right? So you should find something in your own life that you actually know and are passionate about. If you're a more seasoned professional, I think you can find those things, right? And really what it would be is, I think Reddit's dead. I think Etsy's dead. Like that's AI slop basically at this point. The inshittification of the internet has happened to those two websites. I would look at literally what's happening inside of Irwan. Like, I would just move to L.A. and go to Irwan every single day because those are the best people at catching trends. Like, they were anti-vax in fucking 1997, right? Like, they are very, very early on those things. And if you're if you're not going to do that, then it's like you just you have to follow the girlies on TikTok. Right. The other one I bring up is Pilates. Like Pilates was a thing in 2000. It's having a massive resurgence right now. And like once again, we're three young men. How are we going to fucking make a Pilates brand? But Pilates for guys probably could be another trend. Jason Lemkin: Just needs a new name. Shaan Puri: Yeah, totally. Well, Laplace, I think is what the actual name is. Oh, no, LaGree, something like that. My wife knows. Yoga is very much a downward trend, right? And like this yoga was just a synonym for health and wellness and like, you know, non, just jacked dudes weightlisting. I think that's actually changing and it'll be something else like Pilates or something else. Jason Lemkin: All right, Shaan here with a quick public service announcement for any tech founders out there. You know, listen, getting customers is your number one priority. And to land bigger customers, one of the things that people don't talk about is that big customers need you to pass security compliance checks. That's how you can bring in some of the big contracts, but they take time and energy. And one of the things I've seen over and over again is a startup tries to do this all on their own. They meet a customer, the customer asks them about their SOC 2, and then they start shifting their whole dev team over To working on this and their features grind to a halt. Well, that's where Vanta comes in. Vanta is the all-in-one compliance solution that helps startups like yours get audit ready and build a strong security foundation. It's quick. It's painless. And the way that works is that Vanta actually automates all of the manual security tasks that slow you down and it streamlines your audit. So, join 8,000 plus companies. These guys are number one. Join 8,000 plus companies including many YC startups who trust Vanta. You can simplify your compliance and get $1,000 off. All right, we got a deal. $1,000 off if you go to Vanta.com slash million. Again, that's Vanta, V-A-N-T-A.com slash million. Shaan Puri: All right, back to this episode. What are some other going up and going down? Give me like a topic or a trend and tell me is this a buy or sell moment? Well, look, this is not a hot take. This is not Scott Galloway, but all big box department stores. It's very, very much like we just saw Joins Fabric go down. We just saw Container Store go down. We just saw Party City. That's going to accelerate. We are over commercial real estate. There's too many big box stores. Even Target is having a really fucking hard time. And my biggest wholesaler is Best Buy. I crush it in Best Buy. But all of that shit is probably... The FUD isn't real enough. It should be even more real. Nordstrom's, Macy's. I think small independent brick and mortar shops really do work. If you're in LA, you go to Century City. I was walking around Bloomingdale's and 10 years ago, or even 20 years ago probably, it was the number one place to buy women's fashion, women's contemporary fashion. It was the coolest thing ever. I'm walking around, they got blouses that are $800 and it's dead on a Saturday. Nobody's fucking shopping there. At the best mall in LA. I think the FUD isn't even We should be even more scared that there's gonna be more collapses and any sort of commercial real estate that's like 10,000 square feet plus that is like selling physical goods. The other one is probably Better For You, Candy. VCs have really backed this Better For You artificial sugar. You go to a fucking Target. There's all of these weird artificial sugar brands. I think it's gonna come out that that causes cancer and RFK is gonna be pretty against it. So anyway, I'm probably not launching anything in there, probably launching real sugar. And that's a very hot tape that could age really bad, that like real sugar is going to make a massive resurgence. Jason Lemkin: What do you think about like, you know, these, uh, like other people who do the same model you did services to products. So for example, I think the guys behind Brez, which is that, uh, I think it's a, I don't know what it is, like a mushroom drink or it's like an adaptogenic drink. So basically it's like, it gives you a high, but it's not alcohol. It's like, it's a weed or something. Shaan Puri: Their website says, Brez is micro-dosed cannabis and mushrooms in a can. Jason Lemkin: It's a weed drink. Those guys were agency people, right? Shaan Puri: I begged to be the first check in Brez. There's screenshots where they said they were working on it. I'm like, let me be the first check because Aaron is incredibly smart. He was the first person to figure out how to work with Metta to have controlled substances be advertised. So like he, that's like his specialty. Like if you had a cannabis company, you had to go through him and his agency called We Are Lucid to actually do the cannabis advertising on Metta, right? He found a compliant way to do it. So he's incredibly smart. Nick's an amazing operator, ran a great agency. That's the best model. The other person is Zach from Homestead. He has a company called Hollow Socks. I don't know how much time we have, but to unpack the history of ecommerce, ecommerce 1.0, selling random shit, on the internet, okay? Like whatever, pets.com. Ecommerce 2.0 was marketplaces. It was eBay versus Amazon versus everything else. Ecommerce 3.0 is what we consider DTC 1.0, which was like the first brands coming online, the Allbirds, whatever else. Then you get DTC 2.0, which was the COVID hotness, the peak, everything exploding, right? We are now in DTC 3.0, which is small, service providers, pivoting to brands with very lean teams, and Create Gummies, Holo Socks, Brez, the three best examples. Create Gummies has a team of eight people. I think they'll do $40 million this year, right? Holo Socks has a team of five people. They'll do $30 million this year selling socks, most of them at ads, right? And then Brez, they're public with their numbers. Follow Aaron on LinkedIn, and I think they did $5 million last month in revenue, okay? In beverage, in a controlled substance, that's fucking insane. Like that company's worth $300M today, right? And I think their team's incredibly small, maybe 20 people at this point. So yeah, that is the best bull case for ecommerce right now. Service operators who've seen like the Rise and fall of all these different brands have learned from them, have spent their money to get good at ads, right? Launching targeted hyper-specific brands and the three I named are the best. Shaan, you should go to drinkbrez.com. Do you see their website? That's the prettiest website I've ever seen in my life. Jason Lemkin: Yeah, that's usually not a good thing. The prettiest websites are not usually the ones that work the best. Shaan Puri: I hear you and I am on board with that. This is one of the exceptions. Jason Lemkin: But I, you know, I think what happens is you see the front, the front of the house is not always where the traffic is going. So, you know, the front of the house is the, it's kind of the hero. It's the brand, it's the aspirational, but you run your ads and maybe you're running straight to a PDP or to a TikTok shop or to different things like that. I think they're very heavy into TikTok, right? Like their model is the TikTok blueprint, which we just did an episode with Rob from Rob the Bank about like the TikTok blueprint that a bunch of the brands are using right now. And I think Brez is doing that where it's organic. It's kind of the TikTok affiliate slash organic model where you're getting really cheap CPMs because TikTok videos can just pop off and you know, you're putting out thousands of pieces of content a month. And it's driving sales unlike the way I've been doing it or you've been doing it, Shaan, which is like a lot of Facebook, Google ads. You know you put a dollar in, it's attributed exactly how much that ad generated in revenue and you just sort of optimize from there. The TikTok game is a little bit different. It's a bit of a spray and pray game for the most part. Shaan Puri: Yeah, so I just sent you guys, this is from Aaron from Brez. They did 4.6 million in revenue in Month 21, January. This is their LinkedIn post. So this is all public information that they share. TikTok shop was $37,000. Amazon revenue was $342,000. I'm not going to read this for the audience. Maybe I'll just show it. Dude, they're fucking killing it. Bryce is awesome. Jason Lemkin: Well, they post their P&L basically every month. It's not an actual P&L, but like, you know, sort of a marketing P&L on Twitter and LinkedIn. It's great. So we could read this. So total net revenue. 4.5 million. Let's see, that's in, you said month 21 now? Shaan Puri: Yeah, yeah. Jason Lemkin: Then their ads, they spent a million dollars on Facebook, 400,000 on Google. On TikTok ads, they spent zero, but I know that they must be spending on the affiliate part of TikTok because If I'm on TikTok, I see Brez stuff all the time and it's always an affiliate link. Swipe up and you can sort of buy it from there. Shaan Puri: Apple oven, $472,000. It really seems like one of the keys to this business, and this is not always the case, but it's picking the right idea. The right idea and the right angle, it seems like there's no other way to explain how something can get to $4 million in monthly revenue in 21 months. Yeah, I mean, and the reason they were able to be right is because they're both agency operators, right? Like they, the right people to launch a product like this. And also it's so hard. The reason why they're willingly sharing their P&L is they have nothing to hide and they don't think you can beat them, right? And I think anybody listening to this can't beat them because... Jason Lemkin: Are they shutting down their agency or they're just going to keep trying to do both? Like, why would you run your agency once this happens? Shaan Puri: Yeah, I mean, you end up just like, you know, selling it off or hiring operators. I mean, Nick Shackleford, which was the partner in Brez, I mean, he had, you know, an events business, he had an agency business, he had an email business. I think you just, you find partners to take that over and you just put more time into this. But, I mean, early on, I was like bullied about these fucking guys because they're the best. Jason Lemkin: Sam, I want you to Google Nick Shackleford tattoo. And tell me if you want to compete with this guy. Shaan Puri: Oh my God, his whole body is covered. Jason Lemkin: From the neck down to his toe, every inch of his body is covered in a tattoo. Shaan Puri: He looks like a guy from Prison Break, dude. Yeah, he looks like a Japanese murderer. You know how they do the Yakuza? That's insane. Including his neck. I mean, he actually got it done, man. He said it was so painful. It looks horrible. I mean, it looks great, but I don't want to do it. Jason Lemkin: It looks painful. Shaan Puri: Yeah, that's what I mean. That's insane. What do you think Ridge is worth right now? Oh man, I mean, the market for a brand like us is at an all-time low. Well, what's the all-time low number? A market clearing price is probably $300M. I could probably clear that at the market with our growth and everything. It's really hard to sell my business right now. I'm not trying to sell my business right now. I think by the end of the decade, we'll be doing $500M or $600M a year in annual revenue, really driven by this big tech rollout. We're really big in Best Buy already. We're going to be in Apple. We're going to be in Verizon, selling power banks, phone cases, cables. We already sell our wallets in a lot of those places. So that's like the next evolution of the brand is just more product expansion. But it's hard for me to sell my brand when Solo Stove is in a public company and I think they're worth maybe $100M on the public market, right? Like they peaked at $2.1B and now they're probably, the market cap today is $100M. And they have like $400M plus in revenue. They own Chubbies. It's very hard for my brand to go to market when if you squint we kind of look like them and they are They just need to be taken private. There's a lot of take private things to happen and interest rates are still too high to take a lot of stuff private. So we're just waiting, waiting for all that. What would you want to sell if you weren't doing Ridge? If you had to sell Ridge today, what would you, what other product? I mean, you're not a guy who would stop. What other product would you want to sell? Yeah, my goal for Ridge, eventually I'm not the long-term shepherd of this brand. If it's going to go public or whatever, or most likely get bought by one of the roll-ups, like in our industry, that's the exit path. There's 10 strategics that end up buying brands like ours. I would like to net $100M and then I would like to start a portfolio of brands and services, basically. Everyone wants to have their own little PE, their own little family office type thing. I would launch a bunch of weird little ecommerce brands that I think are going to be trend relevant and hire service providers to run those businesses. I love that you know what you want. You know, you've mapped this out of like what your ideal setup is. I love that. I love people who call their shot. Jason Lemkin: You talk about trends, but bone broth, it's hot, then it's not. Keto, it's hot, then it's not. Why go after a trend if it's going to ultimately do what trends do? Most trends don't last forever. Is that like building your sand castle, building your castle on quicksand or something like that? Why go after a trend when trends have this shelf life? Are you trying to time an exit or are you trying to You're going to pop trends? What's the plan if you're going to build on top of a trend? Shaan Puri: Yeah, dude, going back to Will from IQ Bar, trend surface area. Like, you create a product and a trend because that's the... The best way to grow is in a growing market. You can be average in a growing market and grow very, very fast, right? I was an average operator when Facebook ads were growing and that's why my business grew. Now I can be a good operator because I have to be, right? But when a market's growing very fast, you can just be average. And then once you get some sort of success, it's pivoting. So like if I was in the bone broth business, I would have told them, like, hey, we have to do fucking protein-focused bone broths or bone bars. Like, I'm that guy coming in here trying to, like, disrupt whatever fucking business I'm in. I'm like, yeah, if I was at bone broth, I'd be like, look, that's fine. We should do that. We're going to do bone bars and we're going to get, whatever, some jack guy talking about how they're great. Then I'd be in the bars business. Then it'd be like, we got to do bone supplements. We're going to be the only guys doing bone, whatever, marrow pills. Like, that's the type of shit I'd be pitching to them, so. Jason Lemkin: I love that that's your answer because it's like that's the attitude you have to have to win in that game. My takeaway is, man, what a horrible game to play. Like, you know, I was just doing a podcast yesterday with a guy and he goes, you don't want to be in the fresh produce business. He's like, you know, you know, he's like, you want to be YouTube, not a YouTuber. Right. Just as a simple example, he's like, you take the best YouTuber. And they're in the fresh produce business. They have to keep running as fast as they can on that treadmill. And if the treadmill gets faster and faster every year, and if they stop, they fall behind and there's a thousand other people on that treadmill. And so same thing, like if you're on a trend and a trend, you know, almost by definition is going to sort of peter out and then the new trends will emerge. That just seems like a really hard way to win in business when there's other styles of businesses that don't have that problem. Shaan Puri: But I think you're both could be right. I think the right answer, though, is to whichever whichever path you take should fit your skill set and interest, and you should commit to it and be that. You know, we had Moiz on Moiz Ali from Native Deodorant, and we said, like, why don't you do something easier? He goes, because I'm a merchant. This is what I do. Jason Lemkin: Yeah, I think that stuff is silly, dude. Shaan Puri: No, it's not silly. I actually disagree. I think committing to a path is significantly better than not. And if Shaan Frank is committing to this trend thing, then yeah, it's exhausting for you. Jason Lemkin: Yeah, but you can commit to a better path. That's not true. What are you talking about? Shaan Puri: How much better path could it be? He's got a 10-year-old company that's doing $200 billion a year in revenue. That sounds like a good path. Jason Lemkin: I'm not saying what he's doing is bad. I'm saying he's the outlier winner. And even he's like, yeah, there's a company that's like us that does $400M a year and is worth $100M on the public markets. Or we have to continually hop from one category to the next. And he's in a better one. It's more enduring. But let's say you're on the bone broth type of thing where it's a wellness trend. And the wellness trends or the diet trends, they change very rapidly. That's a hard game to play compared to Look at the possible set of businesses you could go into. That's definitely on the hard side, dude. Ecom is definitely on the hard side. And ecom on top of a trend is the hard version of the hard version. Shaan Puri: Oh, dude, look, I understand completely. But the reason why I'm in it is because it's permissionless. When I was 22, nobody would let me build fucking Nvidia servers or whatever. Like, you know, a more robust infrastructure led business, right? Like if I was going to provide, I don't know, fucking routing cable services, some random shit like that, like maybe now, you know, I could get into that, but e-commerce is permissionless and that's why I like it. Agencies are permissionless. It's like, The reason why we sold on Shopify is because nobody would give us a Nordstrom's PO, right? Like there's a level of... Jason Lemkin: There's a lot of things. SAS is permissionless. Communities are permissionless. There's a lot of things that are permission... Newsletters are permissionless. Whatever. There's a lot of things that are permissionless. The agency one is actually more permissionless than ecom because, you know, for ecom, you have to buy inventory, right? There is a capital requirement. The agency one is different, right? That's just, I'm going to hustle my skills and I'll get cash flow. Then what you did was use that cash flow to then invest and continue to grow the brand. I know a lot of people that got excited about ecom and didn't realize how scaling works with ecom. Shaan Puri: People squint and think it's sass and it's not. It's like your problems get harder the bigger you get, right? Like it's bigger POs. It's more management. It's everything else where, you know, if you're SaaS, it's like, you know, if it's 10 zeros or a thousand zeros being processed through your thing, who the fuck cares? Hey, Sean, you've gotten more, you're a great follow on Twitter because you're hilarious, but you're this perfect combination of being hilarious, but also I think you're right, like, because you've been there, done that. But has being as opinionated as you have been and willingness to call people out and this willingness to like say what you think, has that ever held you back? And do you regret doing that? Or do you think that like going all in on being a strong personality has benefited you? I mean, the only tangible negatives of being a public personality on the Internet is is If and when you get sued, because you will be sued, right? Everyone gets sued. It's the cost of doing business. They will read your tweets and depositions. So just like that is the reality, right? I think a lot of people like don't want to offend people. What did you mean by saying you want to shoot the Wobble family? No, like I mean, I was, I got deposed. I told someone I was going to drop a nuclear bomb on them and they read that. I don't know how to explain like I don't have access to nuclear weapons. You should be yourself and authentic. And my Twitter has sold like $300,000 worth of wallets. So definitely it's a net positive. Jason Lemkin: And your podcast, right? So your personality and being public about how well you guys are doing with Ridge and being funny and opinionated led to you guys doing this ecom podcast. And the ecom podcast pays you a bunch of money, right? Like you guys are doing really, really well off that. So that's paid off in a different way, right? You want to talk about that? Shaan Puri: Yeah, yeah. So I only have like four minutes. I got to go to a call and do my real job. Maybe something you guys don't know anything about, but. Jason Lemkin: Yeah, what are you talking about? Shaan Puri: Huh? Jason Lemkin: I take naps after this. Shaan Puri: Yeah. So look. The reason why I got public on the internet is because in 2022, all of my friends moved across the whole world because of COVID and I didn't hang out with anybody. And it sucked for everybody. 2021, 2022, like I used to have a community of people who talk about e-commerce and then they've all moved. So I was just by myself and I'm like, let me just get on Twitter and start talking about e-commerce. And through that, I made a bunch of great friends because it's a very lonely thing We're running a big business. Like, you know, my best friends from high school, one of them goes to like crime scenes and cleans up like when somebody kills themselves or whatever. And the other one does garage doors. So like, imagine trying to tell them being like, yeah, man, like, you know, I spent $8 million on meta, but I probably should have spent like, shut the fuck up. So, you know, you want to find friends who can have some sort of sympathy for worship building. So I got on Twitter, found those people. They're all like, you know, Jason from HexClads on there. Mike Beckham from Simple Modern. He has like $200M selling fucking water bottles. Matt from Peelacase. We started a podcast. Yeah, dude. What's it called? It's called Operators, so it's a niche ecommerce podcast. We have spinoffs. We have marketing operators. Dude, I think it'll bill at least $2 million to sponsors, but it might bill like $4 million to sponsors, and it's just... Us talking about ecommerce, probably one-tenth the listenership. I mean, way less. Maybe one-one-hundredth the listenership you guys get, but because it's so niche, it's like way more of an actual like community, right? And, you know, I think people want to be you guys because you guys are like an entertainment show, right? You guys are like a big show, you know, massive reach, entertaining people. But if you listen to this and you're an expert at something, do an incredibly niche YouTube channel because Like the sponsor integrations are just so much deeper. Like our sponsors fulfill the ERP, right? And like, you guys don't know what that is, but if you're an ecommerce merchant, you need an ERP and the annual contracts are $150,000 a year and we've probably sold a hundred of them, right? So it's like, they'll give us $600,000 a year because we're the only marketing channel for them, right? Anyway, yeah, so we do a podcast. Jason Lemkin: I think that's great advice. All right, we'll let you go. We know you've got to go sell wallets and rings and other great things. Shout out your Twitter. Shout out your URL. Where do you want people to go? Shaan Puri: Okay, go to Ridge comm slash Sean and buy a wallet. That's the best way to support me right now in this let's go time Never stop selling guys We appreciate you man. Thanks for doing this. All right, that's the pod. Unknown Speaker: I feel like I can rule the world I know I could be what I want to Travel never looking back. Jason Lemkin: Hey, Shaan here. A quick break to tell you an Ev Williams story. He started Twitter and before that he sold a company to Google for $100 million and somebody asked him, they said, Ev, what's the secret, man? How do you create these huge businesses, billion dollar businesses? And he says, well, I think the answer is that you take a human desire, preferably one that's been around for thousands of years, and then you just use modern technology to take out steps. Just remove the friction that exists between people getting what they want And that is what my partner Mercury does. They took one of the most basic needs any entrepreneur has, managing your money and being able to do your finance or operations, and they've removed all the friction that has existed for decades. No more clunky interfaces. No more 10 tabs to get something done. No more having to drive to a bank, get out of your car just to send a wire transfer. They made it fast. They made it easy. You can actually just get back to running your business. You don't have to worry about the rest of it. I use it for not one, not two, but six of my companies right now. And it's used by also 200,000 other ambitious founders. So if you want to be like me, head to mercury.com, open up an account in minutes. And remember, Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Involve Bank and Trust Members, FDIC. All right, back to the episode.