How True Classic CEO Went From Sleeping in a Garage to 9-Figure Revenue

How True Classic CEO Went From Sleeping in a Garage to 9-Figure Revenue Speaker 1: Welcome back to another episode of Chew on This. This season's brought to you by Instant. And today we have a really, really special guest. If you haven't heard of this brand, you're probably not in e-commerce. And if you are in e-commerce, you probably should find out. Who True Classic is. True Classic is one of the brands that we've all been following for many years. It's a billion-dollar enterprise. It's a brand created with true, true, true ethos of what it takes to build DTC, figure out retail, build brick-and-mortar, and we're honored here to have the co-founder and chairman of True Classic, Ryan Bartlett, who came all the way from the West Coast. I'd like to say just for the pod, but he's here for other things too. Ryan, I really don't even think you need an intro, but for the few people who may not know you, give a little bit of your background. What is True Classic and what are you up to right now? Speaker 2: Look, at the end of the day, I'm still a family man. I am a husband. I'm a small-town guy from the Midwest and I'm a guy who started True Classic. Really trying to put impact ahead of everything. And when you put impact ahead of everything, you build very big things very fast. And you're doing it for the right reasons. Right? When you when you really striving to do things for the right reasons, things go well, you know, go figure. It's, it's one of those things where, you know, we didn't have to Raise a lot of money. We didn't have to. We started with literally just a few thousand bucks to get this thing off the ground. Obviously, we started with a lot of know-how before starting True Classic, so it wasn't like this was all just a big, you know, accident or we got lucky. It was, you know, a lot of work leading up to it, but. That's who I am. Speaker 1: Before we get started, a quick word about today's sponsor, Instant. 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Speaker 1: And then, I don't know if that worked out, but you're not playing poker right now. Give us a little bit of background of that. Speaker 2: I mean, I did music for a while. I got all my degrees in that thinking that was going to be my future. And then I moved to Atlanta and all my buddies were making money playing poker. So I was like, well, I just, let me just figure this out. And I started out losing and then I slowly got a little bit better. And then I had a few big online scores and I'm like, okay, I'm the best. I'm the best ever. And so I convinced myself, I'm like, this is what I'm going to do forever. This is great. And so eventually I moved to Vegas, probably went broke within, I want to say four months. And I was playing the low six. I was playing like one, two... Speaker 3: You stretched it. Speaker 2: Yeah, dude. At the MGM, I moved there with like a couple thousand bucks. I thought it was gonna last me a lifetime, too. I was like, oh, I'll be good for years on this. Speaker 1: Wow. Speaker 2: So I was putting all my rent money on the line, but um... Speaker 1: What, were you playing like 10-12 hours a day type of thing? Speaker 2: Oh yeah, all day. So I would eat all my meals there. I would get poker comps and just like... Speaker 3: Where were you living? You were living in a hotel room? Speaker 2: No, no. I was living in this garage at a house because they didn't have bedrooms. My buddy was living there and he's like, we don't have rooms, but I got a garage. And I was like, I'm in, dude. Speaker 1: Wow. Speaker 2: And you had to be out of there by like 7am though, because it got so hot, you would die if you stayed in there. Speaker 1: Is your buddy still playing? Speaker 2: You know, honestly, I think he's still out there. Unknown Speaker: I haven't talked to him in forever. Speaker 1: You should definitely visit him. Speaker 2: Yeah, I did. It was insane looking back, dude. Speaker 1: Wow. Speaker 2: I was living on like an air mattress, so it was quite the ride. But yeah, I went broke after a couple months and I didn't want to borrow money because that's what everyone does in that industry. All the poker players just borrow money from each other and I just could not bring myself to ask someone for money. So I pivoted to the nightclub industry and then did that for about a year and eventually just got sick of that, went back to school and then moved out to LA to try to get back into music. Speaker 1: Wow. Speaker 3: And what kind of music were you producing? Speaker 2: It was a mix. It was very roots style. So it was like jazz, hip hop kind of influence. And I was working with a lot of different artists, but I was not making money. That was the kind of the punchline was just like, I was living in LA struggling and I just, I wanted more. I wanted to get into business and then, you know, the second I started thinking about digital marketing, everything just got so much better. So I got a job at like this local SEO company called TrafficZoom. Shout out to TrafficZoom for giving me, you know, my first opportunity. Speaker 1: Wow. Speaker 2: But I applied everywhere and only got this job and I worked as like a web developer slash graphic designer slash kind of jack-of-all-trades content creator. And listening to those sales guys on the phone talking about SEO and how much those monthly retainers were, I was super intrigued. So I'm like, I gotta learn this SEO thing, whatever this is. And this is the heyday of SEO, back when Google was like really crushing and they didn't fall off the face of the earth with ChatGPT. But yeah, dude, so I started learning SEO, started an agency, worked my way up to page one, And stayed up on the top of page one for like five years and just got all the business and started building other people's businesses. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Like SEO Los Angeles, SEO company, all those like big keywords. Speaker 3: And what year was this? Speaker 2: This is... I want to say 2010. The heyday of SEO. Speaker 1: One thing interesting in this first few minutes, right, is there's like this theme of just resilience and then also learning whatever you don't know, right? So now I want to take this from figuring out SEO, figuring out obviously the ability to build other people's businesses and at some point you're like, wait, Now it's time to learn to build my own. When does that crack happen and like what is the thing that pushes you over? Because you got from living in a garage broke to picking up a new skill to like learning and building and stuff. At some point you're kind of like, damn, I kind of came a long way already. But at that point, you're like, I want to take a completely new challenge now. What is that? Can you give us that mental mindset? Speaker 2: So seven years in, I had already built a nice life for myself with SEO Direct. I had a good amount of clients. I had a good amount of revenue coming in. I had bought my first house. I had already had my first kid. I was married. So I was already kind of like settled. And from there, I was just feeling like I still wasn't doing enough. You know, building these little businesses in SEO was nice, but it wasn't super fulfilling. And that's what it kind of went back to is I wanted to do something on a bigger level where I could take care of more people. I could do more good with that money. I could wield those resources the right way. And I got obsessed with e-com. E-com was really the path in my opinion after that because to really scale a service industry business, very, very difficult because it's all people-based. So I was like, okay, let me get into this. And I started really just learning on Facebook groups. I started going into these free channels and learning from these guys who were dropshipping and, you know, doing six figures a month from third world countries without even touching product. And I'm just like, if these guys can do it, I can figure this out. I can definitely, you know, my chops were all digital marketing, but I was like, I can learn this income thing. And so I spent about a year just being obsessed in those groups, asking questions, reading results, pinging people, asking more questions, just being really infinitely curious. Speaker 1: How do you know what to even ask? Speaker 2: Because I would see the parallels in the group chats on what was working. And so I would just start saying like, okay, so for you guys, what works is you test a bunch of products on a big website, right? So I built a website. And then what you do is whatever is the winner on that website, you then build another website around that one product. And then you start scaling that. It was just so much work though and I was like, I just cannot do this. I did the dropshipping thing for a few months and it was a nightmare. It's so much work. It was really good training ground for True Classic. It's what got me learning everything in the business. Now, I was never really a master of anything, but it taught me to be a jack of all trades because you have to know everything to make that business work. So that's where it started, dude. So I did that in 2018, and then I started True Classic end of 2019. So about a year and a half, and this idea was just swirling in my head about men's apparel. And I've told this story many times, but I was just incredibly underwhelmed by the industry. And I just got a lot of confidence the more I looked into it. I mean, just like you guys, I'm sure you look at opportunities and you look at different products on Amazon and you're like, my God, I could take this thing to the moon if I was operating it, right? Like you probably think that all the time. So that was me. I was just like, I'm looking at it, I'm looking at it, I'm spending all this time and I'm just like, this is insane. Like, why isn't anyone building anything for dudes the way I would want them to? And then I was like, let me just put my money where my mouth is and test this out. Speaker 1: So that's incredible. I think, you know, one thing you said there is like, we all think about the market a certain way, right? And I think a lot of us Look at it from like, oh, something's missing or have an ultra level of confidence of we can make this better. Or, you know, it's kind of how we started with Obby too, right? It's like, hey, there's a gap in the market. But, you know, then from there and actually executing on that, right, there's a huge difference. There's a huge drop off. There's a huge failure rate too. When was the first time from 2019 to like your first onset of failure, right? Of like, holy shit, I either spent too much, have too much inventory, whatever, maybe we may be going broke. Not so much like, oh, True Classic started taking off, but more so, when was the first big roadblock? Speaker 2: The first, I mean, dude, there was a million failures. I mean, we're still failing on a lot of different things today. So I don't want to pretend like we have it all figured out. I mean, the overbuying of inventory is always the most impactful to the business because it ties up all your cash and tying up all your cash is obviously not a good thing. But we have failures all the time. We have failures with hiring people that we're thinking are going to be killers and they come in and they're just not and we have to figure out how to get them out and that's a really tough conversation to have and that's a failure on some level. But either it's people or it's the business. In the early days, There wasn't, I mean, it was just Nick, Matt and I for like the first year and a half. We didn't hire anybody, but we, you know, I don't recommend that. We were really hell bent on staying profitable and we killed ourselves to make this business work in the early days and it very well could have died many times, but we just stuck it out and we just, we didn't let up. You know what I mean? As hard as it was, we all had families, we had things going on, but I would say a lot of the failures early on were meta-related, you know, because the business was so tied to meta. Yeah. And nothing is worse than failing there, or you know how meta goes, like they'll just make an update, they don't tell anybody, and then all of a sudden everything's crashing down, and you start realizing you need to hedge on marketing because you cannot be tied to one source of truth. And so now as a business, weirdly enough, we are pulling back considerably on meta for the first time in six years. And the business is not suffering at all. So it shows us that we've done a lot of work on brand to get us here. But failure wise, dude, honestly, we could talk for 10 hours a day for that for a week. I have so many failures to talk about. But I think the point is, is that To really survive in this entrepreneurship world, you just have to get used to failing. It just becomes part of life. There's nothing wrong with it. It really is just, you know, and poker did that for me, right? I failed a lot there. I went broke many times and so I was kind of used to it. So it wasn't, it didn't feel like a defeat when I failed. It just felt like, okay, this is another lesson. Let's keep going kind of thing. Speaker 1: That's great. Speaker 3: And you mentioned your coworker or your co-founder, sorry. Where did you guys meet? Like when did, when did you guys kind of, did you all come up with it together? Did you come up with it and then kind of bring these guys on how to go? Speaker 2: So I came up with all the IP. I kind of built the idea. Matt was a family friend. I was really good friends with his older brother, Alex. And when I moved to LA, I didn't have family. I still don't have any family other than my wife's extended family, but I would spend a lot of holidays with them. And Matt was a lot like me in that he was super big risk taker. He loved, he was an entrepreneur. He had a lot of different businesses. And eventually we started working together on a couple of projects. And I was doing SEO for like some of his solar companies and things like that. So we just developed kind of a partnership with that. And then when I was launching True Classic, I was very aware that I was not gonna be able to do this on my own. So I just reached out to Matt very casually like, hey, I have this company I'm thinking about, I have an offering. At the time, they didn't really, Matt was like, oh, okay, yeah, like he didn't think much of it. But I was like, listen, I've been looking at this space for a while. I think I'm really onto something with this. I think it's gonna do well. If it doesn't, I'm only gonna lose a couple thousand bucks, not a big deal. So I'm like, who do you know in apparel? Because I need a relationship with a manufacturer. And so he gets me on the phone that night with Nick, who's our other co-founder. And Nick had just sold his apparel company. So he was like the perfect guy for me. And so I linked up with Nick. Nick gave a bunch of his equity on that call to Matt. And so we just had a very expensive phone call that night. It was in hindsight. But yeah, that's how I found him. Speaker 3: That's awesome. And did you guys, did you guys all, as the company, I guess, progressed and before you, you know, hired a huge team, did you all do different things or how'd it go? How was the workload kind of spread out? Speaker 2: We really lucked out in that we all had very different skill sets and we were all really trustworthy of each other in each of those skill sets. So Nick was really good at dealing with the manufacturers and speaking their language and also designing the t-shirt. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 2: Because I knew nothing about apparel. Zero. So it was like, Nick, this is what I want. I want it to fit like this. I want it to be tight in the arms. I want it to be like this. And he brought that to life. And so that was huge for the company, obviously, because I didn't know how to do that. And then Matt was really good at being kind of our makeshift CFO in the beginning. We didn't have any real, I mean, Nick has a bit of a financial background as well. And thank God for that, because that is not my background. I'm the, you know, I'm the musician poker guy. So I'm just, you know, I know pot odds, but I don't know how to read a P&L. It saved my life. Or I didn't. I didn't in the beginning. I do now. The point was is that our skill sets were very divide and conquer and it was great. Speaker 3: That's awesome. I feel like that's the perfect way to do it. Speaker 1: Especially being able to not have to hire those roles early on. Speaker 2: We filled all the buckets. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Like we really did. Between all three of us, that's what allowed us not to have to hire. It was huge. Speaker 1: People don't realize the value of that. Because even for us, like between Ankit, who did branding design, and Ashran, who did media buying, and I did finance and ops, like you actually don't need to hire for so long until scale, right? I want to pivot into what 2026 is going to look like. I kind of want to go off to the back of what 2025 was like. I think this has been an interesting year. From our point of view, right, it's like you had a start of the year where there was a lot of uncertainties, but of course you also had a presidential election that created some of it. You have the rise of tariffs. You have, you know, you have rates swinging in different directions. You don't really know where consumer behavior is, but then you also see some really great exits happening. You see like maybe cash becoming a little bit more flush from VCs and PE. It's a weird world. There's almost different conversations you can have and get a completely different view of what the world is. What has the world been like for you guys in 25 years? What's been the main focuses, especially when it comes to acquisitions? Speaker 2: I would say digitally it's been tough. I wouldn't say we're growing a lot digitally, but where we are growing from digital is by means of wholesale. So you're bringing in all those customers... Speaker 1: And what's that split right now for you guys? Speaker 2: Wholesale is still not a huge part of the business because we're still ramping it up. But I would say it's gonna net out closer to 10 to 15 percent of the business by the end of this year. Speaker 1: Got it. Speaker 2: Because you still have to get through Q4. Yeah. But next year it'll be, it could very well be 20 to 30. Wow. You know, it could really just get astronomical. So we have a lot to go there. But I would say acquisition is just getting harder for everybody. Yeah. Right, like that's not a big surprise. I mean everyone knows that it's hard out there, but I think product expansion for acquisition is something people don't talk enough about. I know that a lot of people always want, what is the growth hack? How do I get a little bit better of an acquisition and ROAS and NC ROAS, a new customer acquisition? But what it always goes back to for me is like, how well does the website convert? How much CRO have you done? How good are you to the customer? How well have you developed your product for them? Have you iterated, you know, as well as you could have? Can you go back to the drawing board there? So, you know, this year has been great for a lot of reasons. And this is going to be a big growth year for us with Wholesale and finding other wins on other channels. I think, you know, AppLovin's been great. I'm excited about Q4 coming up. All the people in the apps are going to be buying again. Because whenever gifting season comes around, everything works. It's so funny how that happens. Everyone's like, meta works again. It's like, no guys. Speaker 1: It's not like cash coming in. Yeah. God knows where. Speaker 2: Yeah. No, it's interesting. It's going to be a great year though. I think next year is going to be even bigger. You know, we have women's and kids dropping this year, which is really big for us. So we're going to see what that's going to do. We bought, you know, we didn't overbuy on that. We bought a decent amount, but we left ourselves some upside. So we'll see how that goes. Speaker 1: You know you and this is gonna be my follow-up question is like I think one thing about you guys over the last especially You know five six years is like this kind of like incredible amounts of focus, right? Especially with the amounts of revenue you guys have done, you know nine figures You can easily start to get distracted with like well you know we can easily go do that too or let's get into this and let's get into that. So much so you guys haven't even gotten into like women's and kids the most like adjacent parallel world. Five, six years into business, how do you keep that mentality? And then have you come close to breaking that and you had to pull yourself back? Or you guys just always had this pillar of, hey, this is what we're going to do until we Hit certain revenue or certain milestones. Speaker 2: I mean, look, it wasn't for a lack of trying on the women's thing. We failed multiple times before we got it right. And a lot of that had to do with me trying to build a product for women instead of getting a woman to build a women's product, which seems obvious. But I'm coming from a very scrappy entrepreneurial, let me just trust the customer data standpoint. And there's just an incredible amount of nuance to women's clothing that I'll just never understand. So I had to bring in the right person. That person was Sawako and she's really heading up all things women and kids. She comes from that background. She knows what women want and she's listening to the audience. She's pinging our insiders as to what they would want. She's taking that data, putting it back into the product and making something amazing for them. And so, you know, it took me two years of failing for me to finally get it right. But now I feel, we went back to the insiders and we said, how did you like it? And everyone loves it. Versus the first two times, everyone hated it, like universally. We were trying to basically fit the men's t-shirt onto a woman and say, hey, do you like this shirt? How does it feel? And women are like, I don't even really wear t-shirts. You're trying to force me to wear this. I wear tank tops. I wear ribbed tanks. I wear crops. I wear leggings. I wear activewear. I wear all these things you don't want to show me. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: And it was finally like, okay, let's just give them what they want. But to go back to your point, I think the most important part of this conversation and one thing I want people to take away from it that I look at in business and what you said is incredibly important. It's the impact component. If you're not focused on the things that matter for the business, you will not drive that business to grow. It'll just be plateauing, it'll be steady, and everyone will be wondering why. It really takes, you know, Ben and I, this is what we focus on a lot, is getting people back to what matters in the company and showing them that like, you're doing all this busy work over here, but this is actually the stuff that really matters for the business. You know, while I do appreciate this work, and I know it is work, I want you to spend 90% of your time focused on this stuff because it'll be massively impactful to the business. And until you really understand the whole business, you don't know how to read impact. You don't know what the impact is supposed to look like. So you have to really understand what you're doing. And since I've been here from the beginning, I can tell you, for instance, that the welcome flow is wildly impactful, right? Like you guys know. If you edit the welcome flow just a little bit, And it's something that every single person touches on the website. It makes a monster difference for the business. But try telling that to people that just started True Classic, they just have no context, right? So I think that as leaders, you have to really pull everyone into what the impact is and remove all the noise and just filter out the busy work and get back to what really matters. But that's a conversation we have to have with our leadership all the time because not even all of our leadership team necessarily know because they might be newer or they just don't understand the full context of the business yet. So we have to help them understand so that they can go back to their people and say, this is what we need to be focused on guys. Show me the impact. Show me the impactful work you're doing. Now we have everyone do these lists and we say, okay guys, what are you working on this week? Show me your top three impactful moves. And then we'll say, that's not really that impactful. Let's try this one. Let's put number three up to number one. Like we had to coach them to show them what the impact looks like. And when you start to do that, All boats rise, right? Because then everyone's working towards the same goal. You got to get everyone on the same page with that. Speaker 1: Quick break to talk more about today's sponsor, Instant. Are your abandonment flows making at least 20% of your site's revenue? If not, you're in trouble. Most retention tools have bad short-term memory and even worse opt-in rates. If you don't catch an email opt-in within hours, that data's gone forever. So why pay for someone to be on your list if your abandoned emails never fire when they come back? Instant fixes that. It captures those emails, remembers them forever, and then sends shoppers the exact messages They need to come back and buy. It takes minutes to go live, there are no contracts, and they even have a 4X ROI guarantee. Or simply, your money back. Try it now at instant.one slash Chew and start unlocking all of that lost revenue. That's instant.one slash Chew. Now, let's get back to the episode. Ryan, one thing that I think, you know, you even said in the beginning of the episode before we got started is like, you guys go into the office every single day. And there's something about the merit and the work ethic you guys have. I mean, I even remember meeting Ben a couple years ago and he had told me like this reward system you guys built on Slack, kudos, on how you reward people and like encourage people to recognize other people doing well. There are so many, I feel like if you got a chance as us founders to spend a day watching how you guys operate, True Classic. There'd be a million things to learn, okay? But if you could give me like two or three things that maybe others are doing but like you guys do exceptionally well whether it's from team management or an acquisition funnel build-out strategy or how you create content Whatever it may be, what are those few things that you guys do that, you know, maybe some of us can go and really reconsider how we're doing it? Speaker 2: Yeah. One of the really fun things we do is every, I would say month, we get one of our, so we have the insiders group, which is our most hardcore customers. You guys have a Facebook group, I'm imagining with all that. So you know exactly what I mean, but you get whoever is the craziest customers for you that absolutely bleeds the product. You get them on a live call with the entire company once a month and you sit down for a full hour and you just let everybody hammer them with questions about what do you think about this, how do you feel about the product, what did you feel when you first hit it, how did you, where were you in the funnel and like we just sit there and try to really understand and it gives people that don't have a ton of context directly with customers What it should look like, right? And this is how you learn more about the customer and this is how you provide the most value you can. You speak to them one-on-one and man, do these customers appreciate it. They sit there and they listen to us and they're like, no company's ever done this for me. And so it's such an obvious thing that everyone should be doing, which is you sit down and you just hit them with questions. And at the end, we give them a bunch of money to give to charity. We give them money for True Classic. We give them money just in general, just to give us your time. But it's so rewarding. Everyone leaves that call feeling so amazing. They feel like they're really making an impact because when you see their face, you see them smiling, you see them happy, you see them loving what we're doing. It makes it feel like it's all worth it, you know, because you're just kind of like. We're all in this remote first. I know you guys have people here at the office, but we're still very much remote first. So everyone's just sitting in their lonely apartment working, and they finally get a chance to really connect with people on the other side, and they get to see how much our stuff impacts that person. And then it makes it real for them, right? They can really feel it. So that's one thing. And going to the kudos thing, if you haven't heard of kudos, it's essentially you set up this system where you can allocate a certain amount of money per year towards it and everyone in the company gets a certain amount of coins. You call it like True Classic Cash. And every month they all get allocated this certain amount and then they all dish it out to each other. And they do it based on the core values of the company. So moving fast or leading with empathy or whatever the core pillar is, they give each other the money. And the money you can flip for Uber Eats, you can use it on Amazon, you can use it, you know, on Starbucks, whatever it is. But the people love it because number one, obviously everyone loves getting things, but they just love giving it to each other more than anything. They love recognizing each other. Speaker 1: Community in itself. Speaker 2: Yeah, so those are two things that we do a lot of, which we absolutely love. Speaker 1: Amazing. Speaker 3: That's great. Actually, and correct me if I'm wrong, I read somewhere that you have pretty strong military roots. Your father was in Vietnam. Your stepfather went to West Point. You had some grandparents. World War II. Yep. I always see that when I meet kids who kind of grew up in that environment, they are very, very disciplined. Yeah. Very, very grounded. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 3: And you seem like that's something or it seems like that's something that might have shaped how you kind of run this company. Absolutely. Speaker 2: Dude, I was wild. In my teenage years, I was a wild kid. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: And my parents were tough on me. I mean, my dad was a freaking sergeant. My mom was too. I mean, my mom was even equally as tough on me. I really appreciate it now. I hated it when I was young because I'm just like looking at my friends and they get to do whatever they want. And I was just like, you know, getting rolled with an iron fist. But I look back and I realize had I not had that, there was points where I could have definitely gone off the rails and done some, made some really bad decisions. And it kept me on the straight and narrow, honestly. And as much as I was messing up, there was always a big lesson for them, or a lesson for me to learn from them on how my actions affect other people, what this could mean for me in the future, and that you have to fix this stuff now because this is what it'll look like later if you don't. So, you know, I was always kind of the, I always felt like kind of the black sheep because everybody was in the military, and I think they kind of expected me to follow suit. But, you know, it just wasn't for me. But man, do I appreciate those guys now in business because when I get them in, they are workhorses. They think this is easy work. You know, this is light compared to what they had to deal with. So I'm always looking for the military guys or I always have a soft spot for them. Also, the team sports guys. If they played in college or they had some sort of professional background, these guys are relentless. I love those two groups of people more than anything because they see this stuff and this is like, this is not that bad. This is work for them. I love it. Speaker 3: That's great. Speaker 1: Amazing. Speaker 3: What does success mean to you beyond numbers and sales? Speaker 2: It means impact on people. That's really what I care about. It's what I've always cared about and it's why I really started this thing. So now what I get to do is these amazing things where I get to go out and bless people with tickets to an event or I get to show up for them with a job or money or whatever it is. I get to just do what I want in terms of giving and that's exactly what I did this thing for. So I'm in the most fun position where I get to just wield this cash every single day however I want. Like tomorrow I'm gonna have my assistant pay off 25 to 30 Amazon wish lists for teachers just because it's that time of year kids are going back to school and it is so amazing. Which is nothing feels better than doing that kind of stuff, and I'm absolutely addicted. I have no vices anymore So this is my drug. Speaker 1: It's just giving at scale I mean, I even see like on Twitter and stuff like and I've even I've been lucky to qualify for them, but you give out like $150 or $200 at True Classic and you're just like, hey, who wants it? Just comment or DM me. So much fun. And you can tell, you're not telling people to download a playbook. You're not telling people to go and buy this and then you'll get it. It's just, hey, here, take it. Speaker 2: It's just free money. Speaker 1: Yeah, it's amazing. Speaker 2: Luckily, when I lost in the earlier days, I wasn't playing as high stakes as I play now. So, it's a good thing. A couple thousand bucks maybe at poker. I've lost a lot more at blackjack than I have poker. Blackjack can go real south real quick. If you have a couple bad shoes and you're stubborn enough to stick it out. Speaker 1: You're talking to the guy on your right. Speaker 2: And you have a credit limit. If you have a credit limit and it's high, you can lose a lot of money very quickly. So I would not recommend that. I'd actually recommend most people take your money and go to the poker table because you have a lot more control. Yes. You have a lot more edge and the house will always win. I do have a funny story about fantasy though. I don't know if you guys play fantasy sports. Speaker 1: Yeah, too much. Speaker 2: But I got in on this kind of like high roller fantasy group through my buddy Kerry who owns PokerGo and I bought in and I forgot about it. And it was one Bitcoin at the time. And this is back when Bitcoin was like, you know, 50. And I forgot about it. Speaker 1: That was the fee, Thunder? Speaker 2: Yeah, that was the fee. And he hit me, like, after it was like, how long is the NFL season? It was like, yeah, it was 16 weeks. He hit me. He's like, what's your Bitcoin wallet address? And I'm like, why? What happened? And he's like, you won. And I'm like, I won what? He's like, you won the whole thing. Speaker 1: I'm like, I wasn't even following. Speaker 2: I forgot about it. So on a Tuesday, and by the way, Bitcoin was already up to $100 at this point. Speaker 1: No way. Speaker 2: So I won $500 on a Tuesday just like randomly. It was the most insane day. Yeah, I was like, wow, this was a nice gift on a Tuesday. Speaker 1: I don't really want to ask you anymore questions. That's amazing. Speaker 2: Isn't that crazy? Speaker 1: I love that. Speaker 3: That never happens to me. Speaker 1: What's your most expensive purchase? Speaker 2: My current house, for sure. It's not even close. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: Until you sell True Classic one day? Speaker 2: I don't, honestly, I don't need a lot of stuff anymore. I got rid of all my fancy cars. Like I got rid of most, cause I just, it was just a waste. I wasn't really driving them and I just, you know, I have a nice car now, but I like to, I like it to be electric. I like to not worry about gas and motors and all that. So, um, I don't buy cars anymore. You know, this house was really the biggest investment I've ever made. But it was really for the kids because it's like right on the water. Speaker 1: I see your stories, yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah, the kids love the lake life. Speaker 1: You can tell. Speaker 2: So, I actually didn't want it. We went to look at it and I was like, it's too big, it's too expensive, I don't want it. But then I saw the backyard and I was like, yeah, my kids get to grow up here. Speaker 1: Yeah. This is worth it. More than like it. Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes it worth it. Speaker 3: What's something people would be surprised to learn about you? Speaker 1: One thing you've never shared on a podcast? Speaker 2: That I would say that I think most people think I'm a workaholic, but I'm actually really big on spending a ton of time with my kids. So I work about, I work like nine to three. I work nine to three every day, five days a week. I don't work on the weekends anymore, but I get home and I'm with the kids till they go to sleep at about seven or eight o'clock. And weekends it's all about them 100%. It's all about whatever birthday we're going to that weekend. But I think most people look at me and they think this guy works his face off. Like it's just all work 24-7. And even though I am thinking about the business 24-7, I am not actually doing the work anymore because we have so many amazingly talented people to do it. And, you know, Ben gave me a lot of leverage. All of our leadership team gave me a lot of leverage. And so, you know, for me, life's about building great talent around you so that you have more leverage to do what you want to do. Speaker 1: I appreciate that, honestly, because I feel like there are other people who probably fit in the same narrative you just put, but don't want to be seen as like, wait, you don't work 50, 60, 70, 80 hours. Like, how could you do that? You know, it's almost like you get shamed. But it's like, the truth is like, what else are you building for? Speaker 2: Yeah, I actually hated the early days of, because remember, I had seven to eight years of living a pretty good agency life. And then I went into e-com. And I'm like, this is brutal, dude. Like, because when you're when you're running the Facebook ads, it never stops. Speaker 1: You're just on those ads 24-7. Which musician or genre of music do you think is hot garbage or over over overrated? Speaker 2: Man. Overrated? Probably classical. I hate to say that because I have an appreciation for it, but it's just so like I the reason I gravitated towards jazz because I wanted to be free. I want to be a free spirit. I was never fit in a box. And when I was forced to play classical when I was young, I just despised it because everything was regimented. It was in this box, very much like corporate America, which I absolutely despise. So it made a lot of sense why I didn't like it looking back. But jazz was just be you. It was like no limits, essentially. And that's exactly who I am as a person. You know, and I love all forms of music to be honest. I've grown to love country. I'm really big on the 80s music genre. I don't know why I love the 80s so much. Maybe because I'm an 80s baby. But I grew up listening to a lot of it, but I really appreciate everything about music. But classical to me is just boring. Yeah. And constricted. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 3: Do you think it's valuable for entrepreneurs to go to college? Speaker 2: I think the value comes in the not so obvious, which is the people around you are your peers in the real world. So if you go to college, yes, get your degree, but that ultimately will make no difference to your success. What will determine your success is how good were you to all the people that were in your classes. Because that kid that was there that you may have or may have not have talked to could be the CEO of Sony or Pixar or the new open source AI. Like you just don't know where that person is gonna go and eventually you will need them. No one thinks they need anybody when they're young, right? It's just them against the world and they're just they don't care to be nice to people. But man, when I look back and I think about some of the people that were not so nice to me, that want to be nice to me now, and I'm just kind of just like, I'm just not going to be there to help them out. Like I would have if they just had stayed in touch with me or been nice or whatever it was. But I just think that's the value that they don't talk about in college. You're around a bunch of people that are very like-minded and when you get there, you realize that like, these are my people. It's because they really are your people. And when you get out in the world, they're still going to be your people. And you're going to need a favor someday and you're going to need an in at some department. So just be overly nice. Get your degree and put your head down. I know that the real answer is it doesn't matter at all. That really is the real answer. You don't need college. It's all going to evolve, especially by the time AI gets to infiltrating colleges, which I'm sure it already has on some level. Even with our own kids, we're looking at AI programs now because we're already seeing that it's so much more efficient. They can get their time back. I don't know about necessarily sticking them in a school. Maybe we go this other route. I think that's where it's all headed. It really just, you know, people need to focus on the people around them. That's the stuff people don't talk about. Speaker 3: It makes so much sense. Actually, I met Ron in college and I could have been a complete ass. Unknown Speaker: Good thing he didn't work. Speaker 3: He should have seen what he was wearing. Speaker 1: Before we wrap up, just a quick reminder about Instant. A good abandonment email can make all the difference, but 88% of shoppers never get one. With Instant, you can send up to 10 times more retention emails and use AI to personalize every single message. Fast-growing brands like Higher Dose, Garrett Popcorn, and Karen Kane have tripled their abandonment flow revenue since going live. You could be next. Book your demo at instant.one slash true. That's instant.one slash true and open up a whole new revenue channel today. Now, let's get back to the episode. How inquisitive you were even while building what you're building versus like how much you invest in learning and what you guys are building and truly becoming a brand in the e-commerce space that is willing to share everything. It's almost like what truly what building in public should foster and create. That's what you guys did. So it's an honor to have you guys on this pod. It's an honor to have you share your journey and story. And I think probably one of the hardest things here I'm going to ask you to do is There's one piece of advice that you had for entrepreneurs today, people looking to build the next True Classic. What's that one thing you want people to chew on? Speaker 2: I think it goes back to just being infinitely curious because I think if you're super curious, You will learn just about anything because the curiosity will kind of lead you to the next thing, right? So if you're curious about a product, you go into Amazon and you validate that product. Do people like this product? Is there a lot of great reviews on this product? Okay, good. Check that box. The next thing is distribution. How do I get distribution? And so curiosity just kind of leads you to the next step all the time. And you just have to be really curious to keep learning and growing and being a better version of yourself. I mean, even at True Classic, One of the strengths we have between Ben and I is that we are so curious every single day about what the next thing is that we can learn and get better at. Like, we're not sitting there like, hey, we know it all, we've done it all, here we are. We start every day like, what can we learn today that we didn't know yesterday that will make us better? You know, a lot of that can come from ChatGPT or it can come from AI or come from different sources. A lot of it is asking guys like you, right? Ron, what are you doing for fulfillment these days? Our 3PL is not doing so hot or whatever it is, right? And we have a lot of things to share because we're both in it and we're both trying to make it. So it's like, Leveraging your people and just being curious about how you can be better always gets you to the next level. Speaker 3: Chew on that. Speaker 1: Chew on that. If you want more from us, follow us on Twitter, follow us on Instagram, follow us on TikTok and check out the website ChewOnThis.io.