Dr. Squatch: Jack Haldrup. From a Closet Full of Soap to a $1.5 Billion Brand

I bought maybe four or five hundred bars of soap to start with. Literally had it on a shelf in my closet. My mom took over the shipping department. She did it out of my old childhood bedroom, which is pretty cool. There was a point where my dad called me and was like, hey, you need to find a fulfillment center so I can have my wife back. Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how a burned-out consultant, a trip to the farmer's market, and a viral ad combined to turn a natural soap side hustle into a $1.5 billion brand. Dr. Squatch. Support for the show comes from Stripe. When you're ready to incorporate your startup, Stripe Atlas is ready for what's next. With Stripe Atlas, nearly all companies are formed in just one day. All the legal documents handled. And with Stripe Treasury, you can manage banking, cards, payouts, and more on day one. 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Xero.com If you were super honest, If you were super honest, If you were super honest, back in 2018, you might have come across this really crazy ad. Listen up. The soap you shower with? It's s***. You probably haven't even questioned what bar of soap you lather up with. Let's face it. Most guys don't. They're still using whatever bar their mommy bought for her little man. This video features a big bearded dude standing in an outdoor shower being told he needs better soap. You won't just smell good either. Your skin will be healthier and more nourished. Dare I say, soft. This ad helped turn a tiny business into a major brand, selling millions of bars of soap every month. And as you're about to hear, Dr. Squatch launched with just $1,500. And in 2025, Unilever acquired it in a deal reportedly worth $1.5 billion. So do the math. Do the math on that one. That is a 1 million X return on the original investment. The guy behind the company is Jack Haldrup, who got the idea after buying a bar of soap at a farmer's market to help with his psoriasis. Building that business would mean putting most of his savings on the line and straining a lifelong friendship. And eventually, Jack would have to ask himself whether he still wanted to run the company he created. Jack grew up in a middle class family in Carmel, Indiana. His mom worked nights as a respiratory therapist so she could be home for breakfast and dinner. His dad worked in restaurants before starting a company that connected local businesses to the Internet. Jack studied business at Indiana University. And when he graduated, he took a job as a consultant at a big firm in Chicago. I didn't like being a consultant. And a lot of consulting is kind of positioning yourself as an expert and telling other people what to do, even though you're not necessarily in the industry. And so I maybe had like a little bit of imposter syndrome from that. And I also just had a desire to, you know, I'd say get into the arena or like be involved in actually building something versus kind of critiquing from a consultant lens. And I say the second epiphany was really this realization that I didn't want to necessarily be anybody that was a partner at my firm. So the highest level that you can get at this type of company is to become a partner. And. And there's a lot of great stuff about it. You make pretty good money, but you're still kind of in that travel lifestyle. And they actually traveled more because they would go almost like day to day from job to job to just check in because they're kind of the main person. So you're traveling actually four or five days a week to different places, not just one place. And I just felt that the lifestyle and kind of the health and the quality of life that these people had, it wasn't great and it wasn't what I wanted. And the decent money was not like near enough to kind of make. And so I had this realization that if I don't want to be that person, then why am I, you know, the longer I stay in this career, the more kind of trapped I'm going to be. OK, so you are this is going through your head, but it's still a job and you're you come from a family that I think is, you know, expects you to be responsible and make rational decisions. So, like, I imagine you're not just going to, like, walk in the door one day and be like, I quit. I'm out of here. Like, what's going to happen that way? Yeah, I would never allow that, I guess, for myself. I started to so I guess I started to have this idea that I wanted to become an entrepreneur or that I wanted to move into the tech industry and work for a small startup. And I wasn't really sure where to start or what to do. But I knew that if I did something, I wasn't going to leave my job. And so I started to just basically become obsessed with learning everything I could about entrepreneurship. In terms of just like absorbing content. And one of the benefits of the travel based job is you have so much downtime by yourself and a lot and very few distractions when you're on the road or even if you're at a local client because you're driving. And so I had ample time to kind of just think and to listen to podcasts and read books. And so my first step was just to put myself into that world of consuming as much as I could around those topics. And what what did you what kind of things were you reading? Do you remember? A four hour work week was a classic that stands out. Lean Startup. Eric Reese's book. Lean Startup. Eric Reese's book. Yeah. Yeah. OK, so you are and tell me about your own lifestyle at the time. I mean, you're in your mid 20s. Did you have time to, like, take care of yourself, exercise or just on the road all the time and eating fast food? Yeah, it wasn't great. It's very hard to be healthy on the road because, you know, it's such a grind. That one. One of the main benefits that you get is the ability to just go to all the restaurants kind of in town that you're at and on the client's dime. And so you're typically going out to all these places. And as much as you want to stay disciplined, it's just very hard to, like, pass up, you know, certain meals. And even if you try to stay healthy in a restaurant environment, like, it's just tough. And so, yeah, I mean, I had a great kind of social life. I had a lot of friends in Chicago. I lived with friends that mostly were from IU and just people I knew from the area. But I'd say from a working. Standpoint, I wasn't too happy with my lifestyle. And then I did have a health condition kind of pop up basically around this same time frame around 2012 as well, which probably contributed to a shift in some of my views. What was that? Do you mind talking about the condition? Yeah, no, it's so it's psoriasis and it's basically kind of kind of like a rash on your skin. And it started very small. But I started to notice. And then kind of research it. And I think it shifted my perspective in a couple of ways. I mean, one, just being being in my 20s, that was maybe my first sense of, like, not being invincible. And it was like, oh, my gosh, like, you know, what's wrong with me? And I was very, just very resistant to, like, I don't know, mainstream medical treatment for whatever way, for whatever reason. And I became very interested. Like, I think that one of the first books I read was Primal Blueprint. And so I changed my diet. To the extent that I could and started to kind of get into understanding, like, a little bit more about health and, like, natural foods and personal care products. And so, you know, that was a big shift. So walk me through how you start to think about, you know, what you would eventually start to work on. Yeah. So, like I said, I knew I didn't want to quit my job. I probably had, you know, maybe $10,000 in savings. So I knew that I kind of. That was my startup capital. And so I would say that kind of like along this psoriasis journey, I started shopping at farmer's markets here and there. And eventually I discovered or I bought some soap at a farmer's market and took a home, took a shower and just, like, loved the product. And it was kind of this, like, one of those experiences in your life that stands out for maybe, like, more impactful than you would think. And so normally. I always use body wash when I showered, you know, especially like in the Chicago winter, like, my skin would just feel really dry, really tight, kind of. of cracky after doing that and using this soap like i didn't have that feeling like my soap my skin felt soft felt kind of moisturized and it was just some some random farmer's market stand somebody was selling handmade soap yeah well you know i was buying like produce and meat and then you know there was a seller of the soap and so i just figured i'd try it out you know it's totally random and so um but yeah it kind of like actually made me look forward to showering where i think before that it was always something that felt like i had to do out of necessity because obviously i had to stay clean but like i would always get these like negative effects after showering that i didn't like and so you know that just stood out to me and caused me to research a little bit more about the product and as i started to research it like there was this story around it that became very interesting to me what was the story so basically you know what i had purchased was called cold process soap and it's a way of making soap that's been around forever and it became let's say depopularized in the early 1900s because it's hard to do at scale and also it's kind of more expensive than the bar soap that's normally in the store now and so because of these kind of production reasons that became i guess less popular it's just like kind of not in the mainstream even though it's been around forever and so i just thought that was really interesting and the fact that it was it wasn't just like oh there's one or two ingredients that are different but the fact that it's like it's actually fundamentally a different process and fundamentally a different product than what's on the shelf in the store that just kind of really stood out to me all right so soap that you buy in the store is made i guess in a different way than what's on the shelf in the store and i think that's kind of i don't know what it's called but it's a cold process i'm assuming is that it's cold it's not heated up is that right yeah so when you make soap it you do actually kind of like when you mix lye and water it gets pretty hot and then you actually will heat up the oils a little bit so you're you are adding some heat but the main soap that you would find at a store is called extrusion type soap and it's through kind of a much higher heat process through kind of like a manufacturing at scale that you would see with other products like molds and things of that nature and so i think in the bar soap space the category had been kind of commoditized and with like very cheap products that weren't great and that's kind of was that what was that on the shelf at the time so i guess you could say like um like commercial soap is like ultra high pasteurized ultra high temperature pasteurized milk versus like maybe flash pasteurization or even even unpasteurized milk right which a lot you know that's i know i'm going to get letters from people like don't drink that but a lot of people do i've had it it's fantastic there's a different taste right you it's a and there there's more bacteria good bacteria in things that are less pasteurized so i mean it's kind of let's kind of a is that a fair analogy a little bit i think yeah i think there's definitely some similarities in that analogy i think it's kind of just less processed higher quality kind of ingredient product right and so probably the guy you're buying it from made it right yeah and you're okay so you're you like the soap but you're how do you start to think i mean when you start to research this right and you realize that this is very hard to make it scale i mean for a lot of people that that would be you sort of move on and say okay this is maybe this isn't the right product to focus on because i can't hand make soap and turn this into a business or maybe you can but a small business what what got you thinking oh this this is something i want to maybe pursue i think it was like that that story of the soap being different and the idea that i could build a brand to tell that story and i what i really thought was possible was you know i would say the average guy most of my friends 20 year olds living in chicago were not shopping at farmers markets and they were not buying cold process artisans soap and what i thought was that you know i could basically use the internet and this thing called e-commerce to reach those those people and sell them this product that they wouldn't normally discover and so that's what excited me and whether it's through kind of naivety or maybe it's just the lean startup mindset i wasn't thinking about you know can this be a multi million dollar business or anything like that i was mainly thinking hey i love this product there's probably other people like me that wouldn't normally find the product this product and maybe i can introduce them to it but there's a um there's a slight issue which is you gotta kind of make the soap um you gotta learn how to make soap right i'm assuming that you you started to find resources maybe online or in books to teach you how to do that cold process yourself yeah so making is very easy especially like in a small batch scale or setting and so it's something you can do in your kitchen um yeah what is it it's like a bunch of and yeah yeah lye lye and water and then you know a handful of oils that you can choose whether it's olive oil coconut palm type of oils is the base of a soap and then any kind of scents or other additives that you may add to it so essentially you can mix that together with kitchen equipment and you have to handle lye carefully but other than that it's you know it's a fairly easy process and so i think so i did make some batches and that was fun but i think pretty quickly you know again like my perspective was like hey i want to take this product to another market not that i want to fundamentally change this product and so i didn't set out with the goal of like i have to recreate and make the best cold process soap of all time you know my mindset was more i have to introduce this into a customer that's going to love it that doesn't know it yet okay but you're still working at i mean you're still working at this firm right but you're at nights and on and sort of on weekends just kind of coming up with a concept but really not not not worrying too much about the actual soap like you you figured that was actually going to be relatively easy like making a quality bar of the challenge was going to be figuring out how to build a brand correct yeah especially at a small scale and so obviously my approach was to tailor kind of soaps that already exist into like a what guys would like so like a pine tar was our was a huge seller for us it was like a black soap i had a square you know we chose like a square shape to kind of differentiate from that perspective so there was a few little decisions like that um but again wasn't trying to recreate that from the ground up eventually it just kind of all clicked and i gave myself you know a 90-day goal to to launch the business and so found a manufacturer yeah okay that means a manufacturer tell me what else you had to do in 90 days yeah found a manufacturer um this was pre-shopify days so i actually like bought a website template and then had to modify you know the html code and put in pictures and then i was like okay i'm gonna do this i'm gonna do this i'm and things like that of the soap and basically maybe did a couple like legal things so that was probably about fifteen hundred dollars all in in like a 90-day sprint once i had made the decision to bring it to life and you called it what'd you call it sasquatch soap okay and and tell me about that name why'd you call that so my sister is very creative she's a little more of a musician but she still was good with drawing and i told her about this concept and i told her about this concept of a soap company that i wanted to create for guys and i wanted this brand that was you know kind of manly but funny whimsical outdoorsy and so i gave and i was like can you help me come up with a character for it and so she drew the sasquatch character and i was like oh my god this is perfect and so you know that was prior to a name but the the character i fell in love with took it from there was able to color it and and add some stuff and then yeah just kind of ran with the name sasquatch i think there's a funny thing with the brand where like we wanted to almost stay away from like bigfoot references because it felt too over the top like too aggressive and sasquatch was just kind of like a different way of positioning it but with the same kind of character and so that's kind of how that all ended up okay so you gave yourself 90 days to get a website run going as an llc and have product made and sell and the idea would be to sell exclusively through website you were not going to go to farmers markets and set up tables correct okay so let's break this down how did you find somebody to make it for you that's pretty easy i mean so making again it's not complicated so i found somebody in the chicago area met with them and kind of again we kind of agreed on some small changes and some things to do in terms of scents that would appeal to guys and probably had you know four to five skus to launch with And I bought maybe 400 or 500 bars of soap maybe to start with and literally had it on a shelf in my closet in my room in Chicago that I was using as my fulfillment. And how much did a bar of soap cost you? $1.50. And you were going to sell them for like $5, $6? Yeah, $6. Okay, so now before we get to the actual launch, tell me about this sort of six-month period of lots going on because you're going to launch this thing online. It's going to be a tiny little, you know, it's going to be one of millions of websites, but you're going to launch it. And you also are going to pursue a different job opportunity. Yeah, I launched it first. And, you know, the first six months, it went well enough to want. To continue and gave me enough confidence that the e-commerce space was the space that I wanted to pursue. And so I chose to pursue a job in New York through somebody I knew that did software development for an e-commerce platform that was kind of a pre-Shopify platform. And how long were you in New York? About six months. Okay. And did you leave the company at the end of that six-month period? I started working remote for pre-Shopify. Probably another six months after that. But New York was just not for me. It was kind of not a great place to be when you're trying to launch your own business and work for another startup. I was probably making $25 an hour. You know, it just was like, if my goal was to kind of build up my savings and use that as a way to fund my business, it was just probably one of the worst places I could be. And so you decide to move to, I believe, San Francisco. Yeah. I had a little. I had a little stopover in Colorado kind of for the ski season just to enjoy the lifestyle of that. But eventually, yeah, I landed in San Francisco mainly because my sister was living there and had a very cheap room opened up in the house that she was living in. Got it. Right. Because it's not also not a cheap place to live. Correct. Right. Okay. So you moved to San Francisco because your sister's there. You maybe can save some money. I live in the Bay Area. I love San Francisco. It's a great city. A lot happening there in 2013. Let's go back to the e-commerce site that you launched, you know, six months before that. When you say it was doing well, like how well, like how much money could it have been generating? I mean, this is you, a website and bars of soap, very limited budget to set to buy ads. Like how much do you remember making in your first six months or maybe the first year? The first year. Which was like, let's call it like September to the end of the year, I've made about $12,000 in sales. Okay. And so I thought that was awesome, to be honest. And how did you reach people? Where did the sales come from? A lot of it was general word of mouth and kind of posting on Facebook and convincing friends and family to buy. And then I had a small kind of budget for Google AdWords. And then I was able to set up and was starting to learn that and explore that. But now, help me understand the business. And, you know, you were, were you doing all the fulfillment? Like, were you, like, when you moved to San Francisco, did you move to San Francisco with suitcases full of soap and keep it in your apartment and send it out yourself? So when I lived in Chicago, I was doing all the fulfillment. And I would, you know, I would come home from working, you know, on the road. I would come home Thursday, Friday, ship out a batch of orders. Maybe, maybe we had 10 orders that week. And so it's kind of like at that volume. And so that was easy enough to handle. Once I was, like, leaving, I did have a call with my mom and my parents. And, you know, I was expressing, like, concern on, like, how to continue it from that perspective. And my mom offered to take over and be the shipping department. And so that was amazing. She did it out of, out of my old. Childhood bedroom, which is pretty cool. And so we had the soap and then she was actually curating. Like we used to do these gift boxes that were, she would go get old cigar boxes from cigar stores locally and, you know, try to haggle them down to like a dollar a box. And then we would kind of put soaps in there and wrap them up. And that was like our gift box product, which was a pretty big product at the time. So, so yeah, at that time, my mom took over the shipping and kind of the gift box portion of the business. Um, in exchange for some equity. So it was a pretty cool deal. How long did you continue to work with that Chicago manufacturer? Like, did you, did it well into 2013? Were they still making your soap? For a few years, yeah. Okay. And let's talk about 2013. You know, again, so you're running this remotely, which you can. You read the four hour work week. You knew you could do that. And all of the inventory is being shipped to your mom, to your childhood home. And your bedroom is your, it's your warehouse. And your mom's doing the fulfillment, which is probably manageable because again, you probably, but I mean, by the end of 2013, do you remember roughly how much you guys did in sales? 2013, we did 80 K roughly in sales. Wow. That's pretty great. So what, like five plus orders a day or something like that? Roughly? Yeah, probably. It definitely spiked in the holidays. And. You know, because of the gift boxing, there was a point where my dad called me and was like, Hey, you need to find a fulfillment center so I can have my wife back. And luckily at that point we had built enough scale where when I went to go talk to fulfillment centers, you know, they were actually interested in working with us. So, okay. So you are, it's the middle of 2013, or I guess sometime in 2013, you brought on a friend of yours. A childhood friend to help you run the business. Like, I guess he also went to IU. You went there together. This is AJ fountain and, and AJ moved to San Francisco. He kind of was very nomadic. He kind of lived part-time between San Francisco and Colorado, but he initially started working with me probably in 2013 and basically as a door-to-door soap salesman, he was doing kayak guiding. And basically I said, Hey, you know, every bar you sell, I'll give you a dollar. And so, you know, it was like basically a dollar for the business, a dollar for him. And so I would ship them out, you know, batches of soap and he would kind of go door to door and sell it. And so, all right. So he eventually, so eventually, I mean, he's doing some sales for you, but eventually it's more formalized, right? Like he actually, I guess he's named president, which was just the two of you. So that means that you. You both did everything, but was he, did he also, both of you, I think we're business students, right? At IU. Yeah. I'm not sure exactly what his degree was, but, but yeah, he, he got some money raised up from his family and bought into the business and, and got a, like an ownership stake and we became, you know, business partners. All right. So you are, I mean, a lot of what you were doing from what I understand this first, that first sort of full two years. Was a lot of trying to get this into small retailers, like local boutiques. I read that, that, that you guys like would go all up and down the West coast, right? Would you do that together? Did you go into stores as well? We did do that a few times. And you would, what was the pitch you would make? I mean, we would kind of come in and talk to them about, we have this handmade, you know, natural soap for guys. And I think half the people bought for. From us because they would say something like, oh, you remind me of my son or you remind me of somebody I know. And it's, isn't it so cute what you're doing? I think there was more of that than there was, you know, oh, this is an amazing idea. So, all right. And meantime, you get a chance to be in one of these boxes, right? I think you were actually in Birchbox, but you, you, you were also in this one called Bespoke Post. And did they discover you just like. Serendipitously or did you, did you kind of pitch them? Bespoke Post found us very randomly, and I think through Google search and Birchbox, I had a personal connection through like friend of a friend to just so happened to know the men's buyer at Birchbox. So that was an amazing connection. Um, but those, those were in 2013, kind of into 2024, 2014, that was probably our biggest like marketing channel. That was like. Somewhat scalable were those boxes. And were those boxes helpful? I mean, I imagine in some ways, you know, it's a, it's risky because you probably aren't making that much money off of it. You are getting exposure with the hope that people will order your product, but it's a little bit like, like Groupon. Like a lot of businesses were like, sure, you know, we'll do two for one massages, but then people just took the Groupon but never came back. So the, they were amazing. At the start. And then I think those businesses got a lot smarter. So the V1 of working with those boxes was they would pay us essentially at cost or maybe slightly. slightly above cost of our product. So for, for our standpoint, it's like, we're getting free marketing. And then if we can get, and they were very oriented around trying to get people to then buy the products that they sampled. So they helped facilitate that. So if we would get, you know, if we would send 4,000 out on bespoke posts, we might get 10% to buy from us. So that was, you know, that was huge. And it was free, you know, it's free essentially. And then it quickly moved to like, you know, from we're getting paid for the product to now we're giving the product to them for free, which still, okay, that makes sense. It's free marketing, still, still valuable to then it turned into, you know, pay a fee to be included because the marketing is so valuable. And then they kind of closed off some of their sales channels so that like, instead of us getting a sale, then they would like buy some from us wholesale and then they would sell it on their own store. So over time, and I, obviously understand why they did those things, but over time from the brand standpoint, the business, the channel kind of degraded into something that, you know, wasn't as valuable. Yeah. I mean, I mean, I'm sure initially it was great. They're buying your product and they were facilitating the sales, but they realized that wasn't a good business model for them because they needed subscribers. Plus if they could get the products for free and say, Hey, we're just, we're just another platform to market your products. That's even better. And then if it came to like, Oh, you got to pay us, that's like slotting fees at a supermarket. So that's like, right. That's, that's three, that's three different channels of revenue. Yeah. And it was still good. It just kind of went from a way to really get profitable customer acquisition to a way to kind of still get some good brand marketing. But it wasn't, it stopped being like a very high level, you know, conversion channel for us. What was the point at which you felt comfortable? Yeah. So my hand was actually a little bit forced in that. And the company I was working for went under, um, towards kind of the second half of 2014. And, you know, one of the like benefits that came from that was just a cutting of the ties. That was, that forced me to go a hundred percent all in, uh, on the company. And during that same time, one of the benefits, biggest benefits I got from living in San Francisco was that I chose to attend this thing called general assembly and do a digital marketing class through them. And I want to say, I put like, I maybe had 5,000 left in my savings and I put $3,500 of that towards this class. So it was a big gamble. And I kind of, at the same time, I was actually like preparing my resume and kind of putting together like a website of like, you know, consulting for Google analytics and stuff like that. But the class ended up being one of those just incredible experiences that turned into an inflection point for us. And it was taught by somebody who was directly in the industry doing media buying and ads for this clothing brand called beta brand. And the biggest thing that, you know, I discovered there was basically that we were, we should be doing Facebook ads and not Google ads. And so again, 2014, it's very early days for Facebook ads, especially for small brands. A lot of their tools had just been kind of launched that year. And I got to see firsthand, um, you know, from this instructor, like what he was doing in his companies. And, and that was, you know, an immediate, almost an immediate, like three X in revenue in the month after kind of learning and bringing that to the company. All right. Let's, let's, first of all, general assembly, I think is still around. It's, it's a, it's like a, a training program. Like you could pay to take classes there, right? Like a training program. And it wasn't probably, it wasn't very expensive. And this was a, a marketing class that you took. You had been doing Google AdWords and through this class, you realize that Facebook actually is where you need to be. First of all, why did you come to that realization? What, what was, what was the problem with Google ads versus Facebook? Yeah, ultimately nobody, nobody was searching Google for men's soap or natural soap or any of the keywords that we could potentially rank for, you know, it was a couple hundred people per month. So there was one point in the business where I thought, okay, if we can just own natural soap for men as the search term, like we have made it at that point. And then, you know, we got there and I was like, okay, we're getting, you know, five sales a month from that. But what we discovered through Facebook ads was basically that we were an impulse buy product. And so nobody was actively looking on the internet to buy natural soap or very few people were, but if it came across their feed in a way that was kind of interesting and entertaining, then they would be like, oh, okay, I'll try this out. And so Facebook basically opened up that type of marketing to us. Okay. I want to, I want to get back to Facebook in a sec, right? Because that, that would, that's where you would start to do run experiments. But meantime, you've got this other challenge or this, this, I should say a challenge. Which is, um, the name of your brand Sasquatch soap. You get, I guess, a cease and desist letter. Am I right about that from somebody saying, Hey, that's our, that's our brand. Yes. Correct. Tell me what happened. Basically what had happened was that there was another company selling, let's say a variety of soaps, maybe 30, 50 soaps. And one of the ones that they sold was called Sasquatch soap. And so even though they had a different company, they didn't sell it. They didn't sell it. They didn't sell it. They didn't sell it. They didn't sell it. They didn't sell it. They didn't sell it. They didn't sell it. They didn't sell it. They didn't sell it. They didn't sell it. They didn't sell it. They didn't sell it. They didn't sell it. They didn't sell it. They didn't sell it. They didn't sell it. Obviously based on being in that space, they had rights to, to use that trademark. And we actually only found out because like of a third party that tried to like trademark it because nobody had had a trademark. So they had like a common law thing on it. And so this other party saw our brand, thought it was cool, tried to trademark it before us. And then they found out that this other person had it. And so there was like, these people ended up getting into a battle behind the scenes and we could kind of see that that was happening. And so we knew that we had to pivot and yeah, it was, it felt like an existential crisis at the time. Reports, visual dashboards, forecasts, and AI insights help owners better understand cashflow and make smarter decisions. Join the 5 million customers. Worldwide using Xero. So you have this name, you've got a website, you've got customers. And, and I mean, that is stressful. You kind of like, you can't use that name anymore. And you've established, you've spent two years, two plus years building up this name and this business, even though it's still small. I think you were already in boxes under the name Sasquatch Soap, right? So tell me a little bit about just that, that, you know, what was going through your head trying to untangle this? I mean, were you thinking that's it? We're, we're, we're toast. We're done. Yeah, it felt potentially existential and large part because for the longest time, we could not think of like an alternative brand name. And we had these terrible names like Kingsley's, Sudsworth's, and we were, you know, serving customers and serving friends and, and basically every name that we had thrown out there, everybody thought was terrible. And so, yeah, there, there was a lot of fear. There was a lot of stress. Um, but at the same time, I mean, we didn't have, we didn't have a whole lot of time to, to react and to think about it. And you had to come up with a brand new website, I mean, a brand new URL, right? I mean, you had, you would have to, so you're thinking of completely different names. So how did you come upon the name Dr. Squatch? I mean, it's Sasquatch Soap that you couldn't use. Yeah. So you changed it, which is an interesting change. How did you come up with that? And then also, wasn't that going to be risky? Yes. I think a couple of things. One is that we wanted to, I think, make it more of a character. So Sasquatch Soap versus Dr. Squatch. Dr. Squatch became like more of a figure and we wanted to, to do that. And we thought that the doctor kind of gave it a little bit of an elevated positioning and we ultimately weren't sure if it was going to work. So we had kind of a dual track of like, Hey, maybe this name is too close. Maybe it's not. And if it wasn't, if it ended up failing, like we would have had a backup plan, which was again, none of the names we were, felt great about, but we would have had to do something. But we, we went forward with the Dr. Squatch name, went through, you know, the trademark process, put it out there, didn't have any, you know, I think there's like a period for people to comment or to, to flag against it and we passed that period and so it worked out and the character now i mean it's a sasquatch with like a pipe that's basically what your sister had drawn your in in initially correct and so had you called that character were you did you have a name for that character i mean he's probably known as dr squatch now but did you think about that character with a name or as a with a particular kind of personality well i think it just evolved over time and i think that after the rebranding i mean i think we quickly realized that it was actually a better name and so it turned from an existential crisis into like one of those things that was a huge benefit that maybe we would have never done if this didn't happen and it would have been a worse name and turned out differently so i think we recognized that early on and i think it did allow us to lean more into the persona of the character you the persona of the character and i think it was a huge benefit and i think it was a huge benefit than we had done previously okay so let's let's kind of dive into facebook so you you know that facebook is probably a better place for you to start spending money but did you have i mean did you have money i guess i guess it wasn't that i mean it's different today right facebook in 2014 i've heard people say it's like it was like shooting fish in a barrel like you know it was just it was a different the platform is totally different so you like how much would a facebook ad cost you to you know roughly yeah it was i mean it was so different one of our first ads that i remember used to use these like free library images and then i found one that had like a little funny like little sasquatch character in the woods it was like a toy figurine and i literally just put like a bar of soap photoshop next to it and then i put like an ad that said like you know soap for men and i think i ran that for six months and it was like our best ad and we were getting you know customers for like 15 bucks on it wow and and that was it that was the ad yeah it was like just a little wonky just a static ad on facebook so for men and that and that would drive traffic yep and so i would say i wasn't the most sophisticated at that time i think i quickly realized that the way to grow the business was going to be facebook ads and so i dedicated kind of myself to becoming an expert at that but yeah the early days you didn't necessarily know all the numbers but ultimately we were able to get customers for i would say like probably like a break even um after the first order which is pretty good so all right so you get through the name change you start to focus on facebook ads and i think around this time it's 2015 let's say i think you moved to san diego is that right a year later but yes do you remember what you did in sales that year yeah about 750k wow that's a huge leap yeah so you were probably making close to what you were making as a consultant i guess by that point this 2015 was probably the first year i crossed that threshold yes and by the end of 2016 the business had done 1.8 million in sales so we had another strong jump that's amazing and this is all through face mainly through facebook ads yes i mean that's an that's amazing right 1.8 million dollars in that year and that class you took really paid off i mean it really taught you a lot of things it wasn't just facebook ads there were other things you were probably doing you were looking at data analytics you were making decisions based on on that data can you can you kind of walk me through a little bit about what you were doing and how you were shifting and making decisions based on what information you were getting yeah i would say in 2016 my main role in the company was really focused on understanding e-commerce and that was the first time that i think it started to really come together so the facebook ads was just one part of it it's obviously how you get the attention and kind of get the initial customers but i think we started to really understand more about you know things like subscription and merchandising broadening our merchandising and you know we started to understand more about how to do email marketing and retention-based marketing so that like our customers were valuable on the back end and i think it shows that the market we were going after was big and it didn't feel hard to hit these numbers it almost felt like it was just kind of happening um again with facebook ads as the main driver not the only driver but i think adding these other pieces within e-commerce and starting to understand the data and modeling that a little bit better i want to dive into 2016 because this is a a pivotal year 1.8 million dollars in sales amazing um and also i think this is the year when aj and you split you go separate ways he leaves um you know and again like these things are challenging because there's humans and personalities and history involved but it's very real it's common and it's it happens you know i mean what did you start to think the business could be and where was there a difference in in in sort of vision or view between you and your partner yeah so i think with all the growth that we had and and some of the metrics i was seeing i really had a big vision for where the brand could go and i just kind of felt like we were in the early innings even if i didn't know exactly where that was going to end up and i think that's a big part of it i think that's a big part of it i think aj is he's an extremely kind of outdoor focus person and i think the business was at the level of achieving his dream which was kind of to make a certain amount to live off of so that he could spend as much time as possible kind of in nature like a lifestyle brand basically a it could be passive income for a great life exactly which is by the way just to put a point on that that's actually not a bad ambition. Like lots of people have that ambition. And it's, you can have an incredibly meaningful, fulfilling life, especially if it's not, if scale or, you know, or even money isn't that important. It's if it's, I want to be able to do the things I want that I enjoy doing, and I just need this amount of money to make it happen. Totally agree. And I, I enjoyed like a lot of that lifestyle with AJ as well. And so this process, I mean, this process was extremely hard. He was one of my best friends from childhood and it was, you know, it was like a relationship that was just no longer working out from my perspective and no longer serving the business and where we each wanted to go. So you had to have hard conversations. Yeah. A lot of hard conversations, you know, but I think both kind of recognizing and agreeing that, you know, we just weren't on the same path in terms of where we wanted to go and that we had done a lot of good stuff together to get to that point. But that, you know, having a separation would be the best for both. Did that cause you stress? Just knowing that you had to have those conversations? Yeah. Massive, massive stress on a personal level just to deal with that. And also just stress on a financial level in terms of negotiating and kind of going through that buyout process. Because he bought into the company. Yep. Yeah. And you've done it. $1.8 million in sales at that point. So, you know, I guess, you know, you could start to think about what it might be worth. Yeah. It was a significant amount of money for where the company was at, not necessarily from a revenue standpoint, but again, just from a cashflow and a profit standpoint, you know, in that year we made $1.8 million, like we might've done, I don't know, let's say $100K, give or take, in profit. But then again, from a cashflow standpoint, you're always building inventory. You have marketing expenses, so you don't necessarily have a ton of cash lying in, lying around. And at the same time, you know, you still know that the business is worth, you know, something fairly meaningful. And so we had to come up with a creative structure to basically buy them out through the continued performance of the business. From a personal standpoint, did you also know that that was going to be maybe the end of your personal friendship? Yeah, I wasn't sure. I mean, where it was going to end up exactly. I mean, I think, you know, we tried to approach it amicably, but it's like, it's an extremely hard thing to do. And there's a lot of emotion and a lot of tension. And each person is trying to kind of get the best deal that they can for themselves. And so it's tough. When you made the, when you came to terms and you agreed that you were going to buy him out, was any part of you like, God, am I just mortgaging my, my future here? Like, what if our sales were just lucky? And, and then, you know, or like, it just dies. And then I'm on the hook to pay all this money over the next several years. It was a real risk. It was, you know, there was, it was cash up front, it was cash monthly. And then it was kind of like cash every year in based on how performance went for a couple of years. And I would say, you know, it was delayed gratification for me, just in the sense of I didn't get to take out anything at all at that point. Relatively to the size that he did. And I wasn't sure where things weren't going to go. And we probably had one of our toughest stretches in, you know, I would say in the six to nine months after this process for a couple of reasons. And so that was, you know, it just added to kind of the stress of, of dealing with this process. What happened? Just, just some things started to go wrong. Um, you know, I would say we were continuing to try to scale and I think added some employees and tried to kind of build the team up for the first time, um, post that transition happening in the business was doing well, but it got to a point where we were spending more and kind of had invested in too much. And people were, uh, we, we just kind of couldn't afford what we had signed up for. What did you sign up for? You're talking, you're talking about the people that was the cost. Yes. Yes. Increasing kind of that overhead costs on people, office, things like that, tuning in. Extent that drained the profitability of the business. And then me moving away from overseeing some things like the marketing and led leading to like a decline in performance on that. And some agency partners that just weren't working out. So just honestly, just very kind of normal ups and downs of having a small business, but just happening very kind of close proximity to this buyout, which was also financially stressing the business, put us into a pretty challenging point in, in 2018. And so most of your money was going to pay them. And, uh, meantime, you've got to figure something out. So, I mean, I, I would think the, one of the first decisions you have to make is maybe let some people go. What am I wrong? Yeah, we ha I had to let some people go. I did kind of a process that a lot of people I know have done where I literally printed out, you know, three months worth of bank statements and was circling. every line item or crossing things out just to cut expenses as much as possible. Had to let two people go, basically just kept their kind of customer support and social media person. But if, you know, that felt like a step back because we had been, you know, on this trajectory growing every year, we had obviously challenges, but this felt like the first time that we were maybe in a position to kind of step back as a business. In 2018, you would have this pivotal experience. And before we get to what that was, I guess you were sort of working with a marketing agency or you had contracted a marketing agency. And from what I understand, they had worked with like the San Diego Symphony. So first of all, tell me about this agency that you identified to work with, because it's always a risk. You don't know whether they're going to be able to bring back. Yeah, I think I knew some people that worked with them. And then they just so happened to have an office basically next door to the office we had in San Diego. And so it was kind of natural to meet with them. And they're very smart at marketing. And I think we kind of just, we tiptoed into creating small videos and small ads, mainly around like, you know, Facebook advertising, as well as like some branding stuff. And so we just kind of started doing some work with them. And so the first things we worked on were just more basic things. But I think eventually in 2018, I had gotten through some of the challenges that I had spoken about earlier and kind of reorganized and right-sized some of the expenses and the trajectory of the company. And I think I was just feeling maybe more positive and more like, hey, we should, it's a good time to try to take a swing. And I had recently gone to like a marketing event or convention. And heard a talk by somebody that was in the company called the Harmon Brothers. And they were basically producing these Dollar Shave Club style videos. And so going to that event, kind of learning about that, I did talk to the Harmon Brothers. You know, they wanted $250K to do the video and then $250K of ad spend that they would manage to help kind of like promote the video. Wow. And so that, you know, that was a massive number for us at the time. That would probably be a couple of years of profit. And so even though we had decent revenue, like there's just no way, yeah, that wasn't on the table, right? And so I think I just kind of like started to noodle with it. And as I had conversations with Raindrop, the agency in San Diego, you know, we basically just kind of said like, hey, like what if we just try to recreate one of these videos? Like how hard could it be basically? And I guess we should describe it for anyone. It doesn't, you can find it. I mean, the video you guys did has 120 million views. And for people I'm seeing this, this guy has got like a blonde beard and like, he's a big guy and he looks friendly, but also like a guy who would be, you know, like likes the outdoors. And, and you shot this video, first of all, how much did it cost you to do to shoot this whole thing? It was about 15K. Wow. Amazing. It's, I think it's three minutes long. And just describe this, what, what, what was it? He's in the shower, but it's outdoors. And he kind of grabs your attention and says that, you know, the soap that you're using sucks. Listen up, the soap you shower with, it's s***. And then we kind of go through why our soap is better. And obviously like a lot of funny shots in the, in nature and with the shower and, you know, lathering up. I'm talking about natural, nourishing, cold press, hand cut soap for men. Men who use their hands. Men who build things. Men who open the pickle jar on the first try. It's really entertaining and engaging. And the idea, I guess, was to just put this up on YouTube or, and buy some Facebook ads with this video? Yeah, I think it's easy to call it a viral video, but we knew that it would be an ad. And so I would say it's viral because the ad was so efficient at acquiring customers like cheaply and profitably that that's what drove the virality as well, along with like some of the sharing behind it. Well, tell me about launching it. Like, like you had originally talked to somebody said, well, we'll make it for a quarter million and then we'll put a quarter million dollars of marketing behind it. You spent $15,000 on producing the video. And then what did you have to spend to actually market it to get it out there into the world? Yeah, that's a good question. Because when I think about marketing, I think more incrementally. So when we put it out there, you know, let's say we're getting people to watch. Two minutes of content for like half a set on average, which is crazy cheap for that level of engagement. We're getting people to become a customer for three to $4. So at that level, and you know, and profitability, because I make, let's say I make $25 on that order. And after my margins, you know, I'm getting, let's say $10 per customer. At that margin level, I would spend as much as I possibly could, as long as I have the supply chain to fulfill it. So I wouldn't even think about like that as like a marketing budget, right? I would think of that as like a sales machine. And so I would say the video was kind of like this sales machine for probably like a three to four month period of time where it was just like going crazy on both Facebook and YouTube in terms of like how good the advertising was against it before it started to slow down. So cumulatively to date, I don't know exactly how much we've spent on that. But I would say that we basically would spend on it to the extent that it was profitable in terms of acquiring customers. So you, you put it out into the world with some, a little bit of ad spend. And what did it do to sales for sales? Yeah, I mean, sales were crazy. And then, like I said, is also, they were profitable. So we probably spent, you know, relatively like as much as we could on the video, like we probably were supply chain constrained more than anything else. And we probably did a 5 million, a little over 5 million in sales through the end of 2018. Wow. So you went, I mean, so that, and, and, and how much of that 5 million in sales would you attribute to that video? Probably 30 to 50%. Because I think it got 12 million views in that first year. Again, today it's got 120 million views. Very funny video. But it was, I mean, would you call like how much of a sort of a game changer would you call that for the business? Yeah, it was massive. Obviously from creating that, and I'd say bigger picture, bringing the brand to life in the real way for the first time ever and creating a roadmap for us to produce future content and us kind of really finding our voice that worked for the brand were second level effects that it also created. So I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. Correct. So tell me about that. I mean, you bootstrapped up until that point. Tell me about, I think you raised $1.3 million. I might be wrong. Maybe the number is different. But yeah, tell me about that. that decision? Yeah, no, that's the correct number. So in 2018, I think I started to see the potential for the business come to life with some of the video marketing efforts that we were doing. And I've been through a lot of ups and downs in the past two to three years. And I think I came to this conclusion that I didn't want to run the business by myself as a lifestyle business forever and deal with all the ups and downs. And that I wanted to take a real swing at going for something big. And so those factors kind of came together. And so I was open to outside investment for the first time and was in the mindset of being receptive to it. And so I started to do some outbound outreach as well as getting some inbound requests for that, which I had kind of always gotten throughout the years, but never really responded to. Who were you raising money from? Was it friends and family or was it professional investors or maybe not professional, but angel investors? No, professional investors, Guild Capital, and they were the ones that hosted that roundtable. And it was a network of companies that either they had invested in or wanted to invest in. And so that was a big driver of me wanting to work with them was because I could see how the collaboration and the portfolio would work and the value add be kind of brought to the table. And so it took a few months to kind of hash out an agreement with them. They were your sole investor? Correct. And I think the valuation was like 4.3 million. Is that right? 5.7 post money. So I guess it depends. 5.7. Okay. So man, they made a good investment. Yeah, it was, I mean, great deal for everybody. Okay. So they, they buy a little over 20% of the money. And what did the, and that money presumably enabled you to, first of all, you, you relocate to LA. I think you're, you move the, your headquarters to LA. And what else did that money enable you to do? The main focus of the capital raise was to increase marketing spend and increase the employee, the talent, you know, the company. So money for hiring and money for advertising in a way that would allow us to scale, you know, much quicker than we had done previously. So 2018, you do 5 million. Do you remember what, what you did in 2019? 20, 20, 23, 20 to 23. Wow. All and all of this, like what percentage of this is what a hundred percent of this is direct to consumers through your website? Correct. You're selling at no stores at this point. We had a small independent retail business that from the origins of the AJ days and that still existed. But it was pretty marginal, you know, no, no like formal retail. All right. So you're, you're $25 million in 2019. I read at the, I, is this right? I read at the end of 2020, you did close to a hundred million in sales. Is that, is that right? Or was my research right? 113. That's crazy. I mean, I'm just thinking going from five to 113 million in a little over two years, two years, basically. I mean, everything is going to change. Like you're talking about like the hiring, the scale of this. It's like, it's like, I can't imagine that hamster wheel that you were on. Yeah. It was the hardest two years I ever worked in the most fun two years I ever had in business at the same time. So I think, you know, every, I think a lot of businesses, right. When you pitch an investor, you kind of pitch like, Hey, we have our business model figured out and we just need capital to add fuel to the fire. And I think sometimes that's true. Sometimes it's not, I think in our case, it truly was a reality. And so, you know, we basically just started spending as much as we possibly could on Facebook advertising and bringing in as much talented people as we could over that two year period. Um, there were a lot of other things we did. We did, we did a lot of product line expansion, which enabled, you know, us to get a higher, you know, order size, which again, allowed us to kind of be able to spend more and, you know, made customers more valuable. So there was a lot of things we were doing along the way. Um, but it, you know, it was absolutely drinking from a fire hose. You know, there's probably nothing harder as a CEO than kind of like hiring constantly for your full team, plus running your business at the same time. It's almost like having two jobs. So that's kind of how I felt that I'd never felt a stronger pull to work. You know, when I would, I would almost go to sleep dreaming about the first thing I needed to do in the next morning and would wake up like ready to jump into it. And so, you know, it was just such a cool experience to be a part of. Okay. So now, and I think in, in you've got the pandemic in 2020, which is great for direct to consumer businesses, because you've got captive audiences on social media all day. Um, and, and I could, that was the $110 million year. And I, of course, everybody was focused on staying clean because I was freaked out about germs. Uh, did you see any direct correlation between that and, and your sales? Yes, for sure. Um, I mean, COVID was like, at first we were very scared of it and very uncertain of what was going to happen in the world, obviously. And if we were going to be able to continue. And so we initially kind of like try to slow things down. Cause we just weren't sure like what was going to happen. We didn't want to like build up too much inventory. Um, and I think, uh, you know, a month or two into it, we clearly saw like that was not going to be the case and that there, the demand was, was going crazy. And yeah, we, we were in hygiene space, which was another just kind of, uh, you know, blessing that really kind of added some tailwinds, but you know, the company was growing at a pretty crazy trajectory, even pre COVID. So I would say it's a little hard to kind of fully isolate that. But definitely it was a big tailwind for us in an unexpected way. So, okay. So you, I mean, the growth is just incredible. I think in 2021, uh, private equity group came in and purchase a minority share of the business, right? Majority share, majority share. And that, I mean, I'm sure was a great for the investor, probably great for you. You stayed on. Um, did you feel, I mean, how did you feel? I mean, you were the CEO and the founder. I mean, when you had, you know, in, you know, investors now owning a majority of the share of, of the, of the brand, did you, did it change how you could operate? I mean, was there oversight? Was there more feedback? Was there more like, Hey, you know, I think Jack, you know, you got to do more of this or less of that. Well, I would say a couple of things about that. Um, I knew I had to do more of this or less of that. Um, I knew I had to do more of this or less a timeline as CEO. Just, I think every founder, you know, kind of has that journey where they figure out how far they can take their own business themselves. And most of us are not, you know, like a Mark Zuckerberg. And so I, there was definitely even a point of this growth phase where I was like, I'm, you know, I'm just not well equipped to be the CEO of a large company. You know, I'm, I'm love and I'm great at, I think a lot of the things for a slightly earlier stage company. And then once it gets to that point, it just kind of not, not what I'm great at and not what I want to do. So prior to going into this sale, that was, that was actually like a big motivator. It was actually a big motivating factor for me to want to sell in the first place was, was kind of knowing that that was how I felt about it. And then also just the pace that I was operating at was just not really sustainable in terms of the work, and even just all the emotional burden of the previous, you know, 10 years that had gone into the business. Like it was kind of felt like at certain point I was going to need a break from things. And so I went into the decision to sell part of the company with those as, as some of the motivating factors, not the only ones, but right. That makes a lot of sense. I mean, some founders are like, I'll never, I, this is my thing for life. I want to do this forever. I'm going to stay on as long as, you know, the board's going to keep on. And, and some founders are like, I scaled it to this point and I wanted to get out and do other things. And I think both of those are great, you know, options, but it sounds like for, cause you, you did step down as CEO in 2023 and you felt like, and I think that's really mature decision. You felt like I'm just, I'm not the right guy to run a, you know, a big CPG brand at this point. Maybe you have what it took, but you just didn't have the, the passion to do that. Yeah. I think it was a 300 person roughly company at that point. And it almost had come full circle into like having a job again versus where I initially started, you know, leaving my job and having some of those desires. But I would say ultimately my, when you're an entrepreneur and you have a will to succeed versus like maybe a stress or drudgery tax against things that you want to do. And when your will to succeed is really high, you can overcome those things. But then at the end of this kind of 10 years and just given the scale that the company had got to and some of the success that I had had, I think just being honest about it, my ability and my willpower to do some of those things was just lower than was needed for me to successfully do the role at the time. So when you left, what did you want to do? You just wanted to kind of unplug entirely? Mostly that. Well, I didn't leave with, you know, like you said, some people leave and maybe they have their second business or their next business in mind already. I didn't leave with that in mind. I left with the need to take the weight of the business off my shoulders. And so it was nice to gradually step into a board role and still have, you know, a level of connection and direction in terms of what the company was doing, but to no longer be the person where I felt like I was the primary driver. So I would say that that, you know, was kind of. It was just a nice release period initially. It sounds like it. And did you have those inevitable conversations where people were like, well, what's next? Still do. Does that annoy you, that question? Or do you. Or just have you gotten used to it now? I mean, I'm still. I want to know the answer as much as everybody else does. And I think that I'm still kind of figuring that out. I'm still in a little bit of that transition phase. And so, you know, I have three kids. And I'm very blessed to be able to have success and to also be able to spend time with my kids when they're young and to be fully present and fully focused on that. So I try to make that a huge priority. I think last, in June 2025, Unilever acquired Dr. Squatch from all the investors. And you are still, I think, an equity stakeholder for $1.5 billion. So really, I imagine now you're really out of it. I mean, you have no involvement in Dr. Squatch. Dr. Squatch. Correct. Yeah, I was on the board up until that sale. And after that, you know, they don't really have that board process for a company that they acquire. So pretty much a clean break. Yeah. You know, when we started, you mentioned how when you learned about SOAP, you know, the big companies were making things at scale. And this kind of process, this cold process, was really hard to do at scale. Now, it's owned by a company. Well, and even when you were running it was. I mean, it was mass producing bars of SOAP. So, I mean, does it mean that Dr. Squatch is now doing what it set out not to do? Or is it still able to do what it was doing at a small scale, but at a larger scale? We built our own manufacturing facility to be able to achieve the scale that we needed. So, you know, I would say we are producing cold process SOAP. And we had to kind of figure that out from scratch. Obviously, making a batch of SOAP is pretty easy. But figuring out how to produce, you know, 5 million a month is a lot tougher. And involves, like, some additional engineering. And I would say that, ultimately, we've kind of come full circle. And we've really won in the sense that we are no longer, you know, the underdog on the outside only selling online. And now we are on shelf, you know. And just as a company. As big as, like, all the other big brands out there. And offering, you know, what we think is a better alternative to people. And so, when you see it on the shelf, what do you think? I still think it's cool. I still get pictures. I mean, yeah. I still love seeing the displays. I still, you know, love walking into random grocery stores. And I walk in and they've got, you know, Squatch stocked. So, I think it's awesome. It used to be, you know, 90-100% direct-to-consumer. I think now the vast majority of its sales come from, you know, Target and Walmart. And, you know, grocery stores. Yeah, it's a majority retail. The e-com business is still significant. But over the last three years. And that was another reason for me to maybe not be CEO. I mean, when we sold to Summit in 2021, we had essentially zero in retail. You know, and now that business alone is well over $300 million. And so, that was a little bit unforeseen for us to kind of like how quickly that would happen. So, when you think about, you know, the journey you took and where it started, you know, like reading the 4-Hour Workweek and, you know, go to farmer's markets and sort of come to this realization that you could build a brand around this coal process soap, which you did. And you became very, you know, wealthy and this brand became very successful. How much of this do you attribute to luck and timing? I mean, Facebook ads at the time, it was just amazing. And direct marketing and sort of that wave. And how much do you think had to do with just the grind and the discipline that you put into it? Yeah. It's close to 50-50. I think if I like put it out on a scale, you know, I think on the kind of the grind side, I would say the number one thing is just getting started and creating. Because if you don't have that, you can't benefit from any of these lucky events. Number two is that you have to survive. And that involves kind of just knowing when your business is in survival mode and doing a lot of things that probably many people aren't going to want to do. And then I think that there's a third pillar around execution where that absolutely makes a difference in terms of like how far you go. So, those I would put on the side of the scale towards, you know, skill and then I would say on the luck side, you know, there's absolutely timing. I don't think Squatch could have existed 10 years, you know, 10 years earlier, I wouldn't have been able to build it. Brick and mortar retail would not have taken it in without a proof of concept online. And so, you know, it basically would have been impossible to do that. You know, I think that there's category around luck. And I think that, you know, I chose to go into soap because it was very personal. It wasn't a top-down decision where I said, hey, this is a great market to go into. And so, I think I could have done all the same things and apply that to a different product and maybe not have nearly as big of an outcome. And it just so happens that I was kind of lucky that this was a recurring product and that this, you know, this was a category ready to explode. And so, that probably had a big impact on how big it all got, you know. And then there's just the other serendipitous kind of moments and many things that led to one another meeting different people that all, you know, all kind of add up. So, I think it all kind of adds up close to being 50/50 and that's how I, you know, break it down. Aaron Ross Powell: Jack, thank you. Jack Halldrup: Thanks, Guy. Aaron Ross Powell: That's Jack Halldrup, founder of Dr. Squatch. These days, Jack's still based in San Diego, raising his young kids, investing in businesses, and advising other entrepreneurs. In fact, he also serves on the board of a company called Brick, which makes a device that helps people spend less time on their phones. And thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to tap the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And you can now watch How I Built This on YouTube. This conversation is on our brand new YouTube channel. Just search How I Built This on YouTube and subscribe. We'll also put a link to our new YouTube channel in the episode description. Our show is produced by Podcast Point Man. I'm Guy Raz. You're listening to How I Built This. Available in one connected platform. That's X-E-R-O dot com.