How Matt Orlić Lost It All, Built a Skincare Empire & Found Meaning

How the hell did you guys do it? You've done. I lost five million dollars overnight, and made the retail in Australia when bars. Do you think your 25 year old self would have understood that or would he tell you to go, "Gah." I went and reversed the engineer all the people that actually made heaps of money. And like, surely heaps people lost a lot of money and went bankrupt. When you actually do the research, there's a ton. And then I convinced myself at the time, because I lost this money, I'm gonna be successful because all these other people lost heaps of money. So it's like my right of passage in order to be ultra-wool. The difference between authentic money and inauthentic money is that has some kind of inherent meaning to it, where you actually do the act without needing any money or verification in the process. So there's this concept of like, never build on somebody else's land. Aren't we all doing that? Aren't we all 100% building on Zuckerberg's land? Then you're like, "This, I'm going all that on digital brands." Con control, we look at it and being always controlled what you see. Life's just a game of perspective. You can't connect the dots looking forward only back. All that is is what story you're telling yourself at the time as to why that happened. Welcome to the operator's podcast. My name's Mike Beckham, and we are proudly brought to you by Fulfill after-sell Rich Panel, North Beam, Sarah's Analytics, and PostScript. We are a community for entrepreneurs that are building things. And if you want to be a part of this community, you can listen to the podcast, but you can also go sign up for a newsletter, a ton of awesome information in there. We also partner with Ecommerce Fuel, a forum for you to connect with other entrepreneurs that are building businesses where we can learn from one another. So without further ado, onto the pod. Dealing with Big Box retailers means EDI connections. And that's often a trigger for needing an ERP system. We've been using EDI connections to Costco forever, and the only way that we really solve that problem make it seamless is through Fulfill. EDI adds complexity to everything you do, and fulfill solves that complexity with their connections to their systems. You need Fulfill to move from being just a D to C brand to being a true multi-channel brand, because Big Box retailers are going to require you to connect to their systems using EDI. Let me tell you, it's way easier if you do it with Fulfill. - Okay, welcome back to our listeners, our fellow operators. Today we have a friend of mine. I have no mat for two or three years now. Matt Orlick, yes, another mat. And he's got a really strange story. He is balanced all over the damn map of building companies. I think you're really going to enjoy this. We're going to talk about how this guy has gone from losing 5 million bucks, doing something that we're all very familiar with, all the way to building a pretty substantial company today and now even turning around and saying, how do I go from just making money to having some impact? We're going to cover a lot of ground. So I want you to stick with this episode. Sean and I are going to kind of just pepper mat with lots of questions. And to start it off, Matt, why don't you introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about your background. Like where did you start? How did you get to where you are today? And then we'll kind of like take the conversation wherever the hell we feel like it. Yeah, sure. Well, thanks for having me. I think it's the first podcast that I've been on that I've actually listened to since that school. So I've been in business for like last 20 years, the age of 17. And I've promised on anything you can think of, not by having some sort of strategy. It was just like, whatever made sense or whatever made money the time I did it. Like as an example, I was getting my tattoo removed and I guess during that process, I thought I could do it better. So I started my own clinic. But where I guess I am today stands from this one business that I built called Inspire Brands Group. And what I used to do was to develop brands and some of the mass retailers. And I started that business when I was about 21 years old. And the way I got into it was that I started importing other people's brands. And during that time when I was trying to import other people's brands, there was one brand in particular called Mictivia. And that Mictivia brand was like, "Match show of the Year award, whatever I saw it online." And I applied to get that brand. But then the owner of that brand once come visit operation in Sydney, which I didn't have any. So at that time, I literally went to my counter, I said, "I need to borrow your office for a day." And he was like, "What do you mean?" I'm like, "I need to borrow your whole office and your team." I'm gonna rebrand it. I'm gonna take off your planks, put on mine. And I'm gonna introduce this founder of this Mictivia brand to the whole team and make up roles for the whole team. And so he let me do that. I don't remember one time, when we were actually one of the officers, I said to the guy, "I'm like, this is our finance department." And it was like three or four people in that room. And the guy turns around and goes, "Why do you have three or four people for finance, for import wholesale business?" Like it's a lot. I'm like, "Yeah, we're crushing it." A lot of invoices just send out. So that's how naive I was at the time. But funny enough, he bought the story, gave us the rights with that first product that got into retail. And soon after that, I kind of started importing other brands, but started seeing that I had constraints with a match margin that retail has wanted. And I started seeing the brands that I was importing didn't really do anything that I couldn't do myself, 'cause prior to this, I've been doing a buying trip in China at the age of 18, doing some watches. So I was familiar with China. And at that point, the first brand I launched was the headphone brand during the whole big Dr. Beats era. And the way I got into retail with that headphone brand was that I did a deal of Sony music in Australia, where I gave them 10% of all sales, and they became like my influence army. And they would do promos for me, they put the headphones in video clips. And with that kind of, I guess, collaboration, I got into a major retailer's exclusive deal, and that kicked off me and built them on brands. So I developed like any brand that I thought was cool and had opportunity at the time, but what I did, I created like high-painting brands. Like I had a brand for sports headphones, I had a brand for drones. I had actually developed, yeah, the world's world's first flying Angry Birds toy, 'cause I had a license to that. I then started doing license like Easter eggs with Manchester United and Liverpool, so that was a great idea. So I had this like, relationships for his retailers, I started creating brands left around the center and bringing products. Until I was about 25 years old, one of the retailers went bust. I lost about five million dollars overnight, which forced me to pivot. And from that moment, then I said, I'm gonna take all my next brands, Vex Consumer Online. First brand was Skywalkers, did about two million dollars in its first four months. From that brand, people started to take notice like how did you do it. A friend of mine who owned elite subs in Australia asked me to do his marketing, because you saw what I did for Skywalkers, which took his Southern brand from 500k to a million dollars a month and 18 months. That formed like this digital agency. And from there, I can try and spin up brands, solve some, close them down. Until five years ago, I launched QSkinK with my sister. And this was the first kind of global brand that we started and we might do close to nine figures this year. And yeah, we got better, I think one of the fast-growing skincare brands in the world recently. Matt, one thing you said before we got started is you left Sydney Australia, because you didn't like the hustle and bustle and people being too money-focused. You moved to an undisclosed location in Europe, but then you had to make a company that makes a ton of money. So is that just irony or was that like the focus the whole time? - It's that list and all of the really creation. You know, we didn't touch from the outcome, it just comes to you. - Okay, yeah, the best you do. - Well, I think you'll live and prove to that, man. So, okay, how does a young man with great skin make a skincare company? So you should use the background on the company real quick. - Yeah, so I was in creation, my sister was in Australia, she kept sending me all these skincare products to try, like literally post a nose, morning, night, she proteins and as a guy didn't do anything, but I was into biohacking. And she got to Croatia and believe it or not, people in Croatia were calling me like Ben and Ron Mutton, whatever I was doing was working. I was like, we're reversing my aging, it was all because of biohacking, it's starting up to the door to skincare. And she walked into my room and she saw this massive LED industrial panel and then she really wanted one. And what I told her was like, "Fly a brand who's heart-stulling." And for a whole life she wanted to start a brand, particularly in skincare. And that's when I thought like, this probably good entry point, 'cause I believe in the technology, I've been using it. And at the time, we actually thought all the first ones to ever think of a mask. And then we went online and was like a few things brands. But that was the great entry point, 'cause I think it was like a life-old moment that a lot of these, I guess, clinical treatments aren't accessible to everyone at home. And that was kind of the mission of the company to make them more accessible to people like my sister. And that's where we kind of started. Sean here, I tell you about Sarah's analytics and Sarah's pulse. Ridge is profitable every single day. And we've taken that super seriously since we built this business. We track contribution margin by day. We look at the skews we sell every single day. And we have to do this manually up until Sarah's own skin now. We take all of our skew level data. We build it into the data warehouse. Everything that goes into making a true P&L, I get on a day-to-day basis. Sarah's pulse gives you clarity, so your CLO and your CFL and your CMO start speaking the same language. Contribution margin shifts teams away from hoping profits survive the season to manage them in real time. Look a walk through with the Sarah's pulse team today. Click the like in the description and thank you Sarah for bringing you this show. I think great category. I mean, you mentioned 15 brands. I know Aldenny Lux is a player in the space and we've seen other players. I think it just shows that like, it looks like a red ocean, actually a great place to build. There's obviously a bunch of demand for these products, right? And like you said, they work, man. So what was the first year like? - First year was a struggle. I mean, I think someone asked me to sell the business or do my capital back. I would have taken it for sure. It was a struggle. At any point, but the A/V like was high. I think anytime you're selling a product, A/V of 350 or above, it requires a lot of education. In terms of quite a lot of brand building and we had to create some sort of associations with our brand to demand a high price point. So until we got the mechanics right in terms of influencer marketing side, it was a struggle. But I really really took off probably E2 and E3. E2 probably is where we had a lot of momentum when we actually went to another category. And because we went to another category, we found a product that we could acquire more customers with and draw more attention to the brand. And that's what really helped us. - Yeah, and so if I'm getting out of stuff, maybe tell us where the brand is. today and then we can work backwards. Yeah, so this year we'll do close to nine figures or on tracks to do that. So we started about four or five years ago. We're in the molten part of Caduay's at the moment. We're in LED, water filters, black and adly at home, and in the normal serums and stuff like that, which released out Haygwerk Helmet. So that's where it currently at. And everything's kind of like built around skincare mat or is it something else? Because first brand goes. Yeah, it's all around skincare. I mean, like anything, I think the mission of the company kind of changes as you did develop and things where we thought we were going to be dear one, we're not year five. Around this crossroads now, where we're trying to understand what we're going to be even stand for as a brand. And that's probably the hardest thing. It's been to instrumenting product categories. And probably too early to be honest. But we just want to stick to that narrative of bringing political treatments to home. So that's where we're kind of best at. I think we're really well-classed in building distinct products in the market. So look at our masks, look at our confusion in water filters. We have a patent on. We kind of use these five different elements to create distinct products. We always try and change the design. We try and change the style. We change the materials. We change the experience. Then we try and add some emotional metaphor. We call it the distinct pentagon. I think because of that, we've been able to go into product categories that are trending. But stand out enough to where we can get influence on board. Because our product is unique enough for them to want to pay off our brand. For a lot of other brands into the market doing OEM products. And I think they struggled in terms of getting an influence track. If you go back to the start that you said the first year was hard. And that was just when you were selling the LED. Yeah, the mask. Did you ever figure out or ever crack like some way to sell a higher AOV product? Because yeah, like I'm, dude, I've played in the 350 plus space. I think Sean, you've got some things that are up there. It's the more expensive, it can get more difficult. Right? Particularly with Matt Aaron. Yeah, I think the hardest thing is especially in the early days because you've got cash to strings. The attribution you're, they're measuring the product off is too short of a window. And only so this year we probably changed it to look at clicks and deterministic views over a CCN period. Which we're now looking at a lot longer windows because we have probably the cash to do it. And we have probably the confidence to do it where, you know, year one we didn't. And spending into something like meta on the mask was kind of a scary, scary activity. And that's why we relied more on the influence at that stage. But the influence is a lot longer tail approach, right? So today we're seeing it work, but we're just looking at that Tribute Shwinder as a lot larger. Was this your first foreign e-commerce? Did you do a straight to brand builder? No, so I used to build brands, consume brands and sell them to mass retailers. Until, yeah, one day it was like 25 years old. I lost five million dollars overnight. And made the retail in Australia when bust. And at that point, I said I'm not going to direct some retarging long and a build direct to the SIOA. And the first brand we built was called Skawalkers, but from like zero to two million four months. And at that point, it was like, all right, this is probably a better play for us. And that's where we started building the whole digital team. Oh, dude, you were old school wholesale being a bee. And you had a retail go down and that's how you lost money. Mike Sean, I think I've mentioned this, my business partner. He, I mean, he wrote a book partly about this, but he was selling toys with toys or rustworm fish. It's like, you know, an awesome time. Yeah, Matt, Matt, what retailer took you down? The cold deakesmith in Australia. Have you heard them? No, no, but you know, we have a, we just have a friend who's seven million dollars off of Joanne's fabric, which is like a fabric store in America. And they, of course, went bankrupt because who the hell is buying a fabric, but it's like a hobby store. And yeah, what sucks is there's just no recourse to that. Like, you think they buy your products and you're not an creditor. You're at the very, very bottom of the stack. Everyone else gets paid before you. Did you get clawed back at all? I don't know if this is Australian, but if you do get paid, like even like six months before the bankruptcy, the creditors can come after you for the money. And so like, not only, but not only do you lose all the open accounts payable. Sometimes they try to get more money out of you. And it's just, it's a messy, best, messy business. Yeah, yeah. It's actually funny. You said that that's exactly what they tried to do. But for whatever reason, they kept fighting it. They kind of forgot about it. But it's exactly what they tried to do. Like I couldn't believe it the day that my account told me it's like, all right, so they only like four mil plus that mil, they paid you like two months ago. They can't actually go off that as well. That was like reality broken. Yeah, it's a stupid, stupid thing out there, if mad. So okay, I got asked then like the, you went from traditional like resale wholesale, right? You got bit there. You go direct consumer. So there's this concept of like never built, never build on somebody else's land, right? But aren't we all doing that? Like aren't we all 100% building on Zuckerberg's land? Or, or TikTok or like how do you, I mean, I'd be curious how you both think about this. But Matt, how do you think about this? I mean, clonetration risk is real. And you just do your best. You can diversify as much as you can. I think even with Cuba today, despite, and other shows, there's a lot like, we could probably invest a lot more in meta earlier. But because it had like paid to SD from what happened, I was so adored to not get spending on meta. So we could try to make the long channels work. Like we make channel like Google work, I think a lot better than other brands. And I think the influence of society and our TikTok shop is giving us a nice distribution curve across all the platforms. So we're not really reliant solely on meta. If you're scaling any commerce brand today, ads alone aren't enough. Afterself focuses on the one moment that every brand already owns, after checkout and turns the post-purchase moment into more profit. Monatize every order with post-purchase offers and thank you page experiences. Without disrupting checkout or hurting conversion. Enterprise grade tech used by Gap, ticket master, macy's and target, now driving results for brands like True Classic, Hexclad, Ridge, and Jones Road. I would know. This is the reason I ended up buying three pans from Hexclad instead of two. Afterself is already generated over one billion in additional revenue for e-commerce brands. Revenue that doesn't require more traffic or higher cap. So checkout afterself and tell them that the operator sent you. What I love about the cure brand is that you guys are doing basically five of your product verticals and they're also compliment like they all just really help each other. Like, you know, no Ivan's, I'm doing anybody else to shower filters and lightmasks. But like if you have a hairbrush, lightmask, you know sheriff's like shower filters are going to help with that. So I love how it all works together. All this idea of building on other people's land. I mean, this is the biggest problem with retail. Is that like you get a PO, you're all excited. You're like, oh, this is going to build a real business with these partners. And it's so easy for them to screw you. Right. And then like you know, wait, the digital world, Amazon's very similar. It's like they can ban you at any point. Right. When do you get to Facebook shop? If I you could show more of your destiny. And it's just understanding you're always going to have to use partners. But then putting your trust and partners that have the balance sheet to back you up. Right. You brought influence over a couple of times. I mean, that's rather new. Like you're a legacy brand builder. You're building, you know, the retail brands. Then you go digital. How'd you embrace influence? That's right. I mean, so when I was 21 years old, I built my first brand of headphones when I was bringing into like the retailers. That's when beats took off. And I was like, how the hell are they like cut fruit when we've got all these brands coming through. And what I did, I actually didn't deal with Sony music at the time. Where I gave them 10% of all my sales. And every single artist was to promote my headphones in their video clips. I've been store appearance, impurances. And that's how I got into retail early on. So I was doing the influence of marketing piece on a different kind of scale. Yeah, like 15 years ago. So it's kind of a natural progression for me. It was a little easier today. But yes, I was very familiar with the whole process. And then like in my mind, I create this thing called brand impact units. Where I essentially look at like the reach. So we're spending in terms of advertising dollars. What associations on me transferring. And what trust are we giving a lift on the brand based on our spend. So I'm very much thinking about what credits are doing. What besides acquisition. And that's why the influence of power for me. When I'm trying to pair certain associations and create mental real estate in the consumer's mind is critical, especially for skincare. There's all about trust. It's all about trust at clinical level. So I have to use influences to associate that trust and transfer to our brand. For me, UGC and stuff like that. Trying to build trust and associations of skincare brand. We wouldn't cut it in terms of trying to build the brand at the same time. And I feel like if we went the whole UGC route, when we were just putting feel trying to find the next angle, the next acquisition channel consistently without building that brand. That's the way I've always thought about it. How'd you overcome the cost? Everything I talked to a female first or skincare beauty brand. The cost of the influence is just crazy. Right? So was it because you started so like in the TikTok era, it was just easier to work with TikTokers. Typically you're probably getting quoted $300,000 for videos or whatever. So that's how you overcome that. Yeah, it's insane. I think having amazing gross margins. But also we didn't really use TikTok until October. And I think just the remiss we had working with creators on a long-term deal. Like we'd spend maybe 300, 400K of one crater a year. But we're able to consistently test new angles with them through dark coasting and white listing. And eventually we'll become profitable. It's very hard, I think, when you're engaging with one influence. And you're expecting the first angle, they're going to use with them by white listing to actually work. Like anything, take iterations. So for us, having that, I guess, timeline to be able to test your angles with them was what saved us. You know, it's to be able to hit the first one. But we normally hit, you know, second or third for sure. Where's the conviction come to do that, though? Like the, I guess that's, I don't know, Sean. Like that sounds great in hindsight, Matt. But at some point you have to sit there and say like, I'm going to just start sparing money on these creators. And to Sean's point, when you're selling to women, these creators can get very expensive. Yeah, yeah. Where where did the conviction to say like you know what we're just gonna do like we're just gonna go all in on like this person or these people and we're just gonna test a lot of stuff and it's expensive but I'm like I'm really I have you must have had high conviction that it would work but like where did that come from? Yeah I mean it came from starting the bottom of working way up you know we didn't pay 300 thousand dollars the first year paid 2000 5,000 10,000 15,000 hey slow you work your way up and the good thing is that as you're working your way up you're probably proving all the angles and essentially you're gonna give almost the same script to another influence and because I have different avatar different audience you know it's gonna work you know it's gonna hit so by then by time we'll spend a lot of money we had proven angles that proven scripts and we're proving landing pages and offers where the risk for us just wasn't as high as potentially other brands and what I was gonna say was you actually talked about two things like you know what you have dark posts white listing you partnership ads typically on people have an influencer they're trying to get a return on those on the post right so like having your influencer post and like drive traffic from that post to your website and I think that's basically all but gone in the modern era right like it's really like you think though you're paying for the brand rights to the creative then you're gonna run it out of yourself and if you're can build a system that does that at scale you do a just unlock new customers you have best performing ads but like it's influencers as creators not as you know media units right actually trying to get impressions out of them and I think you guys were early to that because I think people are just waiting for that today but okay can I have both this I got I'd love to dig in deeper here because I think that people listening to this I see this on X all the time I see it in questions that I get if you're if you're advising somebody to run this playbook like Matt you made mention we started at the bottom what does that mean does that mean you start with smaller creators does that mean that you try to do deals with larger creators were like there's upside incentive like how do you tactically how would you both approach that right now for some like I'm a new brand I want to start working with influencer creator how do I start at the bottom you some of the bottom just by going after like the smallest creators essentially and you try and find the avatar that resonates most with so you do see this really working right and just doubling down on the avatar angle but for a white listing kind of influencer and we're doing tests now with a sort of port yesterday where sure our return on the ad spend is higher with the beer creators we're measuring people 100 K and over 100 K under but the cost also higher and our actual net is actually very similar in terms of the reach and I guess probably we get from greatest under 100,000 over 100,000 in the end once we net out all the cost for the reason we go for the bigger the creators is more for the brand perspective not so much the acquisition perspective so I think anyone can go to creators with a few 10 20,000 dollars and still have similar results to what they'll have if they have a big creator totally well what we found is that like it's really hard to make the bigger name is pencil out but I think your question was if we're starting over today how are you building a brand with an engagement with influencers you know I wouldn't start a brand without an influencer today I think it's like it's just an unfair advantage you should you should add to it and if I go to you know here's website they have six doctors on there right like it feels very much like hey this is a clinical product of stamps approval on it and I'm sure that really helps do it like I want to buy the stuff through the other seven doctors on the homepage like all the time you have great it is and I wouldn't sort of brand without this relationship to start but look I think I think I think there's a great nugget of journey we got we got we have to tell this story okay so you are you know finding ways to sell into retail in your very right 20 or 20 years right to the youngest guy walking into you know Kmart which is still popping off in Australia right and you're getting those deals done you get burned bad one time and you're like hey I'm going to go all in on digital I'm going to build up some great digital brands right what were the first ones first one was skywalkers there was a whole board movement and it was funny because yes because it's funny because two years before that I had a hell made brand in mass retailers and it was going nuts it was called juice up and it was like at a point of sound next to the counter and it was certainly like 10,000 units a week or something like that until a customer dropped one of them and a quarter of fire and I had to do like a national recall on TV and stuff like that but what that maybe to be is like an expert in batteries and I'm a PhD in batteries so when the hoverboard came up my batteries were the safest and I was on the news again before the right reasons because my hoverboards were the safest in Australia so that brand took off and went yeah it did like two million in first four months because of all the product development stuff I did and the knowledge I had before but then I was clear at that point that yeah I pretty much had to just keep doing brands and don't direct to you right yes okay so are you just focused on the local Australian market or are you dropped from Hong Kong to America or are you just focused on Australia? No at that point I was just in the Australian market yeah so I had that brand I had a sports equipment brand as well I had a supplement brand and I was just focused on the Australian market I think I was just too immature in terms of an operator until like five six years ago I'm like I'm just putting myself in such small opportunity vehicles like this doesn't make it doesn't make any sense and I think what made me realize that is when I have a digital agency as well and my friend Davie goes by and Davie Foggey will do in the media buying for him back at Woody when they're like a four mil up and so 250 mil and then when I saw what he did that was kind of like my Eric Banner the four-minute mile moment I'm like you know what I actually build one big business instead of having all these different you know hundreds small brands in Australia and that's what led me to that gave the legend is he out there he's helping people you know all the time but let's say about what you did with the brands so like you have a brand doing what's called you know you have five brands doing ten million dollars a year in Australia do you just shut them down for a little while do you sell them are you taking profit distribution off of them or is he really just a grind you're just watching new ones are shutting down what's going on pretty much launching and shutting down but I sold for me three of them I sold three of them but also the midst of all this like I had licensing brands like yeah I was always like an addicted entrepreneur I had the license to Umbro the fitness apparel so I was not lecturing wholesaling that like ten years I sold that business last year like I had retail shops side tattoo removal laser clinics I was kind of doing everything like nothing really made sense and I was just yet just starting businesses selling them starting them selling them buying them closing down it's just like habit yeah it kind of seems like a rat race brown it seems like you're doing like a million things run like if you could put your focus you'd have a billion dollar brand right now every SaaS company says they are AI powered but very few can explain what it actually does for the revenue of my brand this is why post scripts approach to it out to us they don't just build AI for demos or buzzwords they built it to drive real incremental revenue post scripts AI called shopper it shows up inside SMS at moments with real buyer intended when shoppers are likely asking questions hesitating maybe even about to drop off shopper can answer product questions instantly answer questions about fit availability recommendations order issues the kinds of stuff that people usually bounce for this means more conversions higher a less lost demand so you are driving more revenue and doing it more efficiently check out shopper from post script we use it at Pila which is why I am telling you to check it out well that's what ever I always told me and then I guess that's what kind of happened with Cuba so that focused on one day a client would arrive yeah okay cool so I want to have it all those other random businesses you had so like how do you I mean if you're 20 did how did you get into you know the brand building into wholesale did you get to go to China and you're like I could do this or like what was what was that like yeah my first mind from in China was 18 another business I did was doing licensed watches for a couple of brands that's another whole story but the first time I got into import wholesale for two good I got the rights to a product called McTBR you guys heard of it it's like 15 years ago used to wirelessly protect your PC to TV TV before app or airplay was running out so I got the rights to that and I set up a website got the rights and the guys like all the fans like hey I want to come and you know see operation Australia my operation was in my Audi A3 West subwoofer like you know I had no office nothing so I set up as the marketing manager and I go to the account and look I got this guy coming to Australia I need to go over your office for a day it's like when he made I'm like I need to go over your office it's not come work whenever you want to like I need a change of signage I need to use your whole team I need to make up rolls for everyone in your team so when it's like I come they introduced themselves to the whole team so I call it whatever so this guy flew in picked him up broke into the offers and I remember once I went to a room I said this is the finance team there's like three people in there and it goes to me three people in finance doing for wholesale that's a lot I'm like we're doing a lot of audits you know me I don't idea what I was doing and then I went to the third party warehouse that that was my warehouse got the rights to that product got into retail and then soon enough I was importing a couple of the brands was like three or four different brands and then I realized like I've been trying to be for these guys are doing nothing that I can't do and I really didn't have the margins gives the retires that they wanted so then I started developing brands and that person was a headphone brand that I mentioned and then what I kind of realized was that all I have is literally the packaging the traffic's in the store all I have is the marketing tool is the packaging I can't afford anything else so then I started creating like hyper niche brands in every sector like I had a sports headphone brand I had a drone brand I had a power bank brand all separate brands because that was the only way I compete and that kind of strategy went well in the retailers loved it because I gave him heaps and margin the package was beautiful and yeah valuable to the end user okay and then obviously you lose five million bucks or blows up does that does that basically such you back to zero you mean you're 25 years old where that's your whole nest egg for like everything that you you've been grinding for like eight years at that point but like how much of a reset was that it's probably like 80% of my ever worth at the time yeah yeah yeah I trust the ground zero but at the same time I had that hoverboard company at the same time I lost that money the other one took that hoverboard company to go so that's what kind of fuel the next stage of it better I guess. Yeah, that's lucky enough. Hands very full. Okay. So you start you start grab his little brand. You have a digital agency. You're basically doing everything. I think did you say you have you had physical tattoo removed clinics like you're doing you're in brick and mortar retail too. Okay. Yeah, because because naturally, you know, I went to get my tattoo removed and that one's the best place in Sydney and I walked out. I couldn't put my hand in my t-shirt. How much like they ruin my hair. I was like, I can do this a little better. So I'll just start my own. So that was like the full price behind that. How are you fighting this itch every day now? No, you know, my life's so much better. Less anxiety, less stress, amazing. Oh, least. So there's no pull to say like you go into a business now and you're like, I can do that better. You're actually good. You develop the no muscle. Yeah. Yeah. I'm a big big big professional. The no muscle yet. I love it. Okay. So you have you had about two dozen things and then what was the actual switch to go all in on this skincare brand, right? So like there's you to do a million things. I mean, it's only with five years old or ever. So what were you doing in 2019? What would you what did your life look like that? Yeah, 2019 was that it's like two more five years ago. I actually took three years off from the ages of 28 to 31 and then I launched this brand and truth be called I launched another brand at the same time. I had a civic playbook in my mind. I launched a company called football supplements and this was supposed to be for my sister. This was I was supposed to be involved with this business. I launched football supplements had football summons.com. That was a brand name. That was domain. I had like athletic and Madrid. I was a sponsor. I had basketball and I had a learner players. I had around Madrid players and there's just no pro market. It's it. I lost like one point. I don't know. Five million dollars trying to start that brand. About 18 months. I closed it because QL was taking off. Football subs was like declining and that's jumped on the this the QL skincare bandwagon. But yeah, at that time, I thought that was going to be like my $100 million brand. It wasn't and skincare one was doing better. So then I started helping my sister. It was the thesis. So you it was like the whole influencer thing. So you the supplement company had off soccer players. You got to care skincare doctors. Like that was the same. Now with the thesis. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I like white listing with the big clubs and they've never done that stuff. I thought I'm going to go and no one knows this. I do. It's like five years ago. I can white list of Arsenal and athletic and Madrid has to work since that doesn't. I'm actually surprised that didn't work. They do. It was still surprised. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm not. I'm seeing a lot of people waste a lot of money like in sports niches because they just assume like, oh, my fans are going to love this or whatever. I know I know a brand that like they gave like, you know, messy like a million dollars for ad rights and photo shoots and they're like and they have like a cloud with them. They're like, yeah, we sold 300. And it's like he posts on his social. He has like 50 million followers or whatever. They sold 300. It's just it's the disc the disconnect there. But yeah. Yeah. So my question was like he had 2019 the three years you took off. What were you doing? Because you were doing everything on earth. You got burned out. You took three years off. What was that time? What was it about? What was that month? What was that time period like? Yeah. That was a moment for like self discovery. There was a lot of traveling. I got my skydiving license. I put all the businesses like under leadership and actually made more money without me. Funny enough. But and I just literally just traveled the world did like spiritual stuff. Psychedelics tried to understand like what do I actually want to do for the rest of my life? Like because I at that point like I still made good money. I wasn't like, if you make good money. I thought I should have been a lot happier than I was but it wasn't whatever reason. So I just went on like an internal spiritual journey during that time. I said I wasn't going to do anything again unless there was certain many attached to it. And the football stops like I used to be an aspiring football player. I thought that the reason I didn't make is because I didn't understand like the nutritional side of things and that was one of the major reasons. So I was like help that for other players that was kind of the play there that didn't work out. But yeah, that's why I didn't want to study the other solicits meant something to me. So I was trying to I want to like make money authentically. And I think the way the difference between authentic money and eat authentic money is that has some kind of inherent meaning to it where you actually do the act without needing any money or verification in the process. So that's all trying to find it. And what would be FU money? Like what how much money were were you looking for that whole time? It's a great question. Like 100 mil. Yeah. That's a very big number. You can you can you can do it. You can say those words long before you get to 100 million. Either. Also, you live in Croatia, man. I'm pretty sure I'm pretty sure you get to do it for like 15. Yeah, no, but you know, well, Christ is actually more expensive than Australia. It's middle-limbs. People will be shocked to hear that. Yeah. People will be shocked. So I think I was telling him Matt the other day like, you kind of get loans past 500,000 dollars personally. So anything I'm buy, I have to buy in cash. Yeah. So you cost a living in Croatia could be lower, but the but like in dollar terms, not, but like, not even because like you don't have access to the financial instruments that like other countries do. Yeah, but yeah, but not even like my pen house was like formula in US. It's not cheap. Yeah, it's not cheap. In a population of eight, wow, biggest Croatia, what people are. There you go. Oh, yeah. That's it. Yeah, I thought can't always bad. Geez. Yeah. It's going nuts here. Yeah. But that's that's New York prices. Yeah. But you're I think I've some bad news. Everyone I know that has over a hundred million. They say that F.U. number is even bigger. So I think I think it just keeps going up. It was certainly never enough. Man, it's not. That was back then. I mean, like my burn rate personally is like 35,000 years a month. So I think my my because my concept of like why much I need is drastically changed. Yeah. I think that comes with age two. Yeah. I think some maturity. So I think I think we're starting to get peace that your whole story together, right? You're young, hustler. You're doing you're doing like a million different things. You you figure out this niche. I'm going to make OEM goods. Basically, I'm going to buy them in China. I'm going to get some sort of brand on it and make a beautiful macellate to these retailers. And for a while, life's good. You do it as many of those as possible. And then you get punched in the face one time and it takes down 80% of your networks. Then you're like this. I'm going all in on digital brands. I got Facebook ads working. I got hoverboards. I got, you know, I'm just been up four or five of these. I'm going to digital agency. And that works for a couple of years. And then you you have a big aha moment. You see that somebody could sell stuff outside of Australia. And you're like, I got to do that. So then you scale it up. You take a couple of years off. You come back and you're like, look, I want to do something that actually I would do for free. Like I want to actually go out there and help the world. And you're like, I'm going to do supplements because I I wanted to be a professional football player. And I just needed to do this one little thing. And it doesn't hurt. But life life's funny, man. You know, it'll it'll it'll it'll rob you with one hand. It'll give you gifts together. You end up because your sister wanted, you know, LED lights. You ended up having this amazing brand doing $80 million a year right now. So I think things worked out because I think the skincare brand is beautiful and it's totally crushing. Matt, you have to learn to say, I want to like, did you on all of these things were all of the bootstrapped was everything out of your own pocket. Like if you ever take any any any investors, anything like that, yeah, no, definitely. And there's like no chance to show that it's going to give you a loan for anything like I remember even throughout the period of when we'll send to retailers, I had to factor invoices to get paid like three months. It was like, I'm scruciating because like no one in the show is going to help you. No one the financial institution there is not helpful for small businesses. Yeah, I don't think Americans realize how amazing their system is compared to every other striking country. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like okay, I don't know. That word, personal to finance. I'm like bro, what like this doesn't always exist in Australia. I go crazy. I go remember having to so at one point like I went to my parents and like, man, I've got this order from Deeksmith. I paid 30% I needed 70% like just let me extend your mortgage. I'm not risking my house. So and then and then and the con fact that we had those 30% brand and as a return that's how desperately we were. So the first person I shopped that to is like, I'll mortgage my house 30% yeah and that's what we had to pay for like years as an interest rate. Wow. That's worse than loan sharks and like, yeah, we can minate. Yeah, I think 30% of the label in America. You know, it has got a little bit better. I think there is more like private equity capital coming into Australia, but the multiples are still worse. So like if you could become a global brand, try to become a global brand. I think like the tools we all use, it's like, look, if you're in Australia, you're running ads on Facebook, which is an American company, right? We're using the same social media, listen to the same music, try to get as global as possible and like, it's just not that hard, right? If you're going to pick a market to sell into, obviously America's the best market and then like if you're doing that, you might as well go everywhere, right? We've a great Australian business, but it couldn't support the company, right? And when I meet Australian auction owners that could stuck inside their one little market, it helps to Canada happens to Europe too. You got to just you got to just go abroad, dude. So let's talk about that with with cure. How are your sales breaking out? You've gone super, super fast. You said you just launched on TikTok in October. So how did you get from zero to $80 million faster than most people? I think it comes down to our Crave strategy. I think we have a very sister Crave strategy machine. You know, we have this thing called a spherical scaling system that we built internally. It's like the first stage is angle architecture where we take the use case of the problem and we can wind over avatar, but super, super hyper personalized. Like, you know, someone's got acne, it's like a teenager-esque, hormonal acne and that's like one angle. And then we look at the awareness levels of the ad. So is it unaware? Is it problem-aware, solution-aware, prog-aware, most aware? And we actually modify our spending based on where it sits at the awareness level. So we create an unaware ad. We're happy to spend more into that unawareness ad. And then as you have the funnel, we spend less or less. So it's that sophistication. And then scaling with formats, I think, allowed us to get to this. Because I like, you know, either coaching company now where I coach equal brands. And that's the only thing I keep bridging. It's like angles and offers, angles and offers. And I don't think you have to really think about anything else until maybe you get through, you know, multiple layers of fingers. - Hearing you say that, it's no surprise you're running a great brand because for a long time, like this is like during COVID, brand sounders were just people who really liked their product or whatever, like, and the people who are surviving now are amazing marketers. And to be a great marketer, it is all about creative right now, right? You know, this is a bait about if you could have too much creative, right? But it's like, no, if you're trying to scale up, the more angles, the better. The more individual piece of content that are unique, people hear that they've been saying I'm shooting the same video 10 times. And it's like, that doesn't help anybody. It's like you need to have, you need to have 50 different ways to sell to 50 different people. And if you want to scale, each one of those gets a thousand bucks a day, right? But when you add up 50, you're at $50,000 a day in scale and you do that over and over again. So no, it does not surprise me or crush it at. So let's talk about getting over to TikTok. Like, you know, you're not a TikTok shopper, or you're on a certain shopper at first. Obviously you're going to crush over there. So what was the delay? I mean, we got on there. When was it? I do have some issues in terms of getting, I think I was October, we started actually scaling, we probably got on there May, but we didn't get approved at the start because we were like invasive with the needles and stuff like that. So eventually we used some of the link, we got approved and we've scaled pretty aggressively. I think one of the, when the top 10 terms of TikTok shops seemed like October and November, but once we started actually looking to deeper we were making money from it. And the more you dig deeper into it, like there was some weird thing happened where we used to get, say, about 30% 40% revenue was organic and that made it profitable for us. All of a sudden, like a switch in October, zero organic revenue, once we tripled as debt. So all of a sudden we're in the negative. And ever since then, we haven't been able to really bounce back. I'm still trying to work it out with Master TikTok shop reps. They kind of help us. And that's like the game we're trying to play now. Let's try to see if we can actually make it profitable. We're doing holdout tests with Work Magic at the moment to see if that actually can possibly help style the channels. But at the moment, it hasn't really been popular as a cluster investment. And everyone talks about this whole incremental effect around the channels. We haven't seen it yet. - I definitely agree with you that there's no more organic revenue. It's like we were talking to you know, best and class brands and they're like, yeah, 90% of the revenue is going to come from GMV Max campaigns. So you're going to be, it's just a new way to get ads been out of us and commission and whatever else, right? But Bummer, you're going to hear about the Halo. Everyone promises the Halo. That is what it like this mythical thing everyone has been talking about. But hopefully you find it. Hopefully you can find that holdout. And if not, you're crushing on better. - Yeah, exactly. We'll see you'll stay in the 10 days time. I want to talk about how, so you built this company with your sister, right? What is the division? Like how do you guys split up? Who does what? And how do you actually run the company? Like who is running the company? Like, and how does the whole organization work? It's like all of this sounds awesome. That's a lot of growth very quickly to be bootstrapped. So like operationally you got to be buttoned up. - Yeah, I mean, she's often, sorry, I'm often, she's defense. So she's everything product related. I'm everything Mark and her land. And the only time we butt heads is because obviously she's trying to build a brand and not only knows what a brand means and if we advertise on a certain way might not be on brand. And I think that's no time we kind of butt heads. And that's hard. But apart from that, I think it works great because if you actually get a hand in our products, I think our products are literally world class. I think she's spent a lot of time and that are amazing job on it. But yeah, that's where the troubles lie. In terms of what brand is and how do we still scale while protecting a certain brand image which we don't really know how to waterify? - Dude, well, Taylor's all this time, man. You're like, no, I wanna run the, you know, Black Friday offer ads in October. She's like, no, it's bad to the brand that I've been there. (laughing) But you're going back to the product being best in class. What you guys have done is something, Ridge we talked about is putting salt in something, right? Like, you know, we have any commodity could we get into? Like, I like a bunch of business, right? Like, we have to make it really appealing to people. And like, you know, you can't really want to feature all that often 'cause it's like a luggage is a piece of luggage. It's like, well, it's gonna be just as light as everybody else and just as durable. But you have to like make it look like it has salt and then like people actually have to purchase it. You guys have done a great job with that because so much of the LED NAS market looks like American Psycho. It looks just like horribly designed like scaring kids or whatever. But you guys actually like make it look elegant. And I think that's a huge part of your asset success. It's like the aesthetic angle. So you just did a great job on that, man. - Yeah, as you did. Yeah, as you crushed them. The distinct products that we make is definitely a big, big marketing play for us without them at job will be hot in itself. - And you could see this business being five times bigger just because you have those different product lines, right? You could have serums on subscription. You could have the microneedling on subscription. And then you have these big AOV products to really, you know, get people in the door. And you talked about that early on as you said, you had a high AOV product that like you were trying to scale and it was hard. But then you found this second product line that got people into the brand. What was that second product line? Was it the mask? - No, the second product was the micro-infusion. Was that her microneedling? Yeah, yeah. That was our main acquisition product. I think when you're trying to slide products, it always has to have a purpose. You know what I mean? Once by acquisition, once by AOV, you move once by LTV. The filters were clearly an LTV play for us. We're actually potentially looking to go and see where we are. We're going to test telehealth as well for skincare as the LTV play. So we're just trying to really aim to allow our marketing towards different pillars to make sure we can scale and business properly. But I think just on that in terms of the product development for everyone listening, it's not as hard as people think. Like honestly, you can go and get a product design agency to design like the cosmetic look and feel of your product, fairly cheap. Like you look at some of our water filters. I think the one, there's some of the most beautiful ones, especially the balsa one, are because it's like five grams of design. And then you take the design and you go to the factory and use the factory's engineers to actually bring it to life. But I think a lot of people get stuck with product and all the things is really complicated part. Maybe just looking to redesign it in a certain way. It's not that expensive. - With what we should unpack all that. Because you hear about agencies for everything, right? For email, for paid social, for media buying, for whatever. But yeah, you're totally right. There are design agencies, but they will help you make new products. And yeah, you can spend just like any other thing. You could spend $500,000 to make something. You could spend $5,000 grand. And what it comes, I think you nailed it that you should design something independently. And then you bring it to a factory. It's actually going to make it and you have them engineer it. Because where a lot of some people make mistakes is they have the designers and engineers working together. And they're going to engineer a product that is too hard to make. That happens all the time. And then you bring it through a factory and they're like, this is not how we make it. So I think, or we can make it. And it's going to be three X the cost or whatever, right? You can get 95, you know, the aesthetic with no increase in cost. If you bring your designs over to the engineers, but if you say this is the final thing that has to be engineered, it'll be five times as expensive. We see this after all the time. Yeah, 1000% 1000% unpack that a little further. So if you're saying to somebody who wants to develop a product, don't start at the factory because they're going to be looking at it from an assembly and an engineering perspective. You want to start from industrial design. If you're a factory, we've all been to China, we've all seen, we've all been to the Canter-Town fair. Maybe this is changing over time. But typically Chinese factory partners are very bad at design, right? Like it's almost like a joke that typically the way a Chinese designer, it makes something better is to just add more features. And how often do you see some of the just doesn't really and things or do nobody wants this? It's just, they're just like, it's the platic of the approach. They're just, they're going to keep putting more stuff on it, right? So you, that's why buying off the shelf products, they all look the same, right? And they're flooded out of the office. So you want something unique. So you design something, okay? And design is just the aesthetic look of it, right? And you have a function or idea of how you want it to work. But then you go to a factory who actually makes that product, right? And you say, hey, whatever you're doing it needs to kind of look like this at the end. And then you work together with them to engineer a product that actually works with their supply chain. They have the inherent knowledge of how to make the thing anyway. You don't really know that. And then together you build something that looks beautiful. And like, you know, I would like to just a good example of this where, you know, we could have just done an away clone. We could have just done a monosk. Monosk and away are the exact same back, right? We wanted to make a different one. We would add metal to it. So we have a design and then we go to a factory and say, has to kind of look like this. But we don't engineer that product. You know, we work with them to engineer it. So that's the tip for everybody. You've also, you've spent quite a bit of money on product though. Like I think Tewashan saying, like you guys, you and Christina are not afraid of investing in product development. No, I mean, for the mask it probably costs us 200 grand, so if you're fit to start with, we also build an app. So we have a customizable feature in terms of where you want the treatment. You can have different anti-aging on the eyes or acrylachine, whatever. We've probably just got a couple of hundred grand developing that mask at the start. Yeah. Also mold fees, right? Yeah. The molds, let's just do two. Yeah. Do two onions, two onions, two onions. The molds do kill a year. Yeah. I mean, she's a lot of stuns on some new packaging recently, which is beautiful. But the molds for the packaging costs us like 80 grand, which I was shocked about. Yeah, that's, yeah. Put it in the box, bro. But you know, at least there's no sizes, right? You totally, less than 20 skews in the whole business. Yeah. Because the killer is like, you know, shoes, mold are so expensive, because it's like you have to do, you want to do half sizes, okay? It's like, you know, 250 grand. Are there any categories you've avoided? You've done so much stuff. Is there anything where you're like, oh, that's too hard I shouldn't do that? Or like in retrospect, would you have any tips to like, products you should definitely not do? ours, Sean, the answer is ours. That's always the answer. - Feel like, I don't know. I think there is something that don't actually like. I think the older I get, especially I think with AI coming into play where we're gonna have abundance of resources every way, I think it's more important than ever. It's actually do something you love and sell something that you actually like. No matter what that is, I think you can make anything work if you like it and you wanna do it for the longer period of time. - Dude, if you have football supplements, apparently if you're in your set for it. - Yeah, just not that. - I was gonna say, I have a further question on how you guys are running the company 'cause you said you're off at She's Defend, so you're marketing, she's product. Where does operations supply chain finance? Where does all that roll up to? - Me, you, okay. - Yeah, yeah, I still run that part of the business. I just got a lot more experience in that. So we wanna make any sense. And I think, heard so to genius and what she loves the most is making products and I don't think it makes sense for us to do anything else about that. - I heard 100% agreed. The typical thing I said, they should be through the line of business, a product person, a marketer and then everything else guy. Kinda seems like you're the everything else guy and the marketer. So maybe at some point you hire and everything else guy, a COO or somebody else. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's see, oh yeah. - And also the reason why the COO is the easiest one to hire is just like, it is the most transferable across brands, right? Like you don't wanna hire a bad marketer 'cause they'll kill your whole company and you can't hire a product person. But you know, shipping stuff from warehouse is more or less a commodity, you know, skill set. Love my COO though. - So Matt, on the brand and where it operates now, but I would like to know more, you've talked about sort of like meta advertising, you talk TikTok, what other channels are you selling in? How many markets are you guys selling it? So to get to this number that you're at now, like talk to us a little bit about like the, I guess like the supply chain of this company. Like channels, where you're shipping product to you, all of it, then how the hell do you do that? - I think the biggest challenge is my sister wants to sell everything to everyone, whatever cost. 'Cause she's just a lot of, like she's so passionate about it. So we're pretty much selling globally. 80% of our market probably is in the US and you know, the big English speaking countries probably not a 10 and another 5% in Europe. And then we have warehouses in the US, UK, and also China. And we're shipping China out to the rest of the world. And all that stuff like, it was such a headache to nine before, but we recently, we, let me tell you something about a year and a half two years ago, we jumped on the Fifil bandwagon and that made everything so much easier. Because first we reduced a couple of head counts and our business, sometimes when we sell out of certain bundles, we weren't able to actually mix those bundles and fill up certain gaps in our product line, but we could fill in the back end we could. So we never would add a stock, when before we'd have to always go add a stock, but because of the fulfill and the like back end engine, we're able to create different bundles on the back end where the customers wouldn't see, the website would stay the same and allow us to keep selling. So that kind of helped us sell more products and more people than all these different markets. And if someone was at a stock in a certain warehouse, we could root it to another warehouse that should directly come China. So that allowed us to keep up with the growth that we're having. Before we're scaling that quickly, as you guys know, you started pretty quickly sometime, and you're only forecast too well. And that system actually allowed us to be a bit more, yeah, lean in with our forecasting. And if you have five product lines in five warehouses, it's like, it do the complexity gets insane, right? That you were when you at, and bundling, are you doing any wholesale as well or any Amazon? - We just started and probably Amazon properly in October as well. We were just so under-resourced. I didn't realize what a talk to actually win on Amazon. We had one like, you know, we had one guy doing PPC a bit and this and that. But in our category, now we have like a team of like seven or something that we have like a mini fractured team. And that's what's changing in for us, just investing a lot more racists since we make that much out of work. - I mean, you're hitting on all the good points about a fulfill, right, order management system, order routing, eventually you do demand, you're planning to man capture and they're like, how do you make sure your stuff from China shows up at Amazon on time? Because Amazon is not your warehouse, you can't control it, you can't overstock it. Like you have like, especially if you start doing, and I recommend you do this, Amazon in the UK, Amazon in Canada, Amazon in Europe. Like they're gonna give you 50 square feet, and it's like, how do you make sure it always is full all the time? - What's up operators? Welcome to the Rich Panel ad read. Rich panel has been a sponsor for over 12 months. I've been a paying customer for over 12 months and guess what? I just renewed to pay again for another year. We have cut our SaaS bill in half and automation dropped our cost per ticket by 70%. Our CSAT has also improved from 88%, which is still really good, to 96%, best in class, all powered by Rich Panel. I told them last year, hey, you guys need to do the same thing with returns, and now Rich Panel has a returns portal. It's built to cut down your tickets and convert more refunds into exchanges. They do the heavy lifting, data import, self-service, retention flows, team training, all of it, and it'll be live in two weeks. If you wanna save 30%, guaranteed on help desk, and now returns, book a demo. - I also like with the fulfill at the moment, we'll try and build our own AI inventory forecasting system. I would probably spend a bit of money on it, and then fulfill launch their called version, which is actually probably better than we'll try and build for last four months anyway. So that's also kind of helped us manage everything recently. - You should love to take knowledge as to technology, but you're a great ads guy, your sister's a great product builder. It's like that's our zone of genius. We should just focus on that stuff, man. Mine is podcasting. That's what I'm like, it's my zone of genius. (laughing) Yeah, it's before we're retiring from operating, and we're just gonna podcast now. So Matt, can you then you've been building brands, you've done a lot of things. I think Sean, you wanted to go there, but now you're sort of like training, coaching, you're helping other operators. Like why start that? Why get into this new business? Like you've been so focused on here, scale the one big thing, and now you've got this other thing that you're kind of like running alongside it, is that, is that have purpose? Like what's the, what's the reasoning? And then to remember about it. Yeah, it's more for impact over profit. I think at this stage of my life, any extra million that I make weren't actually back in my life at all. I think my basic needs are met. My lifestyle is met. And I just almost build at the moment, so I can coach literally. That's how much I enjoy the coaching thing. I think just, at some point, you need to add a later contribution into your life when you get sort of psychological development, and that for me is the coaching. And that's been so rewarding. I think we've coached like about 150 different brands, the last six months alone. And yeah, just like, I can't believe this Christmas, I was getting like presents to my house from clients. So that whole reframe of like, they're painting me, and then the sending me presents was like mind-balled. That alone. And I think that's what drives me today, to actually broke you up, so I can be a bit of coach. Well, dude, you're definitely a never enough guy, right? Like even though you took the years off, like you found purpose in your life, you did the mushrooms, seems like it's still, like it's never enough. You gotta be doing lots of stuff. (laughing) What's it between coaching and like, your agency business? You had an agency business. Is it really just you're not doing the work? It's all just like helping people get the most firm of a mind, or you explain what the coaching offer is. And then the coaching is all about like, actually, not just from a mindset perspective, but helping the whole e-commerce business from every department. I think for the agency side, it was all done for you, it's done with you. And the agency side would just focus on me to buying a Facebook. And the coaching business, we have everything from playbooks and how to do product development, branding. We have mentors each single discipline, like CRO people, we have Facebook people, Google creative strategist that come every week and show the latest credience and help you with the system. Like everything you possibly need in terms of mentorship and guidance, e-commerce brand, we kinda cover. So I think the service is very different. 'Cause as you know, like when I was trying to build the brand, that's why I even reached out to Matt for help early on. I don't know what I was doing as the brand was growing. I was just trying to find people who did what I've done before. And especially in e-commerce, there's so much to do, but more importantly, it's about someone telling you what to do when, the sequencing of it. 'Cause I think a lot of brands just don't know what lever's to pull when. And that's the main reason why they're not successful. They're just focusing on the wrong, so the coaching is really important, I think, to real line brand founders as to what they're doing at what point and providing them with the right resource and the playbooks to actually upskill them. - That's cool man. And you've done 150 brands so far. And what's the aim of it? You can do a hard plug right here. How do we put sign up with the coupon code? (laughing) - A Google Mac takes mention of what operates and get under the scalp. - Big, that's awesome. - Yeah, e-commerce.com. - Yeah, please, you're gonna say a couple more things, but I'm curious, I wanna know more. - You don't know more. I mean, it is what it is. Like it says, "Monopoly subscription." There's no contracts, there's nothing else. Essentially, you know, you don't like what you're learning, you can leave. And so you like $5.99 a month. Literally, it's just there for impact on a profit. People come into like, "Why is this so cheap?" I think that's the reason why some people don't even join. So they don't understand why it's like $5.99 and have like 14 mentors there. But it's as simple as that. - Yeah, look, it's kind of the reason why we do the podcast, right? Like, people joke about how many sponsors we have. And like this podcast makes a ton of money, now millions of millions of dollars. I was trying to do it for free. There's one guy on the podcast, not gonna name him, Jason. He wouldn't let us do it for free. He's like, "We gotta get sponsors." But it's just 'cause I love brands, but I seem like you love brands too, right? Like being a young guy, you know, 20 or whatever, I would love to buy and stick you for the same way. It's like, it's cool, man. I love stores, I love brands, and I love everything we're building. And in the age of AI, great time to be building a brand. Everybody on earth is building tools for us, right? Like, fulfill has 100 great engineers. They're gonna make clawed, work great free commerce. Serious analytics is gonna build my data warehouse. I can just show up and be like, I have an idea for a new color. Like that's what that's called. my job basically. So now you went out of that. Yeah, I agree. I think that part of the reason we do a big part of the reason we do the pod is it's nice to be helpful. Like it feels good. Like we get a lot of feedback. But I mean, to say that though, the flip side of this is the reason I was excited to have you on that is probably like one of the more acute pieces of feedback we get is we don't make enough content for like people who are kind of starting out early on. So this is actually been really helpful to have you on. So like here's the journey and here's how I do things. And like here's some frameworks to actually help you. And then it's cool that you're actually doing that like the e-com architect thing to like actually help people because it is it is a we have had this criticism for sure on this show is that we say a little too up level up market. But yeah, I think Sean hit it, man. Like we do this to be helpful. I think the like we have too many sponsors the business makes a lot of money. I don't know. My my view is I just don't believe that people value free. Right? Like I really don't. I think you you said that like your program is pretty low priced people almost get turned off by like if something is free or too cheap it must be bad. So I think like our this is some sort of my rant on like operators. I think by us building a good business around it is just going to make the content even better and that that's net benefit to the actual audience. So like suffer through the sponsors. They are funding the the increasing of the collective knowledge of e-commerce and brand building. And I think that's a good thing. Even though I find it annoying to sometimes. Sure. Dude, how yeah. I mean, fulfill brought this. There's amazing story to us today. Thank you, Matt. Thank you for Phil. So Matt, you are on record saying that you think any company not using AI every day is being irresponsible. How are you using it right now? How are you getting the most effective AI tools? I think at the moment when this philosophy want to build the people to build a business. So self leadership is a big component of our philosophy at our company. We are a relationship. We're in every week. We have like this internal university. So at the moment, we're literally just upscaling everyone to use AI themselves. We're also hiring a head of AI that starts in a couple weeks time. I'll be really want to empower everyone to find solutions on their own because what I started to see when I went to every single department is that you're going to use AI as a use case in so many different ways. Like for an example, like a camp one yesterday where we have all these influence of content coming in and we have one person doing pre-reason to make sure that the content is filmed correctly. So now we're creating an app that the influencer has to upload to get approved before it gets to our team. So there's all these intricate ways we can save a lot of operational stress, but I think you need to be at the level where all the information is in order to come up with these ideas. So that's why we're trying to empower everyone. I'll start. Kind of use it. Long time sponsor Northbeam is launching Income Entality later this quarter. This means that you can now have the trifecta of marketing measurement all in one platform. That is multi-touch attribution, medium x modeling and Income Entality holdouts all inside of Northbeam. You can automate that lift testing end to end, unify results with your MTA and your MMM. This is a lot of letters, but if you know, you know, and you can start to cut what doesn't work and you can scale what works. You can do this all with confidence. This is why this is such an incredible ad to Northbeam. Northbeam's Income Entality measures what results marketing is actually generating not just what they're claiming for it or for. As a CEO, that's like music to my ears. A side up now and you can lock in 50% off unlimited tests for the year. Dude, I'm a million percent agree with that. It's like saying people like art using the internet and like the 90s or whatever it's like. It's going to be the next technology. Just get your hands on keyboard. Use a rule that says one business out of time. You currently have two businesses. How hard of a rule is this? I mean, I call the coaching business more of a hobby than I do a business at the moment, but I think focus for me was the game changer. When I had 13 businesses at once, I was probably struggling to generate significant profit. But the moment I focused on one, we grew up pretty quickly, so 80 million four years. So yeah, for me, focus is a big thing. I mean, it makes sense. You're probably doing 30 million across 13 brands that I can do 80 million for one. Focus is a beautiful tool. Last question. You're 25 years old. You just lost 80% of your money. You just lost $5 million. It's a huge push in the face. You can go back in time. What do you tell your 25 year old self? You can't control. We look at being always controlled what you see. So you can't connect the dots looking forward early back. So all the matters is what story you're telling yourself at the time as to why that happened. Literally. These are like, I'll brace some of them. I do think you're 25 year old self would have understood that or would he tell you to go, it's a lot of. It's still 5 million. I think you would have because you know what I actually did at that time. I went and reverse engineered all the people that actually made heaps of money. Like surely heaps of people made a lot of lost a lot of money and went bankrupt and stuff like that. And when you actually do the research, there's time. And then I convinced myself at the time because I lost this money, I'm going to be successful because all these other people lost a lot of money. So it's like my right of passage in order to be ultra well. Yeah. Well, again, I think it all worked out for you, Matt. So thank you for coming on. Thank you for sharing your story. Thank you for Phil for making the intro. So for Phil, the ERPI use. I am doing my order management. And if you want to talk to Matt, he has a coaching program. Link is in the show now. You can click there. He's on LinkedIn. You can hit him up and it's incredibly cheap. Only 600 bucks a month. And you go talk to him and he's going to help you make 10 times more money. That's a Sean Frank guarantee. So Matt, thank for being here. Matt, thanks for having us. I'll talk to you guys later. See you boys. Thanks guys.