So welcome.

My name is Matt Edmundson and you are listening to

the eCommerce Podcast.

Now I've been, uh, an e-commerce, uh, it's my

phrase For those of us who are in eCommerce, I've been

an e-commerce since 2002, and these days I partner with

e-commerce brands to help them grow, scale and exit.

And if you'd like to know more about how that works,

simply head over to the website ecommerce-podcast.net.

Now today.

I am joined from, well, fellow eCommerce-er from

the other side of the pond.

Adam, how are we doing?

So you're doing well.

I'm doing

great, and I deeply appreciate you converting

eCommerce into a verb.

That's fantastic.

We, we may borrow that on the other side of the pond.

That's great.

I totally feel the freedom to steal it.

Uh, okay.

It's um, when I wrote the word down EI thought eCommerce.

So this is a great, I'm an eCommerce.

Yes.

I'm just gonna use this phrase.

When I wrote it down, it looked great on paper.

In fact, it's the name of our newsletter.

Um.

But to say it's not actually that straightforward, it

just feels slightly awkward.

So that's my, it's,

it's like a sorcerer or e-commerce.

It's great.

Matt Edmundson: Makes perfect sense.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's exactly what it is.

Exactly what it is Now, uh, Adam, before we get, uh,

get into the show, just tell folks a little bit about

who you are and, uh, and why we're chatting Steve.

I mean, first and foremost, I'm

a dad and a husband and all that really important

family stuff that is, yeah.

Yeah.

You, you may see in my story and the way that I look at things,

priorities are important.

Um, professionally speaking, I'm an entrepreneur.

I've built and sold a couple of things.

My, although I am the, the founder of a, a software,

SaaS platform right now that we'll certainly talk

to, that comes from my last experience in eCommerce, right?

As a, as a fellow eCommerce, or that company was called

Bottle Keeper, and there's.

I'm sure a handful of highlights that we'll get into things

that we did really, really well in a boat, lot of times

that we tried to burn it to the ground and, uh, all the

fun hard stuff that, that come with operating businesses.

But we, uh, yeah we did, we did some really fun things there.

We were super lean.

We got to 8 million in sales with no employees

or investors, then into.

Tens of millions with, I mean, we got acquired

by private equity.

Uh, we only had four team members, so we were really

lean, we were profitable.

We had no investors or anything, so it was really, really

fun and really, really hard.

It's

amazing how those two things

come together, isn't

it?

They do.

You have to have them.

You have to have them both in order for it to really work.

You do, uh, hard work without

fun is just a nightmare.

But fun without hard work is just frivolity, uh, I

suppose in so many ways.

Yeah.

Um, but I, it's, I'm fascinated actually by the, the story,

um, of bottle Keeper.

We have similar stories in the sense we built up big brands.

I had way more than four staff.

Those companies got acquired and sold and we,

you know, we've both done this a few times now, so.

I am curious with bottle Keeper, 'cause you, you had this, this

product, uh, which as best as I can tell Adam, and forgive

me if I'm butchering, uh, what you did actually create,

um, you created the ability to keep a, a bottle of beer,

ice cold, uh, for a long, a sustained period of time.

Um, have, have I understood that correctly?

Yes.

So we literally took a stainless steel water bottle.

Hacks, saw it in half.

Stucked it with neoprene, like wet jacuzzi material, so you

could put your beer bottle inside of it and it would keep

it cold for way longer than is necessary and protected where

glass doesn't make sense and

yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

No, fair play.

Fair play, and, and you, you got this business up.

Well, let me ask you a question first and foremost.

What.

Was this a particular problem you were having?

Did you just thought, my beer's not staying cold enough, long

enough, therefore I'm gonna hack this, this Yeti over

here and see what happens?

No, it was not my problem.

My cousin, who was my co-founder in that business,

it was his problem.

He, uh, whom I love deeply and I'm very close with, and

was the best man at my wedding far before bottle keeper.

He is a lunatic and he will only, I like him already

in the best possible way.

Yeah,

yeah.

He will only drink a.

Or has a significant pre preference, let's say,

to drink a beer out of a corona, out of a bottle

at a specific temperature.

Yeah.

So the day he found himself on the beach in southern

California trying to drink a beer out of a red party cup,

you know, at 85 degrees, uh, he, he had to have a better,

a better way of doing that.

So he quite literally took a stainless still

water bottle hacks on it and half stuffed it with.

Insulation, like CZI material.

Mm-hmm.

And if it is corona and solved this problem, so I was

actually not in the country.

I was across the pond in your neck of the woods

when this all happened.

Um, I thought it was interesting, but I I, I'm

the first to say I was not sold that that was gonna

be an actual company.

So what, what was the journey

then, because you, you.

You go from this sort of, I need my beer cold, and I, I'm, I I'm

more in the camp of your cousin.

To be fair, I think beer has to be cold to drink it,

which sounds odd coming from a Brit because for the, yeah.

Longest time we never did that.

But, um,

so go.

Going from that, this is not an idea that I think is viable.

You obviously had some Damascus road experience

to go, let's start an e-commerce business here.

What was that?

We did, uh, and it was very, it

was a very defined road.

We went, so this would've been in the fall of 2012

is when Matt, uh, my cousin's name is Matt.

He did this, I sold out of a medical company in May of 2013.

So the timing was right.

Matt is, yeah.

Is the.

I hesitate to use the word wacky 'cause it makes him sound wacky.

And he is not a wacky guy, but he's like the inventor

that he, he generally comes up with something that's really

cool and really interesting.

Yeah.

And he prototypes it and he patents it.

And, um, you know, this, that's what he did with bottle Keeper.

And he went down that path and, and my time had opened up.

I went down and.

The road of trying to start a venture capital fund, which is

awful and terrible and I was bad at it 'cause I don't like

raising money, which doesn't go very well with venture capital.

Mm-hmm.

Fundraising.

Yep.

Yep.

And we, uh, you know, I sort of over

some time agreed that I would go and test this with Matt.

And again, we were really close.

So what I didn't want to do, so we're both

scientifically minded.

We both have science degrees, uh, specifically in molecular

and cellular biology, which has a lot of math and physics and

chemistry and, and all of those.

Mm-hmm.

Studies are revolve around the scientific method and

where you, you sort of have to start at a, and you know

that you need to get to Z and it's your job to figure

the things out in between.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

And so I wanted to approach it, and this

is also to be fair, about the time of Eric Reese, the

Lean Startup, you know, Tim Ferriss's for our work week.

Like all these sort of iconic books that put people, you

know, down really lean, much smarter business paths.

Yeah.

I wanted to prove that we could get, that people

were interested in this product.

'cause I honestly did not think they would be

at a real price point.

Mm-hmm.

So we, I put up a website, I shot a video.

I literally duct taped a GoPro to the outside of our like,

prototype bottle keeper, which is actually sitting over my

shoulder if you're watching video here on the shelf.

Okay.

Um, and shot a video on the beach, uh, near our house in

Manhattan Beach, California.

And put it online and spent $500 on Google AdWords,

sending people to the site to collect emails, and

enough people submitted their email that was like, okay,

maybe this is a thing, but they're not giving us money.

So it's helpful, but not, yeah.

Super relevant.

Yeah.

From there we, the only way that I could figure

out at the time, and I still think this is quite relevant,

maybe there's a lot more noise in the system now, so it's

more challenging, but the only way I could figure out how

to get and test to see if we could get strangers to input.

Payment, like to actually give us money for it

was with crowdfunding.

Mm-hmm.

So we launched a crowdfunding campaign,

um, that we all did our, you know, we did internally.

We didn't go and spend a bunch of money and get

fancy and hire video teams and do all that nonsense.

We, you know, I shot a video in my kitchen with a cheap camera

and that was the extent, I mean, you could still find it now.

It was on fundable fundable do com.

Right.

So the, we did that to prove that we could get people that

weren't our moms and dads and aunts and uncles to actually

put payment information at a real price point.

And it worked.

I was like, huh, okay.

That became a thing.

So we, we, I mean we sold about 300% of what our goal was,

which was not a lofty goal.

It was mm-hmm.

We figured if we could sell $5,000 at $17 a piece or

whatever our price was, um, if we could sell $5,000 of

that, that would be enough to prove that people were

interested in the product at a real price point.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that worked.

So at that point, you've got your proof

of concept, haven't you?

Exactly.

So we went, the important part there is we went and did all of

that before we spent any money.

Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it?

Because I, I, I remember reading, um, the four hour work

week when it came out, and, um, I remembered this idea and, and

again, we, we, uh, we took his idea, Tim, the Tim Ferris idea.

If you've not read the book, I, I do recommend.

You know, reading it.

Uh, but we took that idea where Tim basically said, you create

a landing page, sell in the product, and you in essence

monitor how many people go to the page, how many people click

the button, and that's gonna give you some idea of whether

or not this product's gonna fly.

Right.

That was his whole thing.

And so it is, you didn't even need the product.

You were just, you were just sending people to the page to

see if actually anybody would.

And I remember reading that and thinking that is genius.

Like, why have I, why have I not thought about this before?

Um, and, and we ran that for several different

businesses that never really, we never really took any

further because of the data we were getting back from.

Yeah.

Actually we just didn't think people were gonna hit

the, hit the Bible and, um.

So it's interesting that I'm listening to you tell that

same story, that actually that's what you did, and

that's, that was the start.

The start of in effect of, of bottle keeper.

It was a great way to start the company and

again, prove it out as the skeptic in the Crowd going.

Honestly, didn't believe, I thought it was a cool product,

but I thought it was a $7 at Spencer's gift product,

which is not a company.

That's a nice, maybe hobby, but that's not a business.

Yeah, yeah.

So it

was a really good way to prove to, to use

data to prove myself wrong.

Or let the data prove myself wrong.

It's an interesting, do you see

people doing that these days?

I mean, back then it was kind of like, you know, after, after

the, the four hour work week came out, I, I, you talked

to a lot of people and they were doing similar things.

I don't know if I've spoken to many people doing it recently.

I know I've spoken to a chap called Tanner Holt.

He's been on the show.

He has a similar methodology using Facebook ads to, uh, to

build these funnels, to test concepts, to prove ideas.

But, um.

Uh, do you see people doing that now or do you think it's

a, it's sort of something that we don't do anymore?

It seems slightly distasteful, maybe.

Well, I mean, the crowdfunding sites are certainly

still highly functional.

I mean, you know, that's Kickstarter and Indiegogo

and surely fundable and, and these things, you don't

hear about them as much.

And I think that's probably Aurion Media issue.

Mm-hmm.

Adam Callinan: Aurion Media outcome.

I do know, I mean, I have.

A, a friend and and company we work with that's called

Packed Bags, PAKT bags.

And they launched their brand on crowdfunding, I mean,

kind of the exact same way.

Like they hacked together the products and used

some, some video editing to, to create a thing.

And I mean, they did $2 million worth of, sold $2 million

worth of product online.

And that was.

Five years ago.

Wow.

I mean, that wasn't, I mean, we

did this in 2013, so yeah, that was over a decade ago.

But that, you know, this is, this was right before Covid.

Um, so I'm, I'm sure there are more success

stories of out there of people doing that Again.

The, with the caveat that it, to me, success is not

raise a bazillion dollars.

I mean, Malcolm impact what they did, $2 million is outrageous.

Like that's an insane amount of money to raise grant funding.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We were, we raised $13,000.

Like it wasn't a big amount of money.

We didn't need a lot of money to start the company.

Mm-hmm.

I

mean, even in the, the whole course

of the company, Matt and I each put in $10,000.

That was the extent of our entire investment

into the business.

So that $13,000 it paid for the first manufacturing run, plus a

little bit of product, you know, maybe double the, the amount

of product that we needed.

And then, you know, we marked it at a price point that was

real and continued to sell it.

And you know, we had some important inflection points

and some lucky things that happened over the course of

the first year that turned it from, you know, a. Funny

side project to like a holy hell, this is happening.

Kind of a business.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But it was really, if you, if you boil it down just to

the simple test of can we get strangers to put in their

credit card and click buy?

Mm-hmm.

Just that.

Just let that be the test.

If you need to raise a zillion dollars, like go and do that.

And then maybe you raise a zillion dollars

and that's great.

And maybe you take that data and the, you know, the modicum of

success that you get from that.

Mm-hmm.

And use that to go raise around or raise family and

friends around or whatever.

Yeah.

At least then you have, like you said, you at least have a

proof of concept at that point.

You do.

And that proof of con, and this is really important, I

think if you're starting out in e-comm, which I know many people

listening to the show are.

Someone and I, and I like how you phrased it.

Um, uh, I, I often say to people, someone other

than your mum has to buy this product willingly.

Right?

Yeah.

And, and if you can do that, then maybe, maybe

there's, there's something of interest in there.

If I fast forward, um, Adam a few years, then your, your

bottleneck's doing well.

Um, and you then appear on Shark Tank.

Right.

And this, this interests me because we don't have

Shark Tank in the uk.

We have something called Dragon's Den, which I

feel is the same thing.

Yep.

Um, and the reason why this interests me is

coming on the show soon.

I, I spoke to her earlier this week actually, is a, a beautiful

young lady called Millie.

She started a makeup business.

She's got, um, she has, uh, this chromosome issue

going on, which, um, so she wanted to do, uh, a makeup

company for disabled people.

And her story is just magical and inspiring.

So make make sure folks she stay connected.

'cause that's coming up.

The thing that interests me was this Thursday

she was on Dragon's Den.

Right.

So the equivalent of, of Shark Tank, she took

her business on that.

Um, I'm still to catch up with the episode.

I'm still to find out what actually happened.

Um, and I, and I'm getting to do the interview with

her in two weeks time.

So she's coming back on the show, which will be interesting.

So this has piqued my interest that in the space of a week

I've spoken two people, uh, that are going on Dragons down or

have been on, uh, shark Tank.

How did you find that whole experience?

They found us in 2015.

Mm-hmm.

Because we were, you know, this is like the heyday of paid media

that, you know, we were spending it as fast as we could spend it

on Facebook and it was returning 20 x and we literally couldn't

reinvest it fast enough.

Yeah.

So we had a miss those

days.

Miss those.

Yeah,

I know the good old days.

That's, that's quite literally why I won't ever have a

consumer product brand again.

I, I can't go back.

Um, time travel were a thing.

Yeah.

And so we were, you know, we had one

video that I shot on the beach in front of my house.

We're like, hands come in and you see the bottle

keeper in action and.

And that video got, I mean, it got a 2 billion views

or something 'cause we put so much money behind it.

Mm-hmm.

Um, and it just returned unbelievably well.

And so a producer at Shark Tank saw that video and they're,

I mean, they have a team of people whose jobs it is to go

out and find interesting things.

You can also get into the show, you know, by going

to a casting call or submit

mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Stuff.

So they reached out, we went through the process.

Um, I was actually in Iceland when they gave

us our, the film dates.

And granted in 2015, we were, I. We did about a million

and a half in revenue, and they found out that

I was not in the country.

The whole point of this business, to be clear, was that

I wanted to build a scalable business that had no employees.

Yeah.

That I could operate from anywhere in the

world with internet.

Mm-hmm.

So my wife and I could travel, and we did.

We spent four to six months of the year outta the

country, much of the time.

Again, across the pond, in your neck of the woods,

and in Asia and Africa, and all these fun places.

Mm-hmm.

So they, they ended up not being okay with me not

being in the country when I had to come back and film.

So they pushed us, obviously I didn't know that or I

would've been in the country.

They pushed us to the next year.

Then they had too many beer companies on that year, so they

pushed us to the next year.

And so, but we didn't film until June of 2018.

Right.

And I mean, our trailing 12 months in June of 2018

was over $10 million.

So like, we were a dramatically different

company by the time we filmed.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Sort of eight, seven or eight times the

size, wasn't it really?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I mean, as expected, you know, the, the episode

took about 55 minutes to film, and it is pure chaos.

I mean, there were no breaks, there were no redos,

and they cut that into seven or eight minutes.

But of the 55 minutes, I think 52 of them were of them

just messing with us about not needing to be there.

I mean, mark Cuban's actual quote was either

you're the worst business people in the world, or

you don't need to be here.

Which is, yeah, we knew that was gonna happen.

Made for a gray headline.

Yeah.

Yeah, that definitely, you put that on a poster

on your office, right?

Yeah.

It's, uh, there's, there's the motivation.

Now, you didn't get the Shark Tank, well, you got the

Shark Tank deal on the tv.

They got, you got the agreement, but for whatever reason,

it, it didn't come to pass, um, post recording, but.

I'm assuming, well, I don't know the answer 'cause I've

read the data, but it, it sort of gives you a tremendous

amount of exposure, doesn't it?

The, it does the whole Shark Tank thing and so the business

then goes to another level.

Again,

it's, you know, and yes, short answer, when you

have the opportunity to get in front of millions of eyeballs

for free, like it doesn't cost you anything to do it.

Yeah.

You're not giving up, you know, take that in the us.

There's this never ending rumor that if you go on

the show, you have to give them 5% of your company,

which is completely false.

Mm-hmm.

They did that the first year and Mark Cuban said, if you

keep doing it and you don't give it back, I'm gone.

So they changed it and they never did that again.

Right.

So it doesn't cost you anything from a customer

acquisition standpoint.

It is exceptional.

Yeah,

I mean we aired, we were lucky that

we aired, you know, the December 3rd or something

right before Christmas.

And we were, we would do half our revenue in the month of

December for the entire year.

Mm-hmm.

So we were a very much a gift product company.

Right.

So we got really lucky with that.

We had over a million dollars of revenue in the first week that

we could directly attribute to Shark Tank, and surely we had

more that we could not directly attribute to Shark Tank.

Yeah.

But that episode re airs today.

I mean, that was.

Seriously, I would.

Oh yeah, absolutely.

Okay.

It's on A, B, C for it.

It reared in the January after, and then they move it

to CNBC and it rears probably every other month still.

I mean, it is, it is like the gift that keeps on giving,

that's the most extraordinary thing, isn't it?

Yeah.

And so,

uh, no

regrets then doing that.

Oh, goodness.

No.

It was an exceptional experience.

Yeah.

I mean, in the, you know, from an investment standpoint,

we were open to taking it.

We didn't really want it, but we were absolutely

open to taking it.

The deal that we did on tv, we were.

Open to do.

I mean, we got what we asked for.

We asked for a million dollars for 5%, and

we got Mark and Lori.

Despite, despite Mark's, you're either the worst business

people in the world or you don't need to be here commentary.

Um, and then the reason there's a, you know, if you've ever.

Ben around any investment ever, whether someone

investing in your company or you investing in another.

We literally read an an investing article ever.

Due diligence is a real thing and it takes a really long

time, and that goes both ways.

Mm-hmm.

Lori wanted to put us on QVC, which wasn't part of our brand.

We were more luxury high-end brand, so

that didn't make sense.

Yeah.

So she, we, and she was awesome to work with.

She just called me directly and we talked and that was great.

Mm-hmm.

But it didn't make sense.

And Mark.

We did try to do a different deal with where we were

gonna, he was gonna move more into a consultant.

We really didn't wanna take money from him.

Mm-hmm.

You take money from people, you have this, you know, fiduciary.

At least again, in the US you have this big

fiduciary responsibility.

Yeah.

I didn't really want to have that to Mark Cuban

unless we really needed to have it and we didn't.

We were fortunate at the time to not so.

We tried to do a consulting deal.

It didn't work out for legal reasons.

We had to, we were gonna have to change our accounting structure

and it was gonna cost like a half a million dollars in taxes.

Oh, wow.

So it wasn't because, you know, there wasn't any

like malicious intent or, uh, or, uh, disagreements.

It just, mm-hmm.

Things happen.

Most of the deals you see on TV don't actually get done.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

That's just the reality.

It's good television.

It's a TV show.

Let's see.

Yeah, yeah.

Let's be really clear.

It's first a TV show and then, uh, and you know, some of 'em do

obviously.

Yeah, yeah.

No, absolutely.

There's a couple of things, Adam, that you've

said along the way 'cause I'm, I'm really intrigued

to, into this if I can.

So a lot of people like say start in e-com businesses

or they're small e-com businesses and you, and

you have sort of achieved.

Um, what we, bris would like to call the American

Dream in many ways.

It's kind of like you've set up a business, it's

scaled, you are on tv.

Uh, it scaled even more.

You exit the business.

You made a few quid and everyone's happy, right?

And you've, and you've sort of gone from beginning to end

and now you're, you're running your, your SaaS service.

I'm intrigued by this notion going back to

the four hour work week.

Um.

Which was very much part of Tim Ferriss's thinking,

which seems to have been, uh, part of your thinking.

I wanted to build a business that I could run from anywhere

in the world, and I didn't want really to have staff.

And yet you are turning over 10, $15 million a year

with very little staff.

There's a lot of, I can hear them now screaming.

They're all shouting at their car, radios or wherever they're

listening to us going, how in the world did you do that?

It's much easier to do when you build

from the very beginning, the guardrail, that you'll never

have a team member, right?

You have to solve problem if you're gonna make that decision.

Mm-hmm.

You have to solve problems in a way that doesn't require

human bodies to solve them.

So on the one hand, I had to learn how to play and run every

single position in the business.

Because I had to do every single position in the business.

Like Matt's responsibility was our manufacturing and

our inventory and, uh, some of our financial stuff,

shipping and fulfillment.

The things that would happen that a customer

didn't see my responsibility was everything else.

The website, the images, the videos, the brand, the voice,

the email, all of the content and copy all of the paid social

media, all of the organic social media, like I literally.

Every single thing that a customer would touch, I,

I had to physically do.

Yeah.

So when you learn how to do those things, when

you have to learn how to do those things, you know how to

fix them when they're broken.

And you also get to see.

I got to see and find interesting ways to

automate a lot of that.

And you know, and that would've been really difficult

in 2005, but in 2015, you know, we're not at a place

where most tech platforms will talk to each other.

And if they won't, we had Zapier or one of these

platforms that you could get them to talk to each other.

You could move the stuff into a Google sheet and zap

it from here to there and you know, create scalable.

Systems, cloud-based systems and, and we did that

really, really, really well.

But, but we only got to do that at scale, I think because it

was, the company was built like that and we said, no, this is

another really important piece.

Because of that guardrail, I was really, really strict

and I mean, Matt and I were really strict that we did not.

Do anything that would require us to hire

people, even if they were opportunities to make money.

Okay.

I mean, we had companies coming to us, retail companies and

stores and wholesale almost from the very beginning,

asking to buy the product.

And I knew that if we were going to do that, we were gonna

need to have somebody whose whole job was just to do that.

Mm-hmm.

So we said no to it, like people trying to give us money

for product, we told them no because it violated this

core tenant in the business.

Mm-hmm.

In hindsight, that worked really, really well.

One, because it forced us to focus just on the consumer

in a D two C business.

And then by the time we went, we did decide to go

to wholesale and retail.

We had such incredible demand because we had the

consumers, not because we were asking them to, they

were going into the stores and asking for this product.

They, you know, they didn't wanna wait the two days it

was gonna take to ship 'em.

Yeah.

And we, we had a wait list.

I mean, you know, we had the companies that were coming

to us, we weren't just telling 'em to pound sand.

We were like, yeah, we'll at some point we

will be open to this.

Give us your email and we'll let you know.

So by the time we did that, we had thousands of

companies on a wait list.

So we launched into wholesale in 2018.

We went into 5,000 stores in the first year,

and we got to control.

It was crazy and we got to control how.

I mean, we weren't jerks about it, but like you

couldn't sell it online.

I, the whole point of wholesale was I didn't wanna

compete with the company selling our own stuff online.

So, so because we, we kind of held the cards, we got to

control how it was distributed and where it went in the store,

and how they talked about it and what their pricing was.

Um, so it worked that, and that was completely unintended.

I, we didn't do that on purpose.

That was just a, a nice benefit from, from waiting

until we had enough demand to go in and do it.

Do you think, looking back,

um, then that this idea of, um, having this

non-negotiable, which says, you know, I'm gonna, we're gonna

build this business where we don't employ people at least for

a little while until, you know, you, you know, you are doing all

the wholesale accounts, but it, do you think looking back that

was a right decision to make?

Would you still make the same decision?

No.

I wouldn't, because the time is different.

It's significantly more difficult today to build a

online only e-comm to scale.

Uh, namely because paid media is kind of off the table.

Yeah.

Like building a business on paid media today as your

foundational revenue model is phenomenally treacherous.

Mm-hmm.

If it's even possible, frankly, and I don't.

I don't have the expertise to go and build massive audience

and engagement organically.

People do and they do that and you see it and

I think it is absolutely.

It's like sorcery to me.

It's unbelievable how people can do that.

Yeah.

Um.

And it's funny, I was having a conversation with Travis

Lowry at Vinyl VC the other day, who's a friend and

he invests in commerce.

He won't call it e-commerce because he actually doesn't

believe that a successful business can be exclusively

in e-commerce today.

And I agree with that.

Hmm.

I think it's too difficult to, um, when you know, when

you're small and, and little and nimble and you're trying

to prove the concepts out.

Absolutely.

Like get as far as you can with that as possible.

Yeah.

Um, but.

But I think you, you have to diversify that revenue

stream a lot earlier than we had to in Yeah.

You know, 16, 17, 18.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's a very different landscape, isn't it now?

I suppose in, in many ways it is.

Um, I, I look back and I, our first e-com

business was in 2002.

That's epic.

Yeah.

And you, you kind of go, well, it's only 20, 23 years.

But so much has changed in the last 23 months.

Do you know what I mean?

It's that kind of, it's such a fast, dynamic, uh, moving space.

I'm intrigued by your statement.

If you were starting, uh, you wouldn't get into a consumer

goods eCommerce business now.

I mean, I know you've got into the SAS business.

You've got into, and that's, and we'll talk about

that in in just a second.

I'm curious as to, is that the, what you've just talked

about, is that the reason why you wouldn't get into this.

I would say what I wouldn't do, I

wouldn't go and try to start something from nothing.

Right.

In, in the consumer product world.

And, and honestly, part of it's just emotional.

Like I've done it already.

I mean, I wanna go and find new challenges and new things.

Like I know the pain that's gonna come with that,

and I don't particularly wanna relive it.

Mm-hmm.

I'll relive it starting SaaS companies

and I'll relive it, doing all, all these other things.

But those are learning experiences.

Those are new problems that I could solve in a different way.

Um, I do think because of seeing that.

Seeing an eCommerce business go through the

full American dream cycle.

Mm-hmm.

And I, I do agree with you.

Like we lived the American dream, no question.

Mm.

But because I've gotten to see it through

that all the way from startup through, you know, early scale,

through midscale, through acquisition and all, you know,

all of the goods and bads that come with every single one of

those pieces, I can be really helpful to those companies.

And I, I could see a circumstance, you know,

of getting involved with.

eCom businesses that we're, we're struggling.

'cause it's really easy for me to look under the

hood and see what's wrong.

Yeah.

And frankly, that's what this SaaS product,

that's penting Yeah.

Yeah.

That's what it does.

And we can talk about that if you want.

But, um, that part is, is interesting to me

because I can be really helpful really quickly.

Yeah.

And, and most of the, the challenges are

inside of that, although they're emotional in nature

because we're humans and that's what comes, that's

the beauty of being human.

They're generally math problems.

Yeah.

Like, yeah.

Yeah.

They, they're data issues and math problems and algorithms.

They need to be tweaked and thought of differently.

And, and that's easy for me to, to go in and help with

my, uh, my son, my eldest son has, has,

uh, this year he graduated.

Um, not this year.

Last year he graduated from.

University with his master's in theoretical physics.

Adam, great.

Epic.

Oh, I wanna talk to him.

Smart chap.

I love this.

But he's like, he's like, everything is

a math problem, dad.

That's, that's, it's just a math problem.

I just need to solve the math.

Okay.

I spend, I spend an unreasonable amount

of my spare time in the world of quantum mechanics,

and, uh, that's where he, that's where he functions.

It's awesome.

Oh, the stuff he comes up with is just on another planet.

That's me.

That's cool.

Good for,

good for you.

And good for him.

That's awesome.

Well, definitely.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

But, uh, I, I is your comment about, uh, but mess, one of

the things, um, that I also wanted to ask you about,

and I can't remember where, about in the conversation,

whether, whether this was prerecord or post record,

the value of your business.

Right.

So a lot of people are, are, are, um, thinking about

exiting their e-com businesses or they're wanting to think

about the possibility of that in a few years time.

And so the default has always been go build sales and.

Um, you know, hopefully sell at a time when you've

got a good multiple.

One of the comments that you made was about building

value from your ip.

So you, you, you did a lot of, um, patents, um, or

patents, uh, I suppose you, which I'm not quite sure the

right way to pronounce it now.

What, tell me a little bit about that, because this obviously,

um, is unconventional, I suppose in some ways to the standard

rhetoric that maybe eCommerce entrepreneurs are told.

When we got started in bottle keeper, uh,

I never believed, and my cousin didn't really believe either

we were on the same page.

That going and raising a bunch of money and then chasing

that to the next valuation round and then chasing it

to the next valuation round sounded like a fun thing to do.

And my company before that was bootstrapped.

Yeah.

I mean, I'd never raised money.

It just wasn't part of who I was and wanted to be.

Yeah.

And that would've gone very much against the, I want

to build a scalable thing on the internet that I can

travel the world to do.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That doesn't generally fit with playing the, the

VC run and gun game, so.

At the same time, we also knew that it wasn't a business that

we wanted to hand our kids.

It wasn't, this wasn't the thing that was gonna

be the generational.

Yeah.

Like I, you know, to be clear, from the age of six until

halfway through college, I wanted to be a doctor.

My whole life revolved around being a doctor.

That's why I got a crazy science degree.

Mm-hmm.

Now I'm selling beer products.

This is like the, you know, epic give nothing back dichotomy.

Yeah.

So this was, this was a thing that, that we did not see

as, as the do for everything.

That being said, we believed that if you could

build a business that was.

That had two things.

One, it was profitable, meaning it could survive ups and downs,

and if you're not gonna raise money, it has to be profitable.

Yeah.

So that's not really an option.

But the other is if you can build value in as many

places as possible throughout the business mm-hmm.

Someone will always want to buy it.

So where we saw building value, were in three places.

One which you just talked about is sales.

There's value in revenue, no question.

Even if it's not profitable revenue, as much as I hate

saying that, but it's true.

Mm-hmm.

The second is in the brand.

So we were really, really, really diligent.

That's why our products were expensive.

Like we looked at Yeti and it was unfathomable to me

how they took a product that everybody like it was

not a super unique product.

Granted they had some IP and whatnot, but like

it was a fancy cooler.

There were 10 companies that had the same quality of cooler.

Yeah.

But they would get $300 for their cooler.

Mm-hmm.

And people were going gaga over it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't, I never understood how they do that, and

I absolutely loved it.

So I just said I want to go and do whatever that is.

I wanna do that.

Yeah.

You want to be, I would rather sell less product

for more money than more product for less money.

Mm-hmm.

That just, that goes in line with my efficiency brain.

Yeah.

So brand, there's value in brand.

The other is an intellectual property

in patents.

Mm-hmm.

And with Matt's, you know, when he filed.

And it's called a provisional patent.

Like you file this placeholder patent that's inexpensive at the

very beginning of the company.

So you can go basically like hold your spot in the

line, because in patent law, they're first to file

instead of first to use.

Mm-hmm.

So you can come up with the idea all you want, but if someone

files it first, it's theirs.

Right?

So you file a provisional patent, which

holds your place in line.

Then you have 12 months to prove that concept out.

And if you prove the concept out and it actually turns

out to be a thing, then you convert that into a utility

patent or a patent, you know, that lasts a much longer time,

way more expensive, but at least at that point, you've

de-risked spending that money.

Mm-hmm.

So we did that.

It obviously worked, so we converted it.

That's actually what we used a lot of, that $13,000 that

we got from crowdfunding was to convert a provisional

patent to a utility patent.

Yeah.

And then in that process, you.

I'll caveat everything that I'm about to say

with, I'm not an attorney.

I have a lot of deep domain expertise in

intellectual property, but I'm not an attorney.

So talk to your IP specific attorney.

Don't talk to your contracts.

Mm-hmm.

Law neighbor attorney, your intellectual property attorney.

It's very nuanced, it's very specific.

You have to talk to an IP attorney, but when you get

your first patent, you, you do what's called a continuation

and process, and it's CIP and you leave the patent open.

So you don't allow the patent to close.

And what that allows you to do is evolve that

patent into another patent.

Mm-hmm.

And broaden its scope.

And then you take, you leave that one open, and then

you evolve that patent into another pro patent and you

broaden it scope, and by the end of it you have 42 patents

in this incredible scope that's insanely valuable.

Mm-hmm.

That when you go to sell the company, the private

equity group, who cares a lot about revenue and profitability,

they didn't ask us in the first.

Probably four conversations, hours long conversations

with the board of directors and like all these people.

Mm-hmm.

Not one time did they ask us what our revenue was.

Wow.

Or if we were profitable.

Mm-hmm.

They cared what was on our balance sheet because

they wanted to know if we had raised money.

All they wanted to talk about was our brand and

intellectual property.

So there are, and that those are not the only

ways to, to create value.

Like in your business listener who, whatever that is, think

about the, the different things that you, you know, who you

could possibly sell the company to at in a year or in 10.

And what would be valuable to that company?

Is it just sales?

Probably not.

It might also be sales.

In most cases it is.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But there will be things that are valuable to that.

Type of company and go build for that.

Yeah, like spend your time, spend some time, not all

of your time, but some of your time, trying to build

value around those things.

Yeah.

No, that's, that's fascinating.

That's really good.

I, I it's Did you, so when you set out, uh, with the

business, were you very intentional with the patents

or was that something you kind of stumbled into as,

as you went along, stumble?

That's funny how often that, right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, Matt, Matt had invented

a couple of things that he had filed provisional

patents on that didn't go.

You know, for one reason or another.

So he knew a little bit of the process to, you know,

that it was a smart thing to file a provisional patent

at the very beginning.

'cause they're inexpensive.

I mean, it's thousands of dollars, not tens of

thousands of dollars.

Um, you know, you have to do a, your IP, specific IP attorney,

we'll do a patentability search to make sure you're

not violating anyone else's patent with what you're doing.

Mm-hmm.

And in some cases, if you are, you can modify your product to

not be, and yeah, yeah, there's some strategy stuff there, but

make sure what you're doing.

Is patentable.

And if they're really good, they might say that it's not.

But if we tweak it this way, it becomes patentable.

I mean, there, there's a lot of, there's an incredible

amount of strategy.

Mm-hmm.

Around,

Matt Edmundson: yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's definitely worth.

And then you have to be prepared to defend them,

which is a whole nother thing.

That was actually like the worst part of the business.

I was gonna ask you about that because,

um, I wrote a comment somewhere that you, you seem

to get dragged into having to defend your patents.

Uh, yeah.

A fair bit.

How, how was that?

That was brutal.

You tell us a story while I drink from my Yeti, by the way.

Yeah.

Awesome.

Yeah.

They, they were just an exceptional brand.

Mm-hmm.

I mean, they're, they're like the pinnacle of, of brand value.

Yeah.

They really, what has done,

yeah.

We.

In 2000 and probably 15, started seeing fake versions

of our product on Amazon.

It's like, you know, that's gonna happen, but it is

just like gut wrenching.

Mm-hmm.

When you see this thing that you've, like at that point, you

know, had all your blood and sweat and tears and all that

good stuff inside of, and now you're, you see your product

with another name on it being produced by whatever company

outta China on now, on Amazon.

Yeah.

And at that time we did not have our, our utility

patent had not issued yet.

It takes a while.

I mean, sometimes it takes a year.

For us, it took almost three years for you, right?

First like defensible patent to issue.

Um, the problem is when you start having that success,

those things pop up and you have to deal with them.

Mm-hmm.

And in the case, using Amazon

as a perfect example.

You, you, the platform doesn't want to be the one making

the determination that that company is violating your

patent because they're, that's what case law is for.

Yeah.

That's what the courts are for.

So Amazon, if you have a patent, you can't just go to

Amazon and say, look, I have a patent on this product.

Take that thing down.

They'll say, we don't know if your patent is valid or if

it's actually violating or not.

Yeah.

Like, get a court order and we'll take it down and,

you know, naturally your mental explodes like court

order, how the hell am I gonna get a court order?

Yeah.

It'll just like go to the courthouse and say,

can I have a court order?

Yeah.

I, I'll tell you exactly how to do that.

You have to, this is where it gets painful.

So if you're in this, if you're facing this as an operator,

like dig deep and buckle your seatbelt and you know, pick up

meditation and the things that you have to calm yourself down.

Yeah.

Ex exercise a lot.

Take care of yourself.

You have to go and sue a bunch of companies.

Mm-hmm.

So go and pick 10.

This is exact, literally this is our playbook.

And it worked perfectly.

It was brutal, but it worked perfectly.

Sue, find 10 companies that are selling your product on Amazon.

That are small companies.

They're teen, like literally, it's people selling 'em

outta their basements.

Mm-hmm.

You have to sue those companies.

You're not trying to, gonna try to get money from them

'cause they don't have money and that's not the point.

Yeah.

The point is you want them to stop selling it.

Mm-hmm.

And you need them to sign a document with

the court, within the court case that says they agree

they violated your patent.

And then some number of those, you only probably only need one.

Hopefully you get a couple.

You need the court, the judge in that case to agree that

that company was violating your patent and you want that judge

to sign a consent judgment.

That consent judgment has a number associated to it,

which is a court order.

You can use that court order number.

Yeah.

And Amazon and Amazon will now very, very effectively

pull those things down.

Wow.

But that took, let's be clear,

that took a year.

It cost half a million dollars and it was unbelievably brutal.

Like dealing with lawsuits, 10 of them at a time

like that is hands down the worst part of Yeah.

The bottle keeper business now.

It was clearly important and it, it is what led to that

transaction outcome where we had 'em, you know, on

four phone calls and never asked about our revenue.

'cause the patent portfolio was so impressive.

Yeah.

But it was very, very difficult.

And then from there you just play whack-a-mole forever.

Yeah.

You have to, you set up processes and there are some

technologies you can use to help, um, automate that, but.

You know, you, you're just gonna be defending that stuff

for the life of the business.

It's just part of deal.

It is.

No, it's, it's so easy now, isn't it?

For, and I think it's even easier than it was 10 years

ago for people to just copy.

You know, they, it's easy to see the sales data,

to see the analytics and go, I'm gonna make that.

And it's like, well, okay, come sue me, it's gonna

take you at least a year.

And in which case I'll stop saying I won't care 'cause

I'll have moved on something else and you can't ask.

Yeah.

Okay.

It kind of takes the, the shine off it a little bit,

uh, when you are dealing with those kind of things.

Um, so tell us about the SaaS platform you've got going on.

So now you, you sort of, you've done the whole e-commerce thing

and so you woke up one day and thought, yeah, I'm gonna

start, I'm gonna sell software.

That's what I'm gonna do.

'cause that makes an awful lot of sense.

Yeah.

I can tell you that is not how it happened.

Yeah, I mean, we had a.

I had a wise sage in my life.

I literally had a performance coach.

Mm-hmm.

Because I was trying to figure out like what I'm gonna do

with myself after this thing.

And he said, don't go and start another company immediately.

Mm-hmm.

Like, I know you're gonna want to.

Of course.

Mm-hmm.

I went and tried and it was a disaster.

'cause I, you, you gotta learn some stuff the hard way.

Yep.

And he's like, yep, his name's Dr. Jeff.

He said, yep, I told you so.

He's like, okay, fine, Dr. Jeff, I'll do nothing.

And I got, like, into carpentry.

I started building things in my house.

I remodeled the kitchen doing all these things to, to not,

to try to like break out of that business execution cycle.

And after about six months, I woke up one day and

realized that my hardest decision the entire day was

what to have for breakfast.

And that was a problem.

Yeah.

And Dr. Jeff said, all right, we're ready.

Like, let's go.

We need to do what he would call practice soft offense.

Like let's go find something to do.

What are, and I, I had invested in a, a number of companies

over the life of Bottle Keeper.

So we decided that I was gonna go and talk to those

companies and see if there's literally just how can I help?

And they're, I mean, I was, they were all friends, people

that I knew and whatnot.

So like, yeah, absolutely.

Come look under the hood, let's figure it out.

And I realized very, very quickly.

There was something that we did at Bottle Keeper Real, you

know, there was a lot that we did wrong and we, again, like I

said earlier, we tried to burn it to the ground 20 times, but

there were some things that we did really well that led

to being able to build really scalable revenue efficiently.

Mm.

And that had to do with systems

that we created using math.

Mm-hmm.

So like it goes all back to math and science.

Right.

As the CEO of the business trying to run paid media,

running the website.

All of its optimization.

Trying to be profitable, all that stuff.

I realized that there was no, there were no systems,

there was no software.

There were, honestly, there wasn't anything that gave me

the clarity that I needed to make smarter decisions around

how we spent AD dollars.

Mm-hmm.

How I optimize the website, what we could afford to

do or not afford to do.

And so we built them.

We wrote math and crazy spreadsheets, and we ran

the company on it for the entirety of the business.

We tried to go.

Find it in other platforms.

It was always a disaster.

We tried to build it on like NetSuite and Salesforce.

Aama totally didn't work, and we always went back

to these spreadsheets.

So I saw in these first two companies that I went in

and helped that they had, they were good businesses.

One of 'em was a $20 million year business.

They were profitable.

They had no idea how to make money.

They just knew that like they spent.

You know, $18 million a year and they made $19 million a

year, and 19 minus 18 equals $1 million in net profit, which

is a hundred percent true.

Mm-hmm.

But they didn't understand like the nuance of how

they spent money versus how they acquired customers.

Yeah.

And how it was all made.

Like there's a lot of really, that's like

where all the good stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah,

so I rebuilt systems that we ran a bottle

keeper inside these businesses and it totally changed them.

Mm. It just gave them clarity around how to, you know,

better operate the business.

And it, you know, one of the, that company had increased

their net profit the following year by 50% because they,

it was like, it's going bad.

Huh.

That's interesting.

So we, we decided, Dr. Jeff said, okay, let's go see if you

can get paid to do that, because I just did that for free.

Obviously.

They were, I was just, mm-hmm.

I had an incentive, like I was just trying to help.

Yeah.

So I fe went and found a, a consumer product company

that was, that needed, I mean, they were in bad shape.

They were losing a hundred thousand dollars a month.

It was a $2 million a year business, which means

they were losing a lot.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's huge, huge loss.

They only had a couple of months life left and they,

and I got paid as an advisor to help them turn it around.

And I did the same thing, like I built this, these

much sexier, leaner, smarter versions of the stuff.

We used a bottle keeper and it, this company three

months later was profitable.

And now they're, you know, two years later, they're up 300%.

They're crushing, they're profitable.

Mm-hmm.

Um, and so that, that was the, like, clearly

there's something here that is helpful to other businesses

and it can't just be a bunch of super intimidating spreadsheets.

Yeah, yeah.

So Pentane is born from that.

It is built on foundationally built on.

It is a SaaS platform, but it is foundationally

built on systems that we operated bottle keeper on.

So, so they're built from the standpoint of the operator.

It's not a finance product that Yeah.

You know, an accounting team put together.

Looking at it from the standpoint of finance it,

it does have financial components to it because you

have to, but it also has a lot of customer acquisition.

You know, you can't.

Whether you are or not, you can't make really smart

decisions about how you acquire customers if you

don't understand the financial component in the business.

Like how the business makes money.

Yeah.

How the business spends money.

You know, what, how your payroll and adding to it or subtracting

to it impacts your ability to be profitable and what you

should be spending on ad dollars and how it needs to perform.

And all of that is, you know, is math.

Yeah, yeah.

No, that's brilliant.

Brilliant.

Where can find, where can people find out more

information about that, Adam?

Adam Callinan: Pentane pentane.com.

Matt Edmundson: P-E-N-T-A-N-E.com.

Does pentane mean anything other than it just seems, at

first I thought it was pen 10, but it's, no, it's not.

I've gotta spell it right away.

It does.

This goes back to my ultimate nerdom, pentane

is a, is a five carbon molecule.

It's, it's a member of the alkane family.

It's like a, it's like octane propane methane.

Ethan Hexane.

Okay.

And fine.

Yeah, I know, I know.

I mean, literally, I went and tried to do Octane.

I was like, okay, there's a thousand

companies called Octane.

I can't do that.

Yeah.

And I just, there this family called the Alkanes.

I went through the list of Alkanes and found one that I

could buy the domain for $2,000.

And there was, and there's like no business sound around it.

So that's how we got to pentane.

It is funny now how when it comes to

naming your business, you're like, right, the first thing I

need to do is, is the, what's the domain that I, you know,

it's the driver, isn't it?

Behind all your business.

Yeah.

I set up a business recently and I'm just like, I'm not

going through that process.

'cause all it is is legal entity in the background, right?

Mm-hmm.

It's, um.

It's an SPV that helps with our acquisitions.

I just took the name of our company, spelt it

backwards, and lo and behold, it was all available.

So I'm like, let's just do that.

Perfect.

Yeah, that's perfect.

I mean, look, some of the most successful

companies, like they, their names don't remotely make sense.

That's not the point.

It's basically like, is it memorable and could

you buy the domain?

That's about it.

Well, can I buy the domain and

then is it memorable?

Maybe I don't.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Uh, so is that how people reach you?

Uh, is it through that website or LinkedIn?

What's your preference?

Yeah, I mean, if for me, LinkedIn, I'm, I don't

do the socials outside of that.

I haven't for a long time, but I am spending time

on LinkedIn because it's the place I need to be.

Yeah, it's big.

I am, I am really focused on being helpful, so even if

it's outside of, of Pen 10, if I can be helpful literally

in, in any way with respect to consumer brand, like, you

know, DM me on, on LinkedIn, um, otherwise, yeah, you can

find information and demos and sign up for free trials and

all that stuff at pentane.com.

Fantastic.

We'll, of course link to all of those in the show notes as well.

Uh, Adam, in the last few seconds that we have talking

of LinkedIn, uh, and I've remembered, um, I told you

it'd be 50 50 at the start, uh, this is where I ask for a

question for me, which I answer on LinkedIn fully enough.

Um, so what is your question for me?

Given your exposure to companies moving

through the lifecycle up into acquisition, how do you look at.

A company building just a D2C or, or needing

to be more omnichannel.

Okay, we will get into that.

Come follow me on LinkedIn if you wanna know how I'm

gonna answer that question.

Uh uh.

But Adam, listen, it's been an absolute treatment.

I've genuinely enjoyed the conversation.

Uh, if I had more time, I'd talk to you about your experience

with joiner in carpentry, because I too, it's funny how.

Digital guys like to go and make stuff out of wood

is the sort of pest time.

Uh, when I sold my business a few years ago, the first thing

I did was build a wood shop.

Perfect.

Yeah, I love it.

It's the way it works, isn't it?

Yeah.

But thank you for coming on.

I'm gonna get through this.

It's no problem.

Uh, thank you.

Oh no.

Tell us about your podcast as well.

'cause you, you, your episode four, uh, into

your brand new podcast.

Maybe tell us about that so we can go check that out.

Yeah, the podcast is called Growth Mavericks.

It's all about disrupting our defaults.

It's part, it's, it's really two parts.

It's part tactical.

So I'm talking with, you know, e-commerce founders and what,

what is working more, what is not working, and where are

they, uh, spending their time.

Trying to problem solve with the other half of the discussion

being around what they do to remain resilient and durable

and sort of anti-fragile in these, in the world of these

massive up and ups and downs.

And also interviewing some people that just do that, like

special operations guys mm-hmm.

That have gone and, you know, had to do really hard things

under real duress where there are real consequences, not

like, lose some money mm-hmm.

But lose, lose lives and things like that.

Yeah.

So, um, it's, it's a, it's been really, really fun.

I'm only a handful in, but it's been.

It's been a really, really a productive handful of

episodes, uh, helping operators.

Fantastic growth Mavericks.

Check that out.

Of course, we'll linked to that in the show notes as well.

But Adam, listen, appreciate you, man, appreciate you coming

on and sharing the story.

Uh, it's been, it's been a lot of fun listening to it.

And, um, I all the best my friend with the, with the

SAS platform and, and what's going on in the future.

And next time you're on this side of the pond,

let's go grab a pint.

I would love that.

That'll be fun.

Sounds like fun.

That would be fun.

Uh, but yeah, no, absolutely.

Adam, thank you so much.

Adam Callinan: Thanks for having me.

Appreciate it.