I just interviewed somebody that got Mark Cuban to invest in their company

after they went live on Shark Tank.

And this person is the person that's usually across the

table from me, Brian Bloom.

In this episode, we're going to explore his journey from starting at a bakery

to then working with a Spurs, to then taking an entrepreneurship class,

launching a startup that he raised 1.

5 million for, and then failed.

You're going to learn how to raise money, how to build a startup,

what happens when you go on Shark Tank, and then how to go viral.

It's That's a lot of good shit in this episode.

So give us 45 minutes, but before you give me those 45 minutes, I need

45 seconds to do one quick thing.

If you leave a quick review on Apple or Spotify, you see this hat, you see the

one I'm wearing, I will send you one.

All I need you to do is leave a five star review, leave an actual

comment saying whatever it is that you like about the podcast.

If you could drop it in those notes and if you do, I will send you one of

these hats specifically if you're in the U S but it mean the world to us

because we just want to keep doing this.

We want to keep doing research and record these episodes, but.

But I need some proof.

So when you do leave this review, I need you to screenshot it.

Send it to me, send it to Brian, said it's a podcast at markingsama.

com.

And if you're one of the first 20 people to do it, then I'm going

to send you this hat or this hat, or we got multiple colorways.

That's my 45 second rant.

If you do that for me, then this next 45 minutes of, of this

podcast is going to be awesome.

So Broncos country, let's ride.

I want to start off with.

One, how'd you, you know, you and I have similar backgrounds of, we both

played college sports, our, our entire life wrapped around sports and for

your end basketball for me, football.

And then we both made our way into marketing and entrepreneurship and kind

of this tech scene and startup scene.

And that's a weird transition.

Yeah.

Right.

It's not the normal transition.

So how did you go from being a college basketball player to then making your

way into startups and tech and marketing?

Yeah.

It it all started with taking ironically enough, an

entrepreneurship one on one class.

Yeah.

Which is weird.

Yeah.

I know.

Cause every entrepreneur tells you not to go to college, but I

had an amazing professor named Dr.

Luis Martinez and Trinity, despite not necessarily producing a lot of.

Dogs had a really good entrepreneurship program.

And, you know, a lot of companies had actually been pretty successful

from it for the previous year.

So it was a little bit juiced when I, when I got in there, like

there was a lot of hype about it.

And I took a class in, in the spring of my sophomore year and that

class, the entire point is to create a lean business canvas, which is

just outlining what is a product?

Who is it for?

What does the market look like?

What is your go to market strategy?

Some stuff like that.

And the goal is by, you know, May when the when the class is over

to have launched something with that product, with that idea.

And the course of doing that, I got connected with another kid

in class and he had a great idea.

His his, his uncle or godfather or something had actually been

really directly involved with the launch of Crest Whitestrips.

And so if I remember correctly, the, the, that figure told my co founder at

a business, he told him that if there were one product in the oral care space

that he wanted to create, it would be a chewing gum that cleans your teeth.

So that was actually what led to the idea is chewing gum that cleans your teeth.

And we launched that product called confident in 2016.

And Yeah, that was, that was my first foray into e

commerce and entrepreneurship.

You know, it was literally 21, not even 21 yet.

I was 20 years old.

No clue.

Right.

I mean, kind of some generic creativity and, you know, just the, the

dedication to get after it every day.

But besides that, nothing,

I want to take it back though.

And what, pun intended, what spurred you to take an entrepreneurship class?

Yeah, it was Cause you have to be like, it has to pull you.

For sure.

You're not just going to do an entrepreneurship class for the hell of it.

No doubt.

I mean, dude, I remember the, my first job was at a bakery, actually.

In, in my senior year of high school.

Bakery Brian.

Yeah, Bakery Brian, Three Brothers Bakery.

I made it six weeks.

Ended up quitting because this 45 year old dude that, Yeah.

Was making the same, you know, 7.

50 an hour minimum wage as me told me that I wasn't sweeping correctly.

And I was like, bro, no way.

I can't believe, I can't believe that just happened.

Threw a muffin at his ass.

Yeah, no, no, it was a bunt cake.

But he, yeah.

So that, that was my first working experience.

And it was always the same thing, right?

My, my parents instilled in me very early.

Like, you gotta, you gotta, Go get a job.

You got to work.

If you want to spend money, it's going to be your money.

And you know, from, from the get go, it was, how can you get a job?

So when I went to, I played basketball at Trinity diversity in San Antonio

and this is peak Spurs, right?

Like my senior year of high school is Spurs won the NBA championship.

So I'm coming into San Antonio in 2014 and it was just, you know, Spurs fever

everywhere, hottest thing in town.

And again, you know, Trinity was not known for a lot of things, but it had a really

strong sports management department.

And I've been obsessed with sports my whole life.

So, I wanted to be an NBA GM.

That was actually my original goal going into Trinity.

You can still do that though.

I don't know if you want to do it, but you could, you still

have the potential to do that.

So, I But keep going.

No, I mean, to that point, you know, I thought about this quite a bit.

You actually have, think about making the NBA.

There's 400 spots every year.

About 250 of those stay in the league year over year.

That's an incredibly difficult thing to crack into what and you can

ignore just, you know, the challenges of being a superhuman athlete,

but just the raw numbers of it.

It's extremely difficult to get into.

There's only 30, there's only 30 NBA GMs.

It's a very political game.

If your family is not basketball royalty, it's very hard to get the nod.

You know, you gotta be really well connected.

I don't

know, cause look at Eric Spolstra.

From video editor on the team, or like cutting up film tape or

whatever, to head coach, two rings, or two or three rings at this point.

Sure.

finals appearances.

He

got in and he was able to become Pat Riley's confidant for sure.

And you know, I think he's probably one of the only examples of that all time,

but yeah, there's always ridiculous outliers to anything, but take me

back to Spurs and what you did there.

And so I was able to get an internship at the Spurs.

So I was an intern in their PR department and two guys that had a

massive impact on me back then were Chris Davis and Jordan Howenstein.

And Jordan was this, you know, swaggy dude, like he was just like the liaison

for the players and the media, you know, he would just, whenever the media

would be like clamoring to get in the locker room, Jordan's like, nah, dude,

you can't, you guys can't come in yet.

And I mean, dude, this was peak first, right?

They were the best team in the West, like, Media was crazy and so I got, I got to be

an intern under those guys and my job was essentially to hold the microphone while

players are getting interviewed, hold the microphone with all the media and then

immediately sprint back to the our room and transcribe what was on the recording.

And this is the most like automatable chat GPT shit of all time now.

But.

And record it and then prepare quotes for the media so that they could

turn around their story faster.

So that was pretty much my job.

But I mean, it was, it was dope because I got to be in the locker

room with every major NBA star at the time, especially you think about the

Warriors, you know, LeBron, like I got to like, Be right next to these guys.

You were, you were able to do that with LeBron and any of those players?

Wow.

Yeah, yeah.

There's a, I did like a little going away post on my Instagram and

the angle that I was able to take a picture of LeBron at is in that folder.

That's sick.

I didn't know

that.

I've never seen that.

You've never told me this.

So this is, this is cool information.

It was

cool.

There was one story the Cavs had just gotten, I mean, this is a

year after they won the title.

And so the Spurs are still pretty good.

This is Kawhi becoming, you know, one of the best players in the NBA.

And the Spurs beat the hell out of him, like 35 piece.

Yeah.

And one of the reporters asked LeBron, they say, You know, the Cavs have just

slipped to fourth in the East, LeBron, are you worried that your streak in

making the finals as the only team to represent the East is going to come to

a close and LeBron just kind of like looks at the guy like he's an idiot?

Dead silent room.

I laugh at LeBron's reaction.

Dead silent room.

And LeBron like points to me and he's like, he gets it.

No way.

Yeah, it was sick.

That's a clip.

Yeah, it was cool.

It was cool.

That is so cool.

And he was so goaded for that too.

Like, at the time, just like, he's like, you really don't think

I'm making it out these?

Come on.

Is, did that moment put LeBron over MJ for you?

You know how you could have like a little moment where it just put, it

like puts that guy over somebody else?

Dude, I don't know.

I've

always been kind of team MJ on that side of things, but we could,

that's a different conversation.

Yeah.

But what spurred you to the entrepreneurship class?

What out of that, you know, that scenario and interning at, with

the Spurs and working with them and getting to do those things was

like, I'm, I'm made to do X, Y, Z.

Yeah.

I think, you know, just seeing what, what it took to become So I, you

know, there was Tom James was above Chris Davis and Jordan Hauenstein and

he was like 55 and Tom was probably, you know, doing really well, working

a dream job, traveling all the time.

But I knew he wasn't really making a ton of money.

And I knew that it had taken him like 25 years to like get to that point.

And it started to make me think about sort of the sacrifice that comes with

building a career in the traditional way, which is, you know, pay your dues.

And I'd never been someone that had a lot of patience to that.

And I, I, I kind of, you know, in looking around for what was that next

thing, Found the entrepreneurship class.

I was just intrigued.

It really wasn't any sort of just a curiosity at that.

Yeah, it was an elective and you know, I would really credit dr Martinez

with the way that he positioned how magical it is to build a company and

what that journey looks like with

And did you feel any of that magic when you're starting to build a chewing

gum company where it was amazing, dude.

What led from that?

So like, cause it is a good idea.

I chew a lot of gum.

I would love if it was cleaning my teeth instead of what I hear.

It's like, Oh, it's giving you cavities if you're chewing, chewing,

you know, trident gum or whatever.

So where did it go from this idea to, did you actually launch a product?

What was the evolution?

Oh, we, we launched the hell out of a product.

Yeah.

So we ended up there was a full formulation development.

We had a manufacturer in Vancouver funded.

How'd you get money to do this?

So we won a couple of pitch competitions at the school and then took that money

to develop the product from there.

We had some initial traction.

And took it to a friends and family round.

What, how much was it?

20, 30K or?

Quite a bit more.

I think it was around 1.

5 million.

Oh,

damn.

Yeah.

From pitch competitions.

No, that, the pitch competitions was around 30K.

Okay.

And then product into Sort of Amazon traction into now I'm referring

to like to launch the company.

You guys had 30k.

Yes.

Okay, and then yeah Yeah, and so, you know basically took that 30k and you

know turn it into a real product Turned that product into some baseline Amazon

sales Shopify sales You know continue to grow it it was really interesting.

We initially thought that it was going to be a really strong

B2B play, that we're going to go heavy into retail distribution.

And the problem is at the countertops of a lot of gas stations and convenience

stores, think about, you know, when you go to Hudson news in an airport.

There's Juicy Fruit, there's FiveGun, there's all these

kind of entrenched players.

Those are super long lasting relationships between the

distributor, the, you know, Mars Inc.

that creates the product, and then the retail outlet.

They have razor thin margins, but they work because there's so much trust

in that relationship, and to disrupt that was really, really challenging.

So we thought, okay, what are some other markets that we could crack?

And we settled on hotels and airlines and country clubs.

And sort of like more basically anywhere where a premium amenity,

such as like a, Hey, do you want to clean your teeth right now?

You know, it could be valuable after coffee, after a meal.

You know, you're about to go meet some people at a networking event.

And we settled on a lot of those things.

Resounding feedback from all of them was that we don't want to gum because we don't

want people taking it and then putting it under a table or putting it under a chair.

Interesting.

And so we had deals at the finish line with, you know, a lot of the

biggest airlines in the world.

I mean, some really powerful people were, were curious about this, but

the challenge was always two things.

It was making the margin work.

Yeah, because it was a really expensive product.

All things considered was a functional chewing gum.

Like it actually worked to reduce bacteria that caused gingivitis.

It whitened teeth.

Like there's some tangible benefits to this thing, but chewing it.

We had clinical trials done at the UT Health Science Center that proved

all this stuff out, but ultimately they couldn't get over that.

So we developed a mint product.

And that was a huge pivot for the business, really successful.

And that, that was sort of my first foray into a challenge, which

was, okay, we have a mint product.

We must now go sell it.

How are we going to sell it on, on me?

Let's go figure it out.

Cause were you heading growth or?

Yeah.

I mean, sales and marketing, you know, we had a three person team and

ultimately ended up, I mean, two die.

Okay.

I looked up every Marriott in the US.

I looked up every Hyatt.

I looked up every, you know, hotel pulled list of golf clubs, country clubs.

Like I was just cold calling and I would just say, Hey, can I speak to whoever's

in charge of your amenities department?

Got a really exciting product that I'd like to chat with them about.

And creating a funnel, you know, following up with people, touching base, like all

this stuff, just tracked in Google sheets.

We ultimately became, you know, a brand standard meant for JW Marriott hotels.

We were working on Omni hotels.

We were working on Hyatt.

And it was going really well.

And at the same time, Facebook ads were doing well.

This is like 2018.

Facebook ads were performing.

This was, and that was when I got introduced to meta

and running ads like that.

And then also Amazon was, was a big part of the business.

And what happened to it?

I mean, one point, getting to 1.

5 million in sales.

Now, then pivoting towards towards mints, what happened to the company?

Why, why are you still, why isn't it a hundred million dollar company now?

You know, just some disagreements with the co

founding team about the direction.

You know, the CEO wanted to go into a different space, which was CBD

and that didn't really align with sort of like the original vision.

And so we kind of just parted ways from there.

It's kind of the first time I realized that, you know, a really good product

and good traction and good idea.

Doesn't equate to automatic success.

Something my dad told me all the time, startups fail 90, 95 percent of the time.

What do you think is different about you?

Of course, first one being so successful, having so much traction, great product.

Every time I hand it to somebody.

And it still fails, you know?

And so yeah, that was, that was that first entrepreneurial experience.

With that first experience, looking back at it, what were some of the biggest

learnings from growing a company to 1.

5 million in sales and then it ultimately failing?

Were there any hard lessons that you took into your next few ventures and

the next things that you wanted to do?

For sure.

I think one of them was leading with unit economics.

We wanted to go into an industry that was razor thin margins.

And we wanted to play in DTC, which is direct to consumer.

And so, you know, we, we just had a different game

than five gum or juicy fruit.

Like We, we had, we didn't have the retail presence.

And also that, that was another thing.

Don't, don't ruffle feathers of a player that, you know, is

entrenched in a space because their distributors wouldn't even talk to us.

We already have our gum category settled.

We're not going to talk to anybody for 10 years.

Our deal is not even negotiable.

And you just go into it with the naiveness of like, naivety, maybe

but you go into it thinking, you know, we'll just figure this out.

And some things are not possible to be figured out.

You, you cannot win in the gum business without retail.

There are many CPG products, consumer packaged, good products

that you cannot win without retail.

And that's because your customer acquisition costs.

For a 8 item online, if you want to be profitable, that means you have to have

like a 2 customer acquisition cost.

It's not feasible.

And so, leading with unit economics would definitely be one.

It was also the first time that I really saw marketing for what it was.

We Which is what?

Which is people's needs and desires more so than anything.

You really have to appeal to self actualization.

Our, our product was very much so geared towards insecurities.

You were insecure about your breath.

You were insecure about the color of your teeth.

You were insecure about maybe sometimes chewing gum is just a nervous tick

that allows people to feel more comfortable in certain social situations.

And so diving super deep into not just saying, Hey, this gum

helps you clean your teeth.

You have to say, are you tired of having bad breath after coffee?

Are you, do you feel like your teeth are so stained after

every coffee that you drink?

Getting more specific with the situations and the specific outcome

that our product would provide.

To solve that problem was that was my first experience with it.

And, you know, it took me, it was extremely impactful to have that when I

was young, you know, because those are lessons that I see, I've got 40 year

old marketers that don't know that shit.

You know, I see that all the time.

And so to kind of get that lesson upfront, especially.

Dude, it was dollars in dollars out.

Obviously we raised money, but you know, I was the one spending ads on meta.

There wasn't an agency, you know, there wasn't someone that

I could point the finger at.

If shit wasn't working,

it was on me.

It was good for you at that age to learn, you know, what works in marketing, what

really is marketing, because it's going to, that is something that's going

to impact nearly everything you've done since is why you're successful.

So from there, what was next?

How did you find your next venture?

Did you want to keep pursuing entrepreneurship, building a product

where you're like, fuck all this, all this drama, all this bullshit.

I want to get a job.

You know, where was your head at?

Yeah.

So for, for a minute man, there was a, there was a six month stretch where

there was a lot going on and my parents really wanted me to pursue a safer route,

they wanted me to go to grad school and so I was kind of preparing for the LSAT

to go to law school and I was working a entry level, yeah, me as a lawyer,

that's crazy, questionable but you know, I was preparing for the LSAT and

I was working in an entry level sales job at this place called HomeAdvisor.

And I got through the training and like two weeks of being there

and I just, I couldn't do it.

So and the whole time I was kind of, you know, still doing that consulting

stuff and, you know, it's sort of at the time, like my buddy Thomas fields, who

absolutely, you know, changed my life.

And I'm so grateful for is building this company called grind basketball.

And.

It's kind of a fringe idea, right?

An idea that someone like me might see the value in, but like a random person,

like really did not see the vision when it was just an idea and it was a

portable basketball rebounding machine.

So the idea is that rebounding machines are very prevalent in the basketball

world there at almost every high school, every training facility, every university.

Oftentimes trainers will use them as a way to upsell people on their own programming.

Yeah.

Those products were 400 pounds, 10, 000.

A very difficult for a regular family to afford, certainly impossible to transfer.

I really

just thought you hit us with like British money, like

those products was 400 pounds.

Oh, yeah.

I was like, no.

No, no, 400 pounds, that would be slim.

But yeah, so, you know, they were really bulky and expensive.

And basically his idea was.

You know, he, he wasn't able to afford one back in the day

and he would have loved to.

And so that's where he started from was, can I make the product that, you

know, 15 year old me needed and create that for Hoopers across the country.

He had seen me building the gum company for, for the whole time.

Cause me and him actually played a basketball together.

We met, you know,

that, yeah, that's news to me.

Yeah.

So we met in 2013 in high school.

And so we connected on Instagram and our DMS were so funny, man.

I went through them a few times and like.

You know, especially after we had done some cool stuff and, you know,

there's just like so much encouragement

to like to go back five years later and be like, damn, we built this.

And remember when we were talking about that?

Yeah.

And you also don't even, you know, when you're, when you're in the

moment, you know, it's 2017 and he's posting his logo for the first time.

And I'm like, yo, this is sick.

I don't know.

I'm not even thinking about it at the time.

I'm not like, Oh, I'm ever going to work on this, you know, so he, he ends up

needing some help kind of founding team help and asked me if I want to join him

as kind of his founding marketing guy.

And that was January of 2020.

So we had at the time 0, I think Thomas had raised like 40, 000 from like, you

know, a couple of our first semesters.

And you know, this is six months after the gum company for timeline

sake, and he had 40, 000 just enough to set up a Shopify website.

And one of our other marketing guys, Moe Elrod, who's an absolute

G OG he used to work at and one.

And so he was on the and one street ball tour back in the day.

And when he was there, he was, he befriended the professor.

So the professor, for those that don't know, is a very

popular internet personality.

He's a really flashy basketball player, and he's able to go to Venice Beach,

which has a bunch of courts, and challenge average Joes to a game of one on one,

and then he just absolutely clowns them.

And it's, it's always really entertaining content.

And so professor's blown up as a YouTuber.

He's got a huge audience.

And so Mo was able to work with the professor on doing a release

video with us where the professor posted it from his account.

And so that video was scheduled to go live in March of 2020.

And we were going to launch in March of 2020.

I believe we posted the video on March 1st of 2020.

And obviously, what happened 11 days later, COVID strikes and everyone's

like, Holy shit, basketball's over.

Nothing's going to happen.

And that was, yeah, that was crazy.

It was a real gut check.

What, what was your position at, at Grind?

Did you take on?

Yeah, it was CMO, Chief Marketing Officer.

But we, I mean, it was a very small team.

So we had an engineer.

We had Thomas, the CEO.

Thomas had engineering skills.

And then I was sort of handling anything related to marketing.

And so you, you joined that team.

Where did you guys get it to?

Because you were there for two and a half, three years.

Yeah,

ended up being three, four years.

We did some cool stuff.

I mean, we, we ended up, you know, selling out of our first batch of pre orders.

So we sold out of that and then, you know, July of 2020 Thomas gets an

email from ABC, basically letting him know that he'd been selected to

participate on Shark Tank for that season.

He had a great story.

Like he tore his ACL four times and, you know, self taught mechanical engineer.

That's awesome.

And basically just got it out the mud.

Like he was working two jobs at all times to support this

third job, which was the idea.

That's awesome.

And so, you know, it's a really compelling story.

And obviously the product's very interactive.

So, you know, the concept of having Mark Cuban go shoot a jumper on this thing was

probably very appealing to the producers.

He ends up filming the episode in September of 2020.

But yeah, I mean, dude, like filming Shark Tank and it's crazy because, you

know, Thomas calls me after filming it.

And he's just grinning ear to ear, eating, eating pasta in his hotel room.

And I'm like, what happened?

And he's like, you know what happened?

And I was like, what happened?

And he's like, you know what happened?

And so, you know, we, we obviously got to deal with Mark and Barbara.

And that was, That was crazy.

We kind of leveraged that to raise some money, which was much needed because, you

know, dude, you want to talk about the school of hard knocks, like the lessons

learned at grind were, were real tough.

Essentially, you know, product manufacturing came in and it

was way higher than we thought.

And so we needed a lot more money.

So not only do we have the revenue we'd collected from pre orders, but

a lot of the revenue or a lot of the, you know, financing we had raised

needed to go towards manufacturing and marketing and stuff like that.

So

when your product goes live on Shark Tank, what happens?

Like what is the result of being live on Shark Tank and

having Mark Cuban and Barbara.

Invest in your company.

Yeah.

The first thing is just a hockey stick.

It, the traffic just immediately spikes.

All of a sudden you've got five, 10, 000 people live on your site.

There's no feeling like it because you're just watching the analytics in real time.

Seeing people add to cart, seeing people initiate, check

out purchases, start flying.

It was amazing.

Our, our peak number was, I think we had around 25, 000 people on

the site on that Friday night.

Yeah.

Wow.

And that was insane.

Really, really cool.

You know, you just start getting these random texts, like from

people that you hadn't told about.

And they're like, what is that?

Are you kidding me?

Like, where did this, where did this come from?

So that part's really cool, but you know, I think above all else, like just

seeing, you know, the, it's, it's not necessarily about the initial upfront

revenue, but it's what that stamp of approval does for you longterm.

Yeah.

So.

What was really fascinating about our experience on shark tank is we, we

had great traction initially, and we aired on Friday, May, May 12th of 2021.

And a week later, we had an article go live in CNBC, ironically enough, and that

article in CNBC actually ended up driving more revenue than the shark tank episode.

So our shark tank episode got 3.

5 million views.

Ton of people, I mean, people talk about it, you know, to this day, I'll

say we, you know, I, I used to work at this portable shooting machine company

and they're like, what's your answer?

Was that the shark tank?

Like that?

That still happens a lot.

But what was so interesting is another kind of lesson in audience

is the CNBC article, which goes to, you know, a business enthusiast,

probably a wealthier consumer.

That article ended up actually driving more attributable revenue than the Shark

Tank episode which was super interesting.

What happens when you know, the Shark Tank episode goes live?

That's over, but it keeps, you know, they keep replaying it.

Yeah.

Is it still that same spike?

What does it look like on that?

Yeah, so I would say that the initial spike was, you know, that number

that I mentioned, and then the continuing spike is closer to about a third of that.

So the re heirs is kind of what you're talking about.

So CNBC obviously syndicates Shark Tank and re heirs it periodically.

Dude, that happens like once every, I would say once every six weeks.

It really happens a lot more than I thought.

I didn't know that.

And I can't imagine what that's like for, you know, we had a

2, 000 average order value.

You know, it's not necessarily something that you see on

Shark Tank and just press buy.

Yeah.

And so we had to use it in our own way.

But for people that are in that, you know, 50 to a hundred dollar range and you know,

you see it on Shark Tank, you're sold.

And I mean, I've heard some pretty crazy numbers about what they can do.

You had all the lessons that you learned at the gum company.

You're at grind for three years.

You do some incredible things.

What were some of the biggest takeaways there that were different

than the gum company and kind of helped you again, catapult into

your next, your next career path,

man.

I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think learning about raising money was probably the most impactful thing.

We we ultimately raised 1.

1 million of venture funding in 2021.

We participated in tech stars, sports accelerator, which was amazing.

I think we got really, really lucky with who.

Our managing director is Techstars gets a lot of, you know, flack for

basically being a diluted accelerator.

There's Y Combinator, which has Airbnb, you know, a bunch of really

prompt DoorDash, stuff like that.

But Techstars has less brand names that have come out of it.

And I think that's because your managing director plays the ultimate role in how

successful you are, because it's really their network and their relationships

and introductions they can make.

So our managing director was amazing.

Jordan Flegel program manager, Andrew Hipper, it's gotten promoted now.

I mean, dude, those guys, you know, set us up for as much success as possible.

Like we got every VC intro we wanted.

We were pitching the Pelotona basketball, we were going to build this gamified

experience layered onto the, layered onto the machine where, you know, basically

you had a hub of training content that was trackable through your, your iPhone

on your you know, your iPhone's camera and just gamified that whole experience

and kind of, you know, try and put a player's training journey into a mobile

app as tied to the product itself.

So.

Raising money was, was awesome.

I think, you know, another lesson in union economics as well, you know, even

though we're at 2, 000, the biggest thing, if you want to be a direct consumer

brand is retention and repeat orders.

That's the most important thing in the lifeblood of any direct

to consumer business, because.

You have to acquire a customer first, but that's very difficult to be profitable.

And you have to continue to do that versus If you acquire someone that

loves your brand, like we talked about represent quite a bit on this show.

I bet they have an insane lifetime value because every drop that, yeah, every

drop that they have is, you know, going to get bought by those thousand true

fans and what we really struggled with.

Is we tried to have software be the thing that would create recurring revenue versus

the machine and downstream products.

And, you know, and to be, to be very clear, grind is still

growing and doing well, and it's going to continue to do well.

The product is fantastic.

We have thousands and thousands of people nationwide that love it.

But what, what, what could have potentially helped us really

skyrocket is if we had other ways to extend the customer lifetime value

and create more orders out of our existing people that we had acquired.

So I think, you know, those are the two fundamental things that when I look

at e commerce business, I judge it by, and it helps me realize like if people

are actually doing well or not, because if you don't have those two things.

You don't have a chance.

Going back to raising money, what was the biggest lesson?

What was the biggest takeaway from raising 1.

2 million?

And what, how can somebody take away something from, you know, your

experience there to then raise money?

It's super clear.

You have to run a process that understands that you're going

to get 99 no's out of a hundred.

And that's to getting the meeting.

And, you know, above all else, raising money is actually very similar to dating.

In a way if you like someone too much, then they probably won't like you back.

And VCs are the same way they, if they feel any sort of thirst out of

you, any sort of, I need you to, I need your money, then they run away.

But I've seen time and time again, founders who just kind of lean back and

like, look at you and they're like, yeah, man, you can get in this round or not.

I don't give a fuck.

Those people end up raising more money, even though they have

oftentimes pretty shitty companies.

Because VCs are people too.

And they can get FOMOed into stuff so quickly.

It's also a space that I see a tremendous amount of groupthink.

There's, you know, when things are hot, right now, AI for example,

you know, this is a meme, right?

Because, I mean, crypto is probably the most flagrant example where it's like,

if you just said the word crypto and you're trying to reinvent something.

Or AI and shit.

Yeah, then if you're trying to reinvent something with that new technology, you

had a good chance of getting funded.

If you could, Engineer that FOMO from the vc.

Yeah.

And if you could, you have to run a process and, and what that means is

you have to have, often you have to be very comfortable with lying too,

because a lot of these founders will say that they have money committed.

What does that mean?

You know, it's not funded, it's not wired.

You had a conversation with somebody that said, I'm interested.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm in.

Let me know.

Or I'm in if so and so is in, and then you go to so and so and you

tell them that they're for sure in, you know, and it's, so it's really

about just kind of playing the game.

I would say above all else, you just have to understand the game, which is you

have to FOMO these investors against each other so that they all think that they're

not getting in on something because they're, they're desperate for that win.

Cause they're, they know also that they're going to miss 95 percent of the time.

And then next, I mean, you transitioned from building a grind

basketball to your first job or kind of one of your first jobs, which is at

Spellbound, which for anybody that doesn't know is like an interactive email tool.

Yeah.

Why?

You know, I thought that grind had a ton of potential

and that's why I saw it through.

It did.

We had a couple of really unfortunate situations happen with

regards to supply chain in 2022.

Yeah.

And that was just totally out of our control.

Some challenges that just happened that required a lot of that capital

that we raised to go towards, you know, fixing, and that really

constrained our ability to grow because inventory was always a challenge.

And we kind of were back in this position where the fundraising

market collapsed underneath us.

And, you know, that's what happened in 2022.

If you look at how much, how many dollars were deployed,

it was a pretty steep decline.

And when that happened.

It was really tough for us to get out of the flywheel of, we make a lot of

money, that money immediately has to go into more inventory, we make a lot

of money, more in inventory, and we're just in this kind of hamster wheel.

And because the funding market really dried up for direct to consumer brands,

I kind of, The fundraising experience had taught me what got funded.

And it was these moonshot ideas that were going after a massive target market.

And, you know, I got connected to the team at Spellbound,

Akshaya Dinesh, founder.

And it was, you know, the most exciting thing I'd ever seen.

I mean, I was like, this is, you know, it was interactive emails.

So the concept was, if you send an email as an e commerce merchant right now,

Then someone has to click a button, go to your website, click another button,

go check out, go to checkout, make sure that they actually want the purchase.

And what I thought was possible was that we were moving that

experience into the email.

Could, I mean, it seems like a no brainer for every single, especially

based on like all the data that says.

Email is the most ROI positive channel you could do.

And then if you only optimize that to be all the, all the ROIs now in

email, it sounds like a no brainer.

And, and walking through the decision, I think,

because it was a job, right?

And I was going from being a founder to being someone who had a job.

And a few things played into that decision that maybe being transparent

about could actually help people in our audience to think about.

But like, number one was at Grind, I didn't have money

to pay myself a lot of money.

I was, I was.

Primarily funding any sort of lifestyle through consulting with other agencies.

I was just a media buyer on their team.

I had like three agencies that were trusting me for

media buying which was cool.

And I got to have a lot of experience that fueled my ability to perform a grind.

And so context switching all the time is really tough.

And I just, I had to like play so many different roles.

It was exhausting and Spellbound was the opportunity to just kind of just

consolidate my time into something and have a salary and focus on one outcome.

And, you know, doing that was really appealing.

But also when you're evaluating a company, I think you need to look at

a few things and above all else is what is the market it's going after

and what is its opportunity to get funded again with Spellbound, it had

tier one VCs, it had very, very strong Silicon Valley VCs that backed it.

I knew that those VCs typically are there to support portfolio

companies from not dying.

They're very involved and they're very incentivized to, you know, if

there's any, I had a conversation with the partner and I was like, what does

it take for us to get to a series A?

The number he told me was not challenging for us to get to.

It was not much farther than where we already were.

And I was like, holy shit, we're going to be able to raise another round.

So as far as stability goes, imagine coming from grind where it's like

every, I mean, I see the bank account every, you know, we're.

It just, it was what it was like when no one was coming to save us

versus, you know, the VC backed mentality is here's a bunch of money

to go after this massive opportunity.

And go capitalize as long as you build products, don't

care about being profitable.

Just go for it.

And she was a talented founder.

She was really smart and she is really smart and the company

is still doing great as well.

Like leaving that wasn't anything indicative of where that company is going.

It's just ultimately you have to pursue what's best for you.

And what is best for you?

'cause you, you were there for roughly a year, I think, or

maybe a little over a year.

Yeah, I made it nine months.

I mean, I remember Okay.

Nine months.

It's a pregnancy you mentioned.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's a pregnancy.

And

this is the baby sweat equity.

Yes.

I think I, I mean, honestly, you know, you, you mentioned this on,

on your podcast where we were talking about your background, but

having a job is just hard, man.

Yeah.

I mean, I think ultimately that's, I'm, I'm an entrepreneur at heart and I want

to pursue something where I'm gonna capture the maximum amount of value.

And I think you have to be in control of your own decisions.

You have to be in control of the information that you

choose to make decisions.

Yeah.

And, and what you intake.

And you know, if you spot an opportunity then and you believe you need to go for

it, then you need to go for it.

And what is that opportunity now?

Because I think you're, you're someone that's early to trends and

you see something and you're like, we should take advantage of that.

That's an arbitrage.

I should take advantage of that.

Yeah.

I think you're seeing it now and that's what you're building

a business on the backend.

Yeah.

Because you had an agency that was media buying.

But now you transitioned it.

You pivoted.

What is that pivot?

What opportunity do you see?

And also, you know, after you, you touch on all that, what, how else,

how else can someone tackle this opportunity if they are DTC or CPG brand?

Yeah, for sure.

The opportunity I saw was when we were at Grind, we created a very

specific type of UGC content.

It was faceless and It was incorporating a lot of viral elements that I'd honestly

learned from that gum company where it's, you have to appeal to someone's desires.

You have to really appeal to something that they deeply want.

And so I positioned our product as something that was very aspirational,

dream backyard setup, or every Hooper's dream, or stuff like that.

And that was basically the video thumbnail and the hook.

Use the native TikTok voice.

So it felt very familiar to the platform.

The robot shit.

Like the robot voice.

And I didn't have any paid actors on the screen.

It was me pulling up to a house and filming the grind machine in action.

Yeah.

There's shot on iPhone and stuff like that.

And the content would go viral.

We had like seven or eight videos hit a million views.

Like it was going really well.

And what really kind of blew my mind was I would take those videos and put

it into our meta ad account and they would outperform everything that we had

spent like 10, 000 on a photo shoot for.

And I was like, Holy shit, this shot on iPhone content is all you need in a

world where everyone is just peppered with content and ads all the time.

It's really important to almost disguise your ads as something that

isn't an ad, even though it is.

All of that kind of, kind of led to, you know, creating a bunch of content

like that for various brands last year.

I was moonlighting a little bit doing some consulting for a few brands with a

couple of my buddies who ran an agency.

And that was consistently the best performing content.

When TikTok released their shop feature, I was like, holy

shit, this is now monetizable.

In an organic way.

So that viral video that I made for Grind that got a million views

without any dollars put into it.

All of a sudden, that video could have been monetized without me

putting ad dollars into it, without someone going to the link in my bio.

They built the bridge for you.

They built the bridge.

And it was another thing, you know, if you're in the services world,

what am I going to, how am I going to work with the best brands?

Am I going to go get some of their meta ad creative spend?

No, they're going to go to the big boys, the homesteads,

the common thread collectives.

They're going to go to these really big agencies that have sophisticated

teams, deliverables and charge a massive rate because they're going to perform

really well and building that operation is daunting and competing for those

things would be even more daunting.

So I didn't see anyone really doing the tick tock shop content.

For mainstream brands, and I had some conversations with some, but I mean,

you know, over the years, I'd worked with a lot of head of growth said these

big brands and I had conversations.

So I'm like, you know, what are your resources for this internally?

And it's like, we don't really have anything, you know, we, we have a

content person, we have a social media manager, but no one who kind of blends.

You know, direct response and virality.

And it kind of reminds me how the head of growth has taken over DTC because the head

of growth blends finance and marketing in a way that ensures performance.

Yeah, it's, we are very specifically going after this target customer

acquisition because it works within our contribution margin.

And that is how we can scale profitably at this budget.

That's a growth marketing person.

And what wasn't really out there was this performance marketing organic

person who kind of creates these organic stories that sell a product and go viral.

So my, you know, bet is that we could build the best outsourced version

of that, where we are sort of the shoppable content person on your team.

And I have a, you know, I've now I got seven creators full time.

I've got a team strategists.

So.

We're pumping out 300 videos a month right now.

Amazing.

For, for our brands.

And it's going well.

Yeah.

A lot of the content's starting to get its first level.

What are the,

some of the common denominators you're seeing in

these creators that you hire?

Yeah, that's an excellent question.

I mean, for me it's a, a, a lot of it is above all else.

I mean, this is my first team, man.

First time managing people in a real way, like.

You know, a grind.

It was me and Thomas, you know, like just like you and I talk about sweat

equity, it was like our, our slack DMS were just how the company was ran.

Now it's managing people, setting expectations, making sure deliverables are

met, making sure that quality stays there.

So above all else, is someone going to do what they said they do?

That that's the biggest thing.

I mean, I think content, they have to be comfortable on camera.

They have to be comfortable speaking into a camera.

They have to pick up some key things that I mentioned, which is

a lot of people naturally gravitate towards bland marketing language.

And there's something that you wrote about a lot back in the day, which is, and this

is common sort of in our echo chamber of marketers on Twitter, but I don't think

a lot of people understand, which is.

Clarity.

Clarity is king.

And if you read a script to your 65 year old grandma and she's not abundantly

clear what the benefits of the product are and who it's for, then that's a failure.

And training that has been something that we've really focused on, but I'm

finding that as long as someone has a UGC background, as long as they've created

UGC content for brands before, then as long as I can show them examples and.

Kind of, you know, massage their ideas of like, okay, we're not necessarily

just going to make a UGC video.

We're going to make an organic story that sells the product.

Then that's, that's been pretty effective

and what's been working on TikTok shop.

I think you touched on something interesting that you said this is

blending direct response and virality.

That's a hard thing to do.

Very hard thing to do because you're trying to be top of funnel

while being like bottom of funnel.

Right.

What's working?

It's, it's all about creating a story around a pain point

that your target audience feels.

Can you give me an example?

Yeah, so one of our brands is a hair removal device.

And so, you know, when you're talking about hair, hair, hair,

being hairy as a, as a woman is, is certainly something that is annoying.

And they don't like shaving and if they could be given a pill to just get

rid of hair immediately, I bet almost a lot of them would probably take it.

I don't have any.

I love that Fives, like the hairiest person on our team is in the back.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Just catching, catching strays over there.

But, and you thought you were safe.

You're never safe.

Yeah.

But, you know, they're, they're a situation where, okay, so that's great.

And we can get those, you know, pain points and benefits across

in an ad very effectively.

And they, and they do, they have phenomenal ads.

But to go viral on TikTok.

A lot of things are driven by stories.

And so what's a, what's a hyper specific story that we can tell to

a specific demographic that will position the product as the solution

to not feeling that pain again.

And so you want that story to evoke a sense of emotion.

You want it to make them feel like, ah, shit, I remember that.

So, you know, one example would be having Razorburn on your bikini line before

going out on a boat here in Austin.

That's pretty specific.

Right.

But at the same time, if a girl is telling that story, it feels very specific.

It feels very authentic.

You know, it's not just features benefits at that point.

It's, it's still making sure that it's, it's trustworthy, I think, and

that you're not just getting served an ad and cloaked in something.

And so instead of leaning into.

You know, use it twice a week as an instruction.

It's you only have to use it twice a week.

Right.

It's not, it's not just like straight telling someone it's kind of positioning

as if you're talking to a friend and you're just saying, it's not that bad.

Like I only have to use it twice a week.

And it's totally safe.

I've looked it up.

I've done all the research versus the FDA says it's clear for and so

it's those little kind of tweaks that I've found help video help videos

actually move and great advice.

Yeah.

So you know, whenever you're kind of scripting your content out, that would

be my number one piece of advice is if it reads like an ad It's not gonna work.

Not good.

Yeah.

It's not gonna work.

That won't work organically.

You could still plug that into an ad account and it might work, but that's

because you're paying for views.

You're not earning them.

Yeah.

Organic content has to earn views.

I love that.

So, yeah.

So wrapping up the episode, it's 2024.

You just started Rectify.

For people that don't know, Rectify is this agency, this TikTok shop agency.

He's doing all this work with Hexclad and other companies for Puckberry, et cetera.

What are your goals for 2024 and on for this company as, as you try to grow it?

Yeah.

I think, I mean, dude, as you build, I mean, first of all, we want to generate

a hundred million views for our brand.

Above all else, we want, I mean, we want our content to perform.

And so, how do I build a machine that is able to blend

direct response and virality?

And how do I train just a team of creators that are killers

and can like take a brand in?

We onboard them very specifically about these situations, like the

bikini line thing, come up with like 10 of those situations, and then

that's our two months of content.

We're just going to create variants around those situations.

So it's building the machine, I would say.

And then I kind of miss building a brand.

You always do.

It's fun to have that as kind of your central mission.

So maybe, maybe launching something, but I doubt it.

I think I'm just laser focused on, you know, a hundred million

views plus millions generated in revenue for my brands.

Because, you know, I think the biggest thing is like, we don't.

We take a flat retainer, a of TikTok agencies are trying to take

an upside on the shop revenue.

My brands are too big for that.

If they, if I took upside and we did well, then they'd be paying

me ridiculous sums of money.

And so, you know, keeping that focus of like, we're here to

deliver what we were paid to do.

And that is not regarding any sort of like, we're only going

to do it if we make X money.

Focus Brian is a good Brian.

I like it.

Focus Brian's a good Brian.

Yeah, it's definitely more fun.

Brian, this was awesome.

I'm great to do this.

I learned a bunch about you that I didn't know when we talk all the fucking time.

Yeah.

So one, I appreciate you kind of giving everybody insight into your

life background, what you're doing.

The first thing is for, for anybody that wants to work with

you, they do have a DTC brand.

They have a CPG brand.

They want to take advantage of.

of TikTok shop.

They don't know what to do.

They know it has potential.

Where can they work with you?

Where can they find you?

How can they hit you up?

Yeah, I would say the best place, I mean, it's rctfy.

co, which just infuriates me that I have to spell it out.

I remember my good buddy Alex Martin was like, If you have to spell out

your website, you've already lost.

But hit me on Instagram at brian underscore bloom.

And the link in my bio will take you to directly to the site.

And yeah, we're not really onboarding a bunch of new clients.

I kind of capped right now.

I would have to hire more people to take on additional work, but.

You know, build up the wait list.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, I mean, it's a wait list right now.

And it's, it's really for any brand that just doesn't have those internal resources

to, cause this is a revenue channel now, you know, it used to be something that was

kind of just like, Oh, let's, Throw the social media manager at it to make memes

and it's like, no, like, you know, you really need to focus on this to make some

ROI.

And social media, where can they find you?

Yeah, at brian underscore bloom on IG and at brian

underscore bloom one on Twitter.

That's a

wrap, we're back at it normal tomorrow,

er, next week.

Yeah, excited man.

Peace.