#354: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — How to Generate 8-Figure Revenue at Age 21 (Or Any Age)

"I think the role of the entrepreneur in the world is to find ways to do things better or more efficiently and then try to do that as many times over with the help of other people." — Santiago Nestares Benedict Dohmen and Santiago Nestares of Benitago Group http://www.benitago.com/, both 21, met as computer science students at Dartmouth College. Both worked very long hours in the library and suffered from back pain. They began collaborating on a prototype for a product that ended up being called the Supportiback https://www.amazon.com/s?marketplaceID=ATVPDKIKX0DER&me=A31K165G3RM8VI&merchant=A31K165G3RM8VI, gathering feedback from members of the Dartmouth community, including a local hospital president and professors and students studying engineering and medicine. They launched the product on Amazon in the UK, and when it seemed their first small order was in danger of selling out quickly, they arranged financing from their supplier and were off and running. Since then, they've entered the US market on Amazon, and are on track for nine-figure revenue in 2019. They have introduced 120 consumer products, and are trying to become an alternative to big consumer products companies through a strategy of applying their successful scale-up strategies to brands they acquire. Also joining us in this special episode is Elaine Pofeldt (@elainepofeldt https://twitter.com/elainepofeldt), an independent journalist and speaker who specializes in careers and entrepreneurship. She is the author of The Million-Dollar, One-Person Business: Make Great Money. Work the Way You Like. Have the Life You Want https://www.amazon.com/Million-Dollar-One-Person-Business-Great-Money/dp/039957896X/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&qid=1544291300&sr=8-1&keywords=The+Million-Dollar,+One-Person+Business&linkCode=ll1&tag=offsitoftimfe-20&linkId=0fc5500cf3e3bac891b97b238815bbdf&language=en_US, in which she looks at how entrepreneurs are scaling to $1 million in revenue prior to hiring employees. Please enjoy! Click here for the show notes for this episode. https://tim.blog/2018/12/27/4-hour-workweek-case-study-benitago-group/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description This podcast is brought to you by Peloton https://www.onepeloton.com/, which has become a staple of my daily routine. I picked up this bike after seeing the success of my friend Kevin Rose, and I've been enjoying it more than I ever imagined. Peloton is an indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right to your home. No worrying about fitting classes into your busy schedule or making it to a studio with a crazy commute. New classes are added every day, and this includes options led by elite NYC instructors in your own living room. You can even live stream studio classes taught by the world's best instructors, or find your favorite class on demand. *** If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tim-ferriss-show/id863897795?mt=2/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews! For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 02

  No, this is an inappropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:24Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Peloton, which I've been using probably for about a year now. Peloton is a cutting-edge indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right into your home. You can also do on-demand, which is what I do, we'll come back to that. So you don't have to worry about fitting classes into a busy schedule or making it to a studio or gym with a hectic or unpredictable commute. I, for instance, have a Peloton bike right in my master bedroom at home, and it's one of the first things I do many mornings. I wake up, I meditate for a bit, then I knock out a short 20-minute ride in my undies - hard to do that at the gym - take a shower, and I'm in higher gear for the rest of the day. It's really convenient and has become something that I look forward to. So you have a lot of options. For one, if you like, you can ride live with thousands of other riders across the country

• 1:08Tim Ferriss?

  on an interactive leaderboard to keep you motivated. There are also up to 14 new classes added every day with more than 8,000 classes on-demand, and you can pick based on length - 45 minutes, 20 minutes, whatever - music, hip-hop, rock and roll, or say, low-impact versus high-intensity or interval. You can pick the class structure and style that works for you. And in my case, I quite like Matt Wilpers, and I tend to do on-demand and listen to a lot of and watch many of the same classes over and over, but I'm kind of promiscuous and also enjoy classes from a lot of the other instructors. They have, Peloton, an amazing roster of incredible instructors in New York City with a whole range of styles and personalities, so you can find what you're in the mood for.

• 1:49Tim Ferriss?

  You also get real-time metrics that you can use to track your performance over time, and that will help, I would say catalyze you to beat your personal best. Now, that all sounds good, right? Gamification, yada, yada, yada. I didn't think that it would work for me or in any way incentivize me, but they really 100% hit the nail on the head. I was very, very impressed. ...with how motivating it was and it worked tremendously to keep me pushing, which quite honestly takes a fair amount. I can get quite lazy, particularly with anything that edges on endurance, which is kind of more than five reps of anything for me. So, check it out. Discover this cutting-edge indoor cycling bike that brings a studio experience right to your home. Peloton is offering listeners of this podcast a limited

• 2:34Tim Ferriss?

  time offer. Go to onepeloton.com, that's O-N-E, peloton, P-E-L-O-T-O-N, dot com, and enter the code TIM, all caps, at checkout and get $100 off of accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. So, get a great workout at home anytime you want. Check it out. Go to onepeloton.com and use the code TIM to get started.

• 3:01Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Charlotte's Web, which makes a CBD oil, a hemp extract that has become one of my go-to tools. Now, I have never really talked about CBD oil, and cannabis has never really been the plant for me, and we're talking about hemp. But, nonetheless, after several nights of inexplicable insomnia, this was about a year ago, I just could not get to sleep to save my life, and after other fixes failed, so melatonin, California poppy extract, dah dah dah dah, an elite athlete introduced me to this non-psychoactive extract, and bam, problem solved. I had some of the best sleep that I'd had in months. Now, I don't use sleep aids on a daily basis, but this has become part of my toolkit,

• 3:43Tim Ferriss?

  and I hope to be exploring other applications soon. CBD oil products have exploded in popularity in the health and wellness and fitness worlds, and Charlotte's Web is one of the top players that offers broad-spectrum hemp extract with CBD in the form of oils, capsules, and topical products. Charlotte's Web products will not get you high, so that maybe that is good news, maybe bad news to you, but it does have some powerful benefits and applications. And it works with your body's existing endocannabinoid system, endo meaning from within, like endo versus exoskeleton, for instance.

• 4:20Tim Ferriss?

  System works with your body. Some of the most common uses are for relief from everyday stressors, help in supporting restful sleep, which is what I most often use it for, to bring about a sense of calm and focus. A lot of my friends use it for that. CBD is also known, or becoming known, for helping athletes to recover from exercise-induced inflammation. Charlotte's Web hemp extract has naturally occurring terpenes, flavonoids, and other valuable hemp compounds that work synergistically to heighten positive effects, sometimes referred to as the entourage effect, which you guys can look up, making it more complete than single compound CBD alternatives, or at least that is what I've been told. I do not know much about CBD alternatives nor single compound. In any case, check it out. This stuff has really worked for me.

• 5:05Tim Ferriss?

  So jump over to CWHemp.com/Tim. CW is in Charlotte's Web. CWHemp.com/Tim to take a quick quiz, which will determine the best product for your particular aims, lifestyle, etc. And they ship to all 50 states. Charlotte's Web are offering listeners of this podcast 10% off of their purchase. While there are some exclusions, I personally use the extra strength CBD oils or the extra strength capsules, and you can see what might be a fit for you on that page. And there is a 30-day risk-free guarantee, so why not try it out? So get 10% off of your purchase at CWHemp.com/Tim.

• 5:49Tim Ferriss?

  And disclaimer, these statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Enjoy. Hello, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. And this episode is a case study episode, the most requested type of episode that I've been somewhat negligent in providing. And today, we have three folks with me, two co-founders, and then Elaine Pofelt. And Elaine, it's nice to have you back on the show. And could you perhaps just describe for a moment, aside from being a very accomplished

• 6:29Tim Ferriss?

  journalist, you are an author, and what book of yours is most relevant to the conversation we're going to be having?

• 6:36Speaker 02

  Well, there's only one book so far. It's The Million Dollar One-Person Business. And what it looks at is how non-employer businesses, those with no employees except for the owners, are scaling to $1 million in revenue and beyond. And it's great to be here, Tim.

• 6:53Tim Ferriss?

  It's a subject that is endlessly fascinating to me and to many of my listeners, one they wish I would explore more. So here we are. And I have two young gentlemen across from me. I don't know them that well, so they may not be gentlemen, but I suspect they are. They're very well behaved so far. We have Benedict Dohmen and Santiago Nestares, both 21. Is that currently the case? Great, 21, so well-aged, silver foxes. They met as computer science students at Dartmouth College. I've heard of that school. Very good, very, very good institution. And they worked very long hours in the library, both of them suffering from back pain.

• 7:36Tim Ferriss?

  This is relevant because they began collaborating on a prototype for a product that ended up being called the Supportaback. And in the process of developing it, gathered a lot of feedback from members of the Dartmouth community, including a local hospital president and professors, as well as students studying engineering and medicine. So we will revisit a lot of what we're discussing in this little intro slash summary. They also experimented with pay-per-click marketing, set up a system for testing and tracking keywords using Excel spreadsheets or spreadsheets. They launched the product first on Amazon in the UK. And Benedict, Ben, who's from Germany, is Födmeisch, transferred to Cambridge University to be close to his family. Santiago is based where we're recording this right now, which is Austin, Texas.

• 8:19Tim Ferriss?

  And when it seemed their first small order was in danger of selling out, this I definitely want to talk about, they arranged financing from their supplier and were off and running. They've since entered the US market on Amazon, and this year they're on track for eight-figure revenue. That means this year 2018, next year on track for nine-figure revenue. And they are in the process of introducing more than 120 consumer products.

• 8:46Tim Ferriss?

  Which range across many, many different categories, including beauty, skincare, pet supplies, baby supplies, food and nutrition. And in a sense, I hope we will have time to get to this, maybe that'll be around two, but I think we can get into it. They are hoping to become an alternative to very large consumer products companies through a strategy of applying their scale up strategies that they have tested successfully themselves to brands they acquire. So that's a mouthful, but I think it gives a nice overview of the landscape. Ben and Santi, welcome to the show.

• 9:22Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 9:23Speaker 05

  Thank you for having us.

• 9:24Tim Ferriss?

  And I thought, Elaine, maybe I'd let you kick this one off.

• 9:27Speaker 02

  Sure, that sounds great. Well, Ben and Santi, one of the things I loved about your story so much was the wonderful friendship that you have. Tell us how that came to be.

• 9:37Speaker 05

  Yes, sure. So we met originally at Dartmouth College. We were studying computer science, kind of nerdy coders up until the library, doing our labs, our classes. We met because we were one of the last few guys in the library. And it so happens that at those hours, you do eventually approach the other people around and see what they're working on, what their struggles are, and also helping each other out. So that's originally how we got close. And yeah, just it really kicked off from there.

• 10:10Speaker 02

  And so how did you find out you both had back pain?

• 10:13Speaker 04

  I'll add on to his answer of you needed my help a bit in the lab, so I was always helping him out, and that's why.

• 10:20Speaker 05

  That is inaccurate.

• 10:21Speaker 04

  So, I mean, inevitably, when you're, when you're over the computer, you know, you don't have the best posture. And, and we started getting a bit of back pain that developed over time, especially when it gets to 3, 4 a.m. So, so we took the really nerdy approach of trying to figure out, why is this happening? To us, back pain seemed like something that only happened to really old people. So, so we started geeking out and reading research. Luckily, we had access to the Dartmouth Hitchcock Hospital, which is renowned in back pain. And started to learn more about it and discovered that posture was the core driver for back pain. And it's something that a lot of Americans are suffering, and people around the world, because our bodies are simply not designed to be sitting down, especially a hundred over a computer all day.

• 11:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, especially given the, the new phrase, sitting is the new smoking, that was kind of the, the guideline there.

• 11:14Tim Ferriss?

  Good, my friend Kelly Starrett would agree. He may have even come up with that phrase. I'm not sure where it originated. How did you guys then go from complaining about a common problem and doing some homework on it and research to considering creating a product or starting a company? Right? Because I'm sure, especially in this day and age, you guys met how long ago? About...

• 11:38Speaker 04

  Three years ago now, two and a half.

• 11:40Tim Ferriss?

  Two and a half years ago. Two and a half, three years ago. That there are lots of folks now hoping to learn to code or hoping to learn to computer science because it has been, become very clear that that is an enormous asset in entrepreneurship. So I think there are more entrepreneurs than ever within CS departments. But at what point did you guys decide that this is something you might consider as a business?

• 12:04Speaker 04

  Well, we initially developed the product mostly for ourselves. We started looking at what products were out there that were already working. Big believer that you don't have to reinvent the wheel, just make it slightly better. So we took products out there, started tweaking with them initially just for our own use. So we were not trying to make it a commercial. It was not in our heads. Eventually, so we came up with our two versions.

• 12:29Tim Ferriss?

  So you were buying off the shelf and then modifying them?

• 12:32Speaker 04

  A combination of many things. So we bought a whole bunch, discarded like 95% of the few that worked. Then we started tweaking them and making them better, adding padding. We're not engineers, but we were trying to figure it out just to increase our... It's called proprioception, is basically our awareness of back pain, of poor posture that was leading to back pain. And made our two versions, one for Ben and one for myself. And with time, we started seeing that our friends, who were also young, which we did not expect to also have a bit of back pain, they were also coming to us and saying, "Hey, you know, I'm pulling on all nighter tonight. Can I use your product?" Or, "Hey, I'm gonna go on a trip to New York. Can I take the product with me?" So that's when we took a step back and said, "Look, there's clearly a need for it. We don't know how we're gonna sell it or commercialize it,

• 13:15Speaker 04

  but let's just, let's just sort of like the burn the ships approach. And then let's just make an order and then we'll figure out how we're gonna sell it once they land." So that's how the first order came about. There's a bit of a story behind it, yeah.

• 13:29Speaker 05

  And I think that's also where, what you just mentioned, the computer science background, especially as a hotbed or breeding ground for a lot of modern day entrepreneurs.

• 13:41Speaker 05

  Now, this is a physical product, right? So it's not a software. You're moving atoms around. Not just zeros and ones. But we see computer science as a tool, a toolkit or a toolset that enables us to enhance our products per se and the physical products. So it's definitely very, we've seen a lot of value in having that as our background. Yeah.

• 14:10Tim Ferriss?

  So Santi, you said there's a bit of a story behind that first order. Well, let's talk about it. I mean, how much money did you, how much money did you guys spend on that first order? And where did it come from? Why did you have the confidence?

• 14:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was under, it was under $2,000. That was our whole budget. We'd put together our savings here and there as college students. And so we started figuring out like, where are things even made? We didn't, we had no idea. So we figured out China was a main player, especially when it comes to physical products, and started learning how Alibaba was a great catalog for a lot of suppliers. Not necessarily the product that we wanted to make because it didn't exist. We were trying to make it differently. But you could see through, by seeing other similar products, who were the key manufacturers out there in China. But obviously with $2,000, you can't get really far when it comes to manufacturing a really big order. But I refused, we refused to take the approach of like, we need an investor and take that as an excuse not to, not to move forward.

• 15:07Speaker 04

  So we, we made up this whole story that we were a massive company out of Boston and we had a big board meeting coming up. And, and, and we had over 100 board members that we wanted to distribute samples to, so that they would decide together if we were going to place the big order. And the big order was going to be like million, million plus dollars. But bear with me, we only have 2,000 right now for this. So they, they, I don't know if they believed it or not, but they, they did, they saw something in it and they, they said, look, let's go with it. I'm sure the margins were, were great for them for that, for those 2,000. But that's how the first 100 units came about. They put it on the ship and send it. And then we said, no, now we have 30 days to figure out, are we going to sell it? So that was the story.

• 15:50Tim Ferriss?

  Now, did the reason you have 30 days because it was net 30 terms for payment? Or did you set that for yourselves as a deadline?

• 15:57Speaker 04

  So. So the first order wasn't, there was no, there was no terms yet, as of yet. It was just 30 days that it took to ship.

• 16:05Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I see, I see, to get it over on the containers or whatever.

• 16:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:08Tim Ferriss?

  Was gonna take 30 days. So what did you guys, what were you hatching at that time? So Ben, maybe take a stab at this. Like you were, I'm sure, starting to think about how you might sell these things. Were there any resources, websites, books, or anything that you guys were using to try to educate yourselves on entrepreneurship, marketing, sales, anything at all?

• 16:32Speaker 05

  Absolutely. And at that point, we, so we had the time window of around 30 days to figure out how would we sell these first quote unquote, "sample" units.

• 16:45Speaker 05

  We delved into, first of all, researching what distribution channels were out there. Looking at retail, and especially online e-commerce distribution channels, such as Amazon, Shopify, Walmart, I mean, there's a whole range. We are big believers in focus, so finding one solution and then sticking with that until it works, even though there might be roadblocks on the way. And so what we did was, we spoke to some people, some, actually some friends of ours, who had sold, resold a product on Amazon, and I think eBay before. They showed us some basic, basic marketing approaches or tactics relevant to Amazon and eBay.

• 17:27Speaker 05

  And we decided to go with Amazon and test that out and see if it works for our products. Because obviously, there's also a certain dependency, some channels work better for other products, et cetera.

• 17:42Speaker 05

  With that as a starting ground, we then had to figure out, okay, let's use this as a base, but how do we actually market our products specifically on Amazon? Now, that entailed multiple parts, just basic marketing principles, essentially. Part of that was figuring out the copywriting, so we read... I personally read around four books on copywriting within those thirty days. I took around a two-day deep dive in copywriting 101 taught by myself. That was reading The Boron Letters by Boron.

• 18:17Tim Ferriss?

  How do you spell that?

• 18:18Speaker 05

  B O R O N.

• 18:21Tim Ferriss?

  The Boron Letters.

• 18:22Speaker 05

  The Boron Letters, very good.

• 18:24Tim Ferriss?

  Any other books you remember?

• 18:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, there was another one called Cashfertizing.

• 18:28Tim Ferriss?

  Cashfertizing?

• 18:29Speaker 05

  Yes, which was very highly recommended. So multiple, and then I synthesized all the tactics or all the learnings from those books into one big notes document, came up essentially with a twenty-step sales letter formula, synthesizing the different advices from the different books and also blogs on top of that.

• 18:53Tim Ferriss?

  Your copy algorithm for product description.

• 18:57Speaker 05

  Essentially, yes, and then tried to apply that to the Amazon sales page.

• 19:02Tim Ferriss?

  Do you recall what some of the steps were at this point?

• 19:05Speaker 05

  That's been a long time ago.

• 19:08Speaker 05

  I can tell you that the key principles which have benefited us most in terms of copywriting and sales have been focusing on the benefits rather than the features. A lot of mistakes we see being made or incorrect approaches people often take is they focus on the features of the products. But what consumers or customers actually care about is what benefits them ultimately. So constantly focusing on that is kind of the eighty-twenty or like the one thing to copywriting as the main guiding principle.

• 19:43Tim Ferriss?

  Well, this makes me think of the iPod, which for those of you who weren't born in the dinosaur ages, the iPod was this device about the size of a brick initially that played songs, no telephone, and it was not the first MP3 player that you could put in your pocket, but it was arguably the first to instead of describing and selling the product in terms of the number of gigabytes it could hold and on technical specs said something, and I might be getting this slightly off, but a thousand songs in your pocket, and making the connection much more clear between the purchase and the benefits that you derive from it.

• 20:28Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so you guys are figuring out copywriting. How are you at this point at all in the beginning separating responsibilities or investigating different things, or are you guys all doing everything at that point? You have 30 days before these air quote "sample" products arrive. How are you thinking of partnering on this? Because you don't want to duplicate each other's effort constantly because that's redundant and would seem to be particularly abhorrent to computer science students. So how are you thinking about working together?

• 21:08Speaker 04

  I wish we would have planned it. It was more like we're all in this same boat together, let's see how we can get there faster. Now I think it's more, we've divided that and complementalized that a little bit better. I did gravitate a bit more towards the keyword science behind it and Ben was more around the copywriting and sales science behind it. We took the same approach at everything, is how can we make a formula for it to work every time?

• 21:36Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 21:37Speaker 04

  So I took a bit more of the paper click approach to it. So started understanding how did keyword based algorithms work on platforms like Amazon and why were certain products displayed?

• 21:50Tim Ferriss?

  How did you figure that out? Or if someone came to you and said, "I want to figure that out," what would your advice be?

• 21:57Speaker 04

  The first thing I would say is go understand the basics. Because it actually takes a while. It took a while for me to understand what a keyword based algorithm, like what a keyword based search is and how long tail keywords are different than short tail keywords and different types of matches. So I looked at a course by Brian Johnson. It's really, it starts from the basics and it's a deep dive into what PBC is, specifically on Amazon. And then once you understand that, what we realized is a lot of those people were, they really had no statistical backing to a lot of the methods that they were using to optimize. They were good rule of thumbs, but they were not necessarily the best. So we, to get an edge on that.

• 22:37Speaker 04

  That market and to get an edge on on the keywords that we're bidding and to understand what truly are the keywords that we want to go after that are most likely to convert to our product, we started developing an algorithm or a simple formula as to what was the right bid for that specific keyword. And that was all based on when is it statistically significant to discard a keyword, whether it's to keep bidding or to adjust that bid.

• 23:00Speaker 02

  Am I correct, you did this all on Excel spreadsheets at the time?

• 23:03Speaker 04

  Yes. So a lot of people think when they hear formulas, algorithms, you can even name it AI because nowadays they name a lot of things AI.

• 23:11Tim Ferriss?

  Don't forget deep learning.

• 23:13Speaker 04

  Ultimately, it's just a simple formula. You can run it on Excel sheets. Deep learning.

• 23:19Speaker 05

  It was very deep.

• 23:21Speaker 04

  It was all around on Excel sheets and that's when we said, look, and I think we got a big edge and that helped us kickstart or give that initial momentum to those hundred units that we had, that then we started to show up organically on the.

• 23:33Tim Ferriss?

  So these hundred units arrive, like just describe the day. So you guys are doing all this homework.

• 23:43Tim Ferriss?

  Describe the day when this stuff lands.

• 23:46Speaker 04

  We didn't even see it. So it went straight from China to our fulfillment network. We leveraged Amazon fulfillment FBA. As a fulfillment partner, they're the most efficient we found and yet to this day, we still use them.

• 24:01Speaker 04

  We never saw the products, we did get some samples to do some quality control, but we really didn't see the whole shipment. So it was very abstract to us. You think about a hundred units and you actually don't even know how it looks and still.

• 24:13Tim Ferriss?

  Probably better for you guys in some ways.

• 24:15Speaker 04

  It was probably better.

• 24:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 24:17Speaker 04

  So they arrived and I remember I was, I was actually, I was actually just sitting down at home. I was, I was back back with my family and I think Ben was also back in Germany with his family.

• 24:29Speaker 04

  And we, I just looked up on the phone from an hour to the next and we saw we'd sold the first day a quarter of our inventory. So that caught us off guard and that's when we, we said, okay, we're onto something. We've done something right and let's figure out what is it that we did right? So we can do it over and over.

• 24:45Speaker 02

  Now, were you worried that you might just sell out completely and not be able to fill the orders?

• 24:49Speaker 04

  We knew, we knew, we knew we were going to sell out by that point.

• 24:54Speaker 05

  But the worry was nothing compared to the excitement or overwhelm from actually having thought to have found a formula for some sort of success in that marketplace.

• 25:05Tim Ferriss?

  What did you do right when you look back? And what I'm also trying to, just so you guys have an idea of what I'm going to try to do in this interview, there are certain things that people will have trouble replicating if they don't have certain types of training. Not replicating isn't the right word, learning from, right? And then there are other principles and so on that they can borrow and apply and learn from that you guys have used. So I'll try to separate those two at different points, just because not everyone coming in is going to have the technical capabilities that you guys have, or the statistical familiarity, say. But what, looking back, like what did you guys do right? So you sold, is it a quarter of your inventory? Like from one hour to the next, you're like, on one hand, you're like, high five, awesome,

• 25:50Tim Ferriss?

  and then on the other hand, you're like, oh shit, okay, this is, this is turning out differently than maybe we would have expected. Good news. But what, what did you do right? What did you guys do right?

• 26:01Speaker 04

  So I think, I think what we did right, after, after reflecting, we still reflect on it, on it today. Every, every time we do a big move, we go back and think, what did we do right and wrong, and constantly try to learn from our experience. I think what we did right then was take computer science approach at developing the product. It all starts in the product. You can have amazing copy and you need to have amazing copy, you can have amazing keyword strategy and you need to have it, but it all boils down to the product. Because if you have a good product, it'll convert best and you really can outbid any competitor in any keyword or any search ranking.

• 26:35Tim Ferriss?

  Also relates to returns, customer service, issues, all of that.

• 26:40Speaker 04

  All of that, it'll take care of itself if you start off with having something good to offer. But obviously, we were not back pain experts. We still aren't. And we're not experts in, in the pet industry, we're not experts in the beauty industry. What we did really well was take the customer as the expert. Don't take anyone else or anything else as an expert, but take the customer. And how can we apply? But we've learned like the lean startup methodology, the agile method that a lot of software companies use.

• 27:09Tim Ferriss?

  Lean startup methodology, Eric Ries.

• 27:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yes. That's cool.

• 27:13Speaker 05

  Very influential.

• 27:13Speaker 04

  Really, really important book for us.

• 27:15Tim Ferriss?

  Eric's a good guy.

• 27:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. So taking those, that approach that was so common in the software to the product development is, our only goal at that point was, let's hear what's working out there, let's hear what isn't, let's put those two things together. Initially was for us, eventually for the market. And then it was, how can we get those products on the ship as quickly as we can so that we can start selling? Because the day we start selling is the day we start learning.

• 27:38Tim Ferriss?

  Day you start getting feedback. And this is sometimes for people who are not familiar, referred to as the MVP.

• 27:44Speaker 04

  Yes, exactly.

• 27:45Tim Ferriss?

  I think it's minimal or minimally viable product. So how do you ship in, in the context of lean startup, very often software, which is very easy to iterate. Physical product's a little more challenging, but how can you get something out into the real world with real people who are not your friends trying to tell you what you want to hear? So you can get feedback that can inform better decisions.

• 28:06Speaker 05

  Yes. And a very important concept we learned, most relevant to that is, there's a clear distinction between feedback and failure. So usually, what a lot of people react, say they ship out a product, be it a software or a physical product, whatever, into the market, and they get zero sales, or they get very disappointed with very, very few sales. A lot of people see that as failure and decide to give up. If you take the MVP approach, you see that as feedback. So with that feedback in hand, you can then cost correct and actually identify the, the triggers or the variables that caused the, the low sales, or that caused your miss of expectations, and then work on those and tweak them.

• 28:50Speaker 05

  And then iterate again and ship out the next version or the next product and see how that compares to the previous version. So I think that that's for us, that was very crucial to understand the distinction between feedback and failure. Failure is when you give up. Feedback is positive because it allows you to iterate to get better.

• 29:10Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and just having that mindset creates a lens through which you look at things very differently and it affects the questions that you ask, right? So before we started recording, we were chatting about podcasting a little bit. And the, I want to say it was like the first or second question you guys honed in on is like, how do you learn what's working or not in the world of podcasting? Which turns out to be somewhat challenging from a technical perspective, given the lack of really deep and specific analytics. But that was one of your very first questions. And it's, if you do not have that feedback oriented mindset, it's very easy, whether something works or fails or somewhere in between,

• 29:53Tim Ferriss?

  to just decide what you're going to do next without looking at what happened, right? But like really spending time on the post-game analysis and figuring out like, all right, is this one-off? Is it a problem that, can we replicate the problem, right? Do we think it's because the website's taking too long to load? I mean, obviously it's slightly different with Amazon. But do we think it's because the price is too high? Is there a way, not necessarily on Amazon, where we can offer, say, an exit pop-up that gives people a discount to test that hypothesis? Then your approach becomes very, very different. Okay, so you guys are launching your MVP.

• 30:32Tim Ferriss?

  You've taken a lean startup slash agile development approach to product development. You've now figured out, what was the name of that book? Cash.

• 30:46Speaker 05

  Cash for Tizing.

• 30:50Tim Ferriss?

  God, so good.

• 30:54Tim Ferriss?

  So terrible, so bad it's good. Cash for Tizing. And what are you using to track your sales at this point? Is there an Amazon dashboard that you use to track that? Or what are you watching?

• 31:08Speaker 05

  Yes, we used, so Amazon has internal dashboards just in the Seller Central, which is the approach we took. Where you can see basic reporting on like sessions, conversion rates, the overall sales. As we grew, we then also expanded into third-party softwares though, that give more, a more clear picture, more organized, more structured. Because I, especially in the beginnings...

• 31:38Speaker 05

  Amazon's internal reports and then their structure can be very confusing. And you can for pretty cheap or you get a third party. Software that shows you all the key metrics you actually care about in a very clear and structured format.

• 31:55Tim Ferriss?

  What are some of those options?

• 31:57Speaker 05

  So we use one called Sellex.

• 32:00Tim Ferriss?

  Sellex.

• 32:01Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 32:01Tim Ferriss?

  S E L L E X?

• 32:03Speaker 05

  S E L L I C S.

• 32:05Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, alright.

• 32:07Speaker 02

  What does that mean? Is that just a brand name or?

• 32:09Speaker 05

  That's their brand name.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  Brand name, okay.

• 32:11Speaker 04

  We also use Cashcow Pro at one point.

• 32:13Tim Ferriss?

  Say again?

• 32:14Speaker 04

  Cashcow Pro.

• 32:15Tim Ferriss?

  Cashcow Pro.

• 32:16Speaker 04

  Like Cashcow Business, Cashcow.

• 32:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 32:18Speaker 04

  And then Cashcow Pro. They're really, really affordable. And it know your metrics is really, knowing your metrics is really important, so.

• 32:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, now, now, speaking as someone who's not sold anything on Amazon and looked at the UI. Or the options for testing, let's just say split testing. Is it, this is more for my personal curiosity, I'm sure there's somebody out there wondering the same thing. On Amazon, can you test different price points? Like automatically serve like twenty nine ninety nine to thirty percent of the audience and nineteen ninety nine to thirty, another thirty percent of the audience and so on and so forth?

• 32:57Speaker 05

  It's tricky. Overall, from a high level, there are many different variables, like there might be a, a deal of the day running or a lightning deal or, or there's so many variables, it's very hard to control for say price or for the images. There are certain tools out there who have tried to give in some type of testing. There's one called Splitly. That's S P.

• 33:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 33:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, Splitly. What they do is they subsequently test, say, image one against image two or price point one against price point two. You can't do it simultaneously, so you can't do normal A B testing. But it's a close, a close approximation.

• 33:40Speaker 05

  And even within that. The price range, very tactically on Amazon, you can't jump the price from, say, $19.99 to $9.99, or especially the inverse. So you can't just drastically raise the price because Amazon will then disallow you to own the buy box, which is a crucial part to your conversion rate. So there are certain intricacies, but some approximations as to get some rough idea and some rough testing.

• 34:13Tim Ferriss?

  Why did you guys decide on Amazon? Versus was it primarily to simplify the fulfilled-by-Amazon component of the entire process, or were there other reasons? I mean, Amazon is, of course, a behemoth outside of, well, outside of China, certainly in the United States, highly dominant. But were there other reasons you guys chose Amazon as your primary platform?

• 34:42Speaker 04

  So what we discovered was, again, it's really easy for new-time entrepreneurs to get caught up in reasons or complicating things and making it as hard as possible to get to the ultimate goal, which is get to our customer. We were trying to simplify everything down to how can we get this product in front of the right customer as quickly as we can. And Amazon offered the fulfillment side, which pretty much removed all of the operation intricacies for us, and it also enabled us to go to the whole European market as well, with a flip of a switch, so to say. And then additionally, it also simplified all the marketing. There's already active people going into Amazon, trying to find solutions for their problem. People that are problem-aware, people that are product-aware.

• 35:26Speaker 04

  There's people going out there saying, "I need a cushion for my back," or "I need a pillow to sleep better because I have back pain." And they're searching for that.

• 35:33Tim Ferriss?

  And they're looking to buy as opposed to find information.

• 35:35Speaker 04

  They have really high buying intent. So instead of... Figuring out how do we create awareness? How do we create product awareness? And eventually get those down the funnel, which is a game or a science in and of itself. We are like, all we have to figure out is how do we convince those that are already going into Amazon that, look, we are the best solution for them. And we truly believe in our products. We think they're better than the ones out there. So all we have to do is demonstrate that. So that allowed us to do it really, really easily. And Amazon additionally is growing. Online is growing over retail. So it made the most sense to us. And still today, we rely on Amazon as one of our main partners.

• 36:14Tim Ferriss?

  How do you, coming back to the MVP and customer feedback, get actionable feedback? So part of the reason I use Amazon as much as I do is to very deliberately avoid interaction with many merchants. Right? I do not want to get email. I do not want to get questionnaires. I do not want to have any more interaction than absolutely necessary. So how do you guys get feedback on products?

• 36:46Speaker 05

  We aggregate a whole bunch of data. And that data comes from within Amazon, but also off Amazon. Within Amazon, some of the main sections we look at are reviews, feedbacks, competitors' reviews, competitors' feedbacks, products in the same industry or category, their reviews, their feedbacks. So feedback and reviews from many different sources.

• 37:12Tim Ferriss?

  I suppose questions too, because you have the questions and answers. So you can see what's confusing people.

• 37:16Speaker 05

  That's another way. And then we scrape all of that. We have bots that aggregate that and put them into a Google sheet, essentially. Analyze it by keyword frequency or some search query frequency. And then we try to see some statistical trends as to, all right, this complaint, say with a memory foam, this complaint has come up X many times over potentially that many purchases. It's roughly statistically significant. This is something we should add to our list to then implement in on our product development and on the sourcing and manufacturing side. And then off Amazon as well.

• 37:57Speaker 05

  Looking at social media engagement, social media postings, et cetera. Aggregating all of that and then combining that and synthesizing with the on Amazon data to come up with a list of features we can then implement on the sourcing side. And the way that works is, so we have this list of features for every product that we would like to implement, which we, where we see from the real customers that they crave or in some way desire that. Because it's a different story if people say, okay, this pillow, if you have two people saying this is, it's too firm for me and two other people saying it's too soft. That is in no way statistically significant.

• 38:40Speaker 05

  So we have this list of suggestions and then we speak with our manufacturers in China, depending on where the products are sourced, some are sourced in the EU, some in the US, all over. We speak with them to evaluate how the feasibility of this feature of incorporating that. The costs of it, how fast can they turn it around? Will it affect the lead times as to how fast they're going to even produce then, all the subsequent batches? And a whole bunch of smaller, smaller decisions. If we decide to go ahead and it makes sense from a cost benefit perspective, we implement that into the next cycle.

• 39:21Speaker 05

  So the next order, we already have version N plus one. If we decide at this point, it doesn't make sense to implement that, then we keep it on our, on our hold list and we revisit in say three, six, nine orders down the line. We revisit, okay, does it make sense now? Does it complement any of the other features we've just incorporated in the past orders, et cetera?

• 39:45Tim Ferriss?

  Are the, and I don't know, I don't know if this is too much secret sauce discussion, but I'll let you decide. Is, are the, when you say bots, right? This is a word that gets thrown a lot into media that people have seen and it's, I think, generally poorly understood, right? The, the term scraping and bots and so on. Are you guys using off, have you used off the shelf programs or services for that? Are these things that you guys have coded yourselves? How does, what does that look like?

• 40:17Speaker 05

  To answer your question, we've, it's a great question, by the way. We've, we have computer science backgrounds, so we coded it ourselves in like Python and some, some libraries that are out there. Anyone can use.

• 40:32Speaker 05

  It's just a way to automate it, to automate the process. Anyone can do this. It's just, it will then require more manual work, which would otherwise be done by, by, by a script. So anyone can go into fifty listings of competitor, competitors' products, look at their reviews, put them into an Excel sheet, and then look over and, and count the number of words or the number of queries, and then map them out essentially. These are the queries, we had forty-five of them over all these reviews, et cetera.

• 41:10Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, or just display as many as possible, then Ctrl F and search for whichever term, right? It'll show you right at the top of the browser how many occurrences.

• 41:17Speaker 05

  That's what we did the first time.

• 41:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 41:19Speaker 05

  Super simple.

• 41:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 41:21Speaker 02

  Have you found that the information you gathered in the European market was directly relevant to the US market? Are there, are there differences in terms of the types of feedback that comes in?

• 41:34Tim Ferriss?

  Did you launch initially in Europe?

• 41:36Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 41:37Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 41:38Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, yeah, that's great. That's a great question. So walk us through that.

• 41:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, so there is certain differences between consumers in Europe and the US. Based on what we've seen, obviously, our dataset is very limited, based on, on our, on our own products, as well as our own personal experience. To give an example, German consumers, I'm, I'm German myself, tend to focus more heavily on technical, technical aspects of the product.

• 42:07Tim Ferriss?

  Shocker.

• 42:12Speaker 05

  And the, the American direct response, very, to, to Germans, it seems very salesy and very off-putting.

• 42:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 42:23Speaker 04

  And similarly, across, even within Europe, you have the Germans, you have the French, Spanish, Italian.

• 42:29Tim Ferriss?

  Very different.

• 42:30Speaker 04

  The British, they all have very different consumer behaviors, in a sense. And so you have to cater, say, the copy and adjust it slightly to each.

• 42:42Speaker 02

  What about the keywords, you change those also?

• 42:46Speaker 04

  Well, the keywords are independent of that, because the keyword pillow, for instance, it's the same.

• 42:55Speaker 02

  They're generics.

• 42:56Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 42:57Tim Ferriss?

  Then the product copy you use to convert them is different.

• 43:00Speaker 04

  There you go.

• 43:01Tim Ferriss?

  Why did you choose to launch outside of the US first? In the US would be more uniform, right? In the sense where it's like, okay, yes, people in New York are different from people in Louisiana, or different from people in Nebraska, kind of, but culturally, they're probably going to be closer or more similar than Italians versus Germans, right? I would think.

• 43:21Speaker 04

  So back then, it would have probably made more sense to launch in the US. Ben had German background, we believed that we would have an edge, at least with the German marketplace. And I probably must have been at some econ class and taken some macro parallels to it that nowadays I just laugh at myself for it, because it doesn't really make a difference. But that, it was mostly serendipity, we decided to go Europe. We've discovered some advantages in terms of they're stricter in terms of regulation, so it forced us to put our products through regulatory processes that then are really easy to go through once we bring them into the US. The market is considerably smaller, it's about three times as small in terms of Amazon

• 44:06Speaker 04

  sizes, so it allowed us also to experiment and to get that feedback on a smaller sort of sandbox. And then, once those products got to the point where they were very successful and most people were really happy with them, we flipped them over to the US.

• 44:20Tim Ferriss?

  That is a very common practice for a lot of big companies, in the sense that, I believe Nike is one of them that does a good amount of their testing in New Zealand. They want to test on a native English-speaking market, but if it is a catastrophic flop, they don't want it to be in Times Square or necessarily in the larger playground or sandbox of the US, let's say. So they'll do a good amount of their research in initial. Testing iteration in a place like New Zealand. So let's backtrack for a second. Look at the phone. OMG, we've sold a quarter of our inventory. So I'm coming back to what I said I would definitely come back to.

• 45:04Tim Ferriss?

  And here's the line. When it seemed their first small order was in danger of selling out quickly, I would say that the story qualifies. They arranged financing from their supplier and were off and running. Walk us through that. Arranged financing from their supplier. This is really important, I think, because, and I don't even know the story, but most people think, and this is particularly true, I think, in startup land, where people hear the word startup, and if, I think particularly for a lot of people who are 20, 22-year-old, however old, CS students, like, ooh, go out, venture capital, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, raise a bunch of money.

• 45:48Tim Ferriss?

  And they have that particular narrative when they think of financing. This is something that is not that uncommon, but it's something very few people know about. So can you walk us through this?

• 46:00Speaker 04

  Yeah. So from the get-go, Ben and I, we went in with the mentality of removing obstacles rather than coming up with obstacles.

• 46:11Tim Ferriss?

  What do you mean by that?

• 46:13Speaker 04

  So this is a great example, is, do you need an investor to put your second order? Otherwise, you'll run out of stock. That is, that is an obstacle that you might actually be putting there by yourself. So we had this problem, which was, we need to make a way bigger order now. We did have the profits from the initial order. We had a clear proof of concept. And we had heard this narrative where you need investors to scale, but we said, there must be a better way out there. There must be a quicker way out there. So who do we went to? Our biggest partner so far, our company that would, thought we were a massive company out of Boston and said, look, we're going to place this bigger order, but as we are a big company, we expect good terms. So we convinced them to give us the good payment terms.

• 46:56Tim Ferriss?

  And for those people who are wondering, what are good payment terms in this? Situation. What did you, what did you ask? Did you first, did you ask for specific terms? Or did you say, what are the best terms you can offer? What was the, what was the approach?

• 47:09Speaker 04

  We, we came in really demanding because we're a big company out of Boston.

• 47:14Speaker 04

  So we said, look, um, we're, we're going to be placing a bigger order. Again, we, we were pursuing cash flow. We're pursuing profit. We were not pursuing an investor and have a tank and spend that money and then figure out what we're going to do. So at all points, we were like, we, we knew that we needed to be profitable. One, the biggest issue with physical products companies is today you have to put the order that you're going to sell in three months. So if your sales are up today, um, and you expect them to be even bigger. And this problem we still encounter on a day to day basis, we're going to have to put in more capital today to hopefully bake up for the sales tomorrow. So, so we said, okay, they can be our biggest partner, came up to them and said, um, big companies like Walmart expects 60 day credit terms, a hundred net. And they were like, no, that's not happening.

• 47:57Tim Ferriss?

  Now, explain for people what that means. Sixty day credit and then.

• 48:01Speaker 04

  They produce the whole thing. They send you the whole batch and then 60 days after you get it, you pay for it.

• 48:05Tim Ferriss?

  And then.

• 48:06Speaker 04

  Then obviously they said, no, we went back and forth.

• 48:08Tim Ferriss?

  What was the second part of the terms? So you said.

• 48:10Speaker 04

  A hundred percent, so.

• 48:11Tim Ferriss?

  Something, something net.

• 48:13Speaker 04

  Sixty day, a hundred percent net.

• 48:14Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, a hundred percent. Sorry, I missed for you. I got it. Yeah.

• 48:17Speaker 04

  So we basically don't, don't put any, any penny upfront and they send the whole thing and we pay them 60 days after it arrives. Obviously that didn't work out very well, but it, but, um, the ultimate thing that we understood, both of us is that our scaling, obviously after, after that point, they started understanding we're, we're not that big company. We're a small company, but we've been really successful with that initial order. And things came down to, down to earth, but they understood that we were a key player in their scale and their scalability. They were going to grow with us as the same way they're a big player in our scalability. So when you understand that, um, you're both trying to help each other. And usually the objections they have to giving you credit terms is not because they don't want you. It's because they have risk objections. They also might be cash strapped.

• 48:59Speaker 04

  So you want to sit down with them and have that honest conversation and say, look, what guarantees going to give you over this inventory? Or what things can I do to ease your cash flow? How can I guarantee that I'm going to pay this back in 30 days? I think we managed to get somewhere near fifty fifty or or maybe it was it was seventy. It was seventy needed to be paid by the time I left and the other thirty needed to be paid sixty days after. And since then, every time we go back to the table and we always ask for better terms as we continue to scale. Every time you have a bigger order, that's a good opportunity to say, look, can we get better payment terms to do this bigger order?

• 49:30Tim Ferriss?

  I want to I want to highlight something, which is you didn't assume, well, maybe you did. But you didn't stop at the no, you investigated the fears behind the no. This is really important because there may be other ways to address fears that do not include paying for everything upfront. There may be other ways that you can address it, right? And that can range from not necessarily in this case, but getting a cosigner for a particular deal. So that worst case scenario, they have someone to hold financially accountable who is not you, right? Or ABCD, right? Committing to the next four orders in some type of contractual way.

• 50:14Tim Ferriss?

  So that they they mitigate the risk of getting burned on one particular deal, right? There are many different ways, or maybe they say no because they don't know who you are. Can you provide them with references of some type who will allow them to sell their supervisor on approving this? Because they've only been in the job for thirty days and they're not comfortable yet taking the risk to approve that particular one off deal. There's a there's a great book I would recommend to folks called Getting Past No, which I think is the more practical cousin of Getting To Yes. It's actually and it's actually written, I think it's authored by one of the co authors of Getting To Yes. Did you guys just figure out negotiating on the fly or did you read anything related to that?

• 50:57Speaker 05

  It was mostly on the fly, trying to put ourselves in the other party's shoes and then making our decision based on that. So it's, I guess, principles from game theory, which we took a class on at school.

• 51:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that helps a lot. All right. So, and Elaine, feel free to jump in at any time since you know you're certainly more familiar with their story than I am. But you you are then able to achieve what you set out to achieve in a sense, which is to get favorable enough terms that you can get more inventory. Yeah, all right. What happens then? So you have more product on the way. What were some of the best decisions that you guys made from that point on? Like, what were some of the critical decisions, right? Because a lot of people try to sell products online, whether they're physical or digital. And most of them go into it unprepared. Most of them do not learn from their mistakes.

• 51:57Tim Ferriss?

  Many of them do not apply any type of rigor to their analytics or minding of very basic things. And that's, keep in mind, coming from me, and I am about as innumerate as you can possibly be. I mean, I chose my university based on a lack of math requirements. So I'm not, I'm not exactly a quant. But very basic, like, simple arithmetic and not fooling yourself that like two customer reviews that say X is cool means that definitively across the board, everyone thinks X is cool. That's all you need. Right? Really basic stuff. That's all you need. Super basic. So, but you guys have done very well. You have a very steep trajectory on sales. You're launching new products. So you, at this point, you have a support back, right?

• 52:42Tim Ferriss?

  And you have more units coming in. What were some of the smartest decisions that you guys made, or worst decisions? They're both, both are important, in sort of the months that followed?

• 52:53Speaker 05

  One of the key decisions, and then San Diego can add to that, I'll dive into the first one, was to focus. And we're big believers in the Pareto principle, in honing in on what's working and keeping on that and getting better at that and not getting distracted, removing distractions.

• 53:12Speaker 02

  And Ben, you, you had mentioned to me you're fans of the Four Hour Work Week. Was that what made you think along those lines?

• 53:21Speaker 05

  Absolutely. I mean, Tim, you mentioned it in the Four Hour Work Week. Focus and removing distractions has definitely been one of the key decisions, even if it was an unknown decision, so unseen, so to say, because you neglect something you don't see, the thing you neglected.

• 53:43Speaker 05

  So what that meant in this particular case was we had many options to expand into different channels, say walmart.com, jet.com, even ebay, where we could figure it out. But one of the key decisions we did was to focus in and hone in on Amazon in growing both our expertise as well as our sales on that platform. And unknowingly, one of the effects that had is the way Amazon works from a very high level is the more sales you have, the more sales you have. So it's a snowball or a cumulative advantage attribution, however you want to call it, in that Amazon ultimately cares about transactions on their site.

• 54:27Speaker 05

  So the more transactions you have on their site, the more they like you. And what the more they like you means is they rank you higher, they give you access to advertisement, et cetera, to a whole bunch of other benefits based off of that.

• 54:41Speaker 02

  So you classified those other sites then as distractions, it sounds like?

• 54:46Speaker 05

  Yes. And so Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger are big ails of ours. And Warren Buffett mentions, one of his concepts in distractions and focus is there are 20 things you want to do right now, we're really burning to do, say for us that was expanding to other channels like Walmart. But you have to scrap them all and focus on the one thing that ultimately will push you forward. And real distractions are things you're dying to do. So we applied that in our case and kept on focusing on Amazon. I think that was crucial.

• 55:27Speaker 02

  And does one of you rein the other in? I mean, is one of you better at narrowing the focus? Or do you both do that for each other?

• 55:36Speaker 05

  It's both for each other. And I think there's a lot of value in a partnership in particularly that point, because one can easily lose track and get distracted oneself. But having kind of a second pair of eyes is definitely where two plus two is way greater than four in that sense.

• 55:54Tim Ferriss?

  You mentioned, you guys have mentioned, before we started recording and also now, Warren Buffett and Munger.

• 56:03Tim Ferriss?

  Why are, aside from, yes, they're very successful investors. That's, that's great. And they're certainly among the best the world has ever seen. But beyond that, or maybe in addition to that, like, why are these two so interesting to you guys? And when you say we idolize them, that's great, but does that mean you study them? And if you study them, how do you study them?

• 56:30Speaker 04

  That's a good question. We, I think what we admire the most out of them is the ability to, or their constant pursuit of truth and rationality. Is how do we, how do we really understand the reality and keep emotion and irrationality out of it as much as possible? Even admit there's no such thing as perfection in that. But they're always striving to do that. So, the most, the most studying we do is both on what they have to say. I think our favorite, one of my favorite pieces of Charlie Munger's speech in Harvard, I think in 19, you can look it up on YouTube, Charlie Munger Harvard.

• 57:12Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, just look up Charlie Munger commencement. I think it's also in Poor Charlie's Almanac.

• 57:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:19Tim Ferriss?

  In the newer editions.

• 57:20Speaker 04

  What they have to say, pretty much any insight into their lives. I know they're usually pretty private, but there's, there's plenty of content out there for free that you can, you can, you can see. But it's that pursuit of, of being rational and staying down to earth and keeping emotions out of things that helped, has helped us both in, in our personal lives and our relationship as co-founders, as in our ability to dissect the business and focus on the few things that actually move the needle.

• 57:49Tim Ferriss?

  Ben, what about you? And as it relates to that dynamic duo, are there any resources that you would recommend?

• 57:57Speaker 05

  Poor Charlie's Almanac is definitely there. I think there's another book, From Darwin to Munger.

• 58:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yep, Peter Bevillen.

• 58:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 58:07Tim Ferriss?

  Seeking Wisdom, I think is the title.

• 58:09Speaker 05

  Seeking Wisdom.

• 58:10Tim Ferriss?

  And then From Darwin to Munger or Munger to Darwin is also a really good collection.

• 58:13Speaker 05

  And then the speeches on YouTube. I think Munger has one at USC.

• 58:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 58:21Speaker 05

  It's a commencement speech, which is very valuable.

• 58:23Tim Ferriss?

  And I also would recommend to folks who may not explicitly have an interest in

• 58:30Tim Ferriss?

  What you think of as investing, which is picking stocks, let's just say, to read the annual letters to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders by Buffett. There are collections of these letters and it will help you to hone, or at the very least, test your own thinking so that you become clear or more clear about how you are reaching your conclusions, which translates to better investment of time, energy, attention, capital, which certainly transfers to just about everything. All right, so getting back to the main story, the storyline that we've been, we've been traveling along here.

• 59:13Tim Ferriss?

  When did you begin to expand outside of your first product? And how did you make, how did you make that decision?

• 59:20Speaker 04

  So back to when I, what I mentioned that we took a time, a pause to understand what had worked. We understood again, it was our approach at product development. How we took our CS background to developing the best back pain product and.

• 59:36Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I'm going to interrupt you because I'm being a jerk, but also because I want to, we are gonna, we're definitely gonna get to the expansion of product line. But I realized maybe we skipped a chapter really early, which was before you ordered your product and you were getting feedback from people at Dartmouth. What did that look like? Because this is really hands-on, it's something people can do with communities around them. How did you elicit feedback in the very early days? Because you guys are systems thinkers, right? So you're not gonna be like, hey, do you like it? And they're like, yeah, I like it. You're like, okay, great, let's go buy a container full of product. No, you're not gonna do that. So what did you do?

• 1:00:13Speaker 04

  Look, bad, no, limited feedback is better than no feedback. We took it with a big grain of salt. We went through, we lined up a whole bunch of people and say, look, withdraw yourself from the product as much as you can and say, what do you think of this? Use it for a few hours. We did a couple of different tests. One of us like use it for a few hours and, and right beforehand, we would ask them, how much pain are you in right now? And then how much pain are you in after? How statistically significant was that or how valid is? Poly isn't very valid, but then we reached out to the CEO of the Dartmouth Hitchcock. He was nice enough, he, all his background is on back pain. He was nice enough to meet with us and, and give us his opinion on, on his best practices. But again, that was, that was not the pillar or the core of how the product was developed.

• 1:00:58Speaker 04

  Cause ultimately our biggest effort, expert is the customer and their behavior, the consumer behavior. So we took that with a bit of a grain of salt, took it as a guiding reference, but it was how can we get to the market as quickly as we can? And that's when the true learning started.

• 1:01:12Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm. What were things that you modified in the product? I don't think we touched upon this yet, like so support back, right? I mean, you, that was like your undergrad and master's degrees. Setting you up for the later products, I would assume in a lot of respects, right? So what were some of the early changes that you made to the product and that were important in retrospect and why?

• 1:01:34Speaker 04

  Yeah. So we actually worked on, on three products initially. They, they launched in a bit of a, a different timing, but the three were the brace, the, the pillow and the lumbar support. All of those were supporting back products. I'll give you the example of the, of the pillow, cause it's the most substantial or, or clear changes that we did. So we started looking at, again, approach, what, what do other pills are doing? We knew that the pillow, let me backtrack. So there's three core points in your life where you're, where you have back pain, where you're not moving. And when you're in poor posture, it's when you're sleeping, usually when you're commuting, if you're commuting by car, like the majority of the people in the U S. And when you're sitting at work.

• 1:02:15Speaker 04

  So our customers kept coming back to us for those kind of three products. So what we, we set out, we set off to do a pillow. And we understood, started looking at different types of pillows, understood that memory foam was the best material. Again, looking at the trends, what, what material has gotten the best feedback in terms of solving the issue, which is back pain? That was by far memory foam. And there were different densities of it. So that's when Ben came in and he was like, well, but some people say too hard, too soft. What is the, how can we pinpoint into the optimal, optimal density? So we pinpointed to the optimal density. And then, and then started, once it started, suddenly we started getting feedback from the customers saying, clear, clear trend saying.

• 1:02:57Speaker 04

  Look, the memory foam is great, but it retains a lot of heat. And it's making our faces really itchy. Within two to three days, we're not really using the product. I'm throwing it to the side and using my normal pillow. So we were saying, how can we make this cooler or solve this issue?

• 1:03:13Tim Ferriss?

  Literally cooler.

• 1:03:15Speaker 04

  Literally cooler. So we started looking at other industries and how had memory foam products before. Again, I'm trying to reinvent the wheel, just trying to solve the issue the simplest way possible. Found that we could add a little thin layer of cool gel on top. And then even pinpointed down to what was the width of that layer? How big would you want it to make it? And added that specific layer to the product, made that change. And as soon as that product hit the market, it became the best selling pillow in all of the UK marketplace. It actually became the best selling pillow in all of home and kitchen as a category for a few days.

• 1:03:54Speaker 02

  Sade, can I just stop you for a second? How did you know about the materials? This seems like it would be totally alien to most of us.

• 1:04:01Speaker 04

  We didn't. So that was what we did right.

• 1:04:05Speaker 04

  Our own ignorance pushed us to take the right approach and is taking the customer as the ultimate desire. So we said, look, we don't know what a memory foam is. So let's buy all the memory foam pillows. And let's see which ones have the best feedback on the specific memory foam as the enabler to solve the problem.

• 1:04:24Speaker 02

  So you looked at their comments on Amazon about those pillows?

• 1:04:28Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 1:04:28Speaker 02

  And then you extrapolated?

• 1:04:29Speaker 04

  And off Amazon, again, same approach. It was just iterating on the same thing that we'd done right. And then we literally took a sample out of the memory foam, sent it to our supplier and said, can you make it out of this memory foam? They examined it, they said, this is the type of density, this is the color, this is exactly how we're going to do it.

• 1:04:46Speaker 04

  It was very systematic. For us, if we couldn't do it again with any product, we wouldn't even do it. Even if we thought that we could input our own opinions into it and make it different. We said, that is not iterable, let's not do it that way.

• 1:04:59Tim Ferriss?

  Question on manufacturer, I don't think I asked. So there are a million and one manufacturers out there. And for every one good story I hear, I hear 20 awful stories. How did you end up? And you don't have to mention the specific manufacturer, but how did you pick them? And did you have to? Did you make mistakes in the beginning and have to replace your manufacturer? How did you go about vetting and selecting who you ended up selecting?

• 1:05:26Speaker 05

  So overall, the approach we took was let's put in the upfront work in the vetting because that will make our lives down the line way easier.

• 1:05:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:38Speaker 05

  Instead of having to deal with a lot of issues, quality insurance, et cetera.

• 1:05:44Speaker 05

  So Santiago already mentioned, we initially reached out via Alibaba to around, again, very numeric driven approach to finding a supplier, reached out to, I think, around thirty or forty different suppliers, all within the categories of the products through Alibaba. I think we also looked at sixteen eighty-eight dot com, which is another comparable site.

• 1:06:10Speaker 05

  And within Alibaba, you also have certain metrics. There's a gold star rating, there's metrics on how long they've been on the platform for, and even Alibaba, I guess, given to their own history, has instituted quality checks from within of their own people or employees, going to the factories, taking photos, verifying all the certifications are accurate, et cetera. So that was a good, a good ground basis to work off.

• 1:06:43Speaker 05

  A lot of the vetting came from speaking with the manufacturers themselves in how professional

• 1:06:51Speaker 05

  they would behave and how effectively they would communicate, what companies, under non-disclosure, but what type of companies, what size of companies they'd worked with in the past, example, products they've worked and produced themselves in the past. So many different variables we looked at to vet them and ultimately like a checklist where they had to tick off different, different boxes.

• 1:07:20Tim Ferriss?

  What were some of the questions you asked on the phone and at what, so thirty to forty you reach out to, how many of those would you say you guys called?

• 1:07:29Speaker 05

  Well, we contacted all of them.

• 1:07:33Speaker 05

  And it's like a marketing funnel, right?

• 1:07:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:35Speaker 05

  You have certain dropout and then we obviously cut off a certain percentage because it's a huge time investment on our end to speak with fifty different people simultaneously.

• 1:07:46Speaker 05

  So like we had an initial cutoff in terms of Poor communication and that was indicated by, say, poor English. There are some certifications they could not hold up, et cetera.

• 1:08:00Tim Ferriss?

  Meaning they couldn't provide certificates to show you.

• 1:08:02Speaker 05

  Exactly. And then, so that was a big cutoff. Then another step in the funnel was actually having a lawyer go over the certifications and counter checking them that they were accurate and not fake. There's basic services or basic lawyers who can do that for a hundred, two hundred bucks. So that was another stage.

• 1:08:26Tim Ferriss?

  How did you find the lawyers?

• 1:08:27Speaker 05

  Google search.

• 1:08:28Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. And those were based in the US?

• 1:08:30Speaker 05

  Those were based in Europe, actually. But the lawyer can be from anywhere because these organizations are global, the certification.

• 1:08:40Tim Ferriss?

  What do you search on Google for someone like that? What might you search?

• 1:08:43Speaker 05

  Yeah. So it depends again on the category of product you're manufacturing.

• 1:08:50Speaker 05

  A general good certification to have is good manufacturing practice.

• 1:08:56Tim Ferriss?

  GMP.

• 1:08:56Speaker 05

  GMP. So you can look up for GMP certificate, lawyer approval, verification, et cetera, and you'll get a whole bunch of results. Very practical again.

• 1:09:08Speaker 02

  And were you going to your classes at this time? How did you actually find time to do all of this?

• 1:09:13Speaker 05

  Yeah. And that's a great question. Going back to Far Work Week. That's another point where that was very influential to us because we had limited time. We obviously, there was attendance at class, we had to do labs, et cetera, which took up a lot of time. So with the time we had available, we had to use very focusedly. Like, again, Pareto principle, focusing on the few things that matter.

• 1:09:39Tim Ferriss?

  Let me just pause you for one second. So Pareto principle, for people who are not familiar with that term, is often also called the eighty twenty principle. And in very, very simple terms, there's a lot of nuance to it. But the idea or the premise being, it's more of a conceptual framework, but it ends up...

• 1:09:58Tim Ferriss?

  Manifesting pretty accurately in a lot of different areas, whether it's agriculture or looking at profit per customer or any headache per supplier. That 80% of, say, in the case of profit, like 80% of the profit that you generate will be produced by 20% of your products, 20% of your customers. And doing that type of analysis to identify the really, really good and also the really, really bad, so you can make more informed decisions. And 80/20, it doesn't mean, it doesn't have to add up to 100, right? It could be the 95/5 principle, where 5% produces 95% of your headache with your accounts receivable, right? I mean, it could be any number of things like that.

• 1:10:43Tim Ferriss?

  But that's named after Vilfredo Pareto.

• 1:10:48Tim Ferriss?

  So, sorry to interrupt. Yeah, so you've got your labs, you've got your classes, you have limited time, so you're really having to focus on the things that matter.

• 1:10:57Speaker 05

  Exactly. And a funny note, we've actually seen instances where people who dedicate full-time, say, to a business or to their entrepreneurial pursuits end up being less effective than people who are only pursuing it part-time, just because they get distracted, they get lost, they don't use their time effectively. And ultimately, the people who, say, have a full-time job or are in college can use the limited time they have available on the things that matter, again, power law distribution,

• 1:11:28Speaker 05

  and also use them effectively focused, not being on the phone, seeing all the messages from the wife, from the partner, from work, et cetera.

• 1:11:40Speaker 05

  So I think, again, that we use that from the Four Hour Workweek, the concept of focusing in on what matters, systematizing the rest. And that's been very, very influential for us.

• 1:11:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's true for, I mean, a lot of folks, which is in part why, whether it's in the Four Hour Workweek or outside of that, I often talk about the 80/20 principle or Pareto principle being used in tandem with Parkinson's Law. And Parkinson's Law is a semi...

• 1:12:09Tim Ferriss?

  It was initially written about in more of a humorous satire-like context, but... The applications are really practical. So the premise of the Parkinson's Law is that a task will swell in complexity for the time that you allotted. And so the more time you have for something, the more complicated you will be inclined to make it. And this is also not just within entrepreneurship, but even in writing. I mean, you have someone like, I think Khalid Hussani, I don't know if I'm pronouncing his name correctly, but who wrote The Kite Runner, who was, I believe, a full-time physician at the time. So he had to use tiny chunks of time here and there to really focus.

• 1:12:54Tim Ferriss?

  It was not an option not to focus because his time was so limited. So it can be a very useful forcing function. And the reason I mention that is that a lot of people who, there are many people, myself included, I do this all the time too. So it's a matter of conditioning yourself to use this lens, but it's very easy to look at a perceived lack of time as a weakness. But if you view it instead as a forcing function, where when you focus, you have to focus. You cannot get away with checking social media every five minutes and get anything done. Then it can be a real asset. So you guys were using, what, nights, weekends? When were you actually finding the time? Or was it in separate chunks?

• 1:13:37Speaker 04

  So first thing we said is, let's apply the 20/80 to the classes. So what are the things that we actually have to do to get, you know, still get our good grades, but not necessarily spend 100% of the time that normally people would spend? And then the time that was opened by that, then say, no, we have this little bit of time, what can we do for the business in that 20 to produce the 80% of the results? And a note on the 20/80 is sometimes, so it's really easy to identify, say, when you're not doing the 20 of the 80, say, with social media or with wasting your time, but often it's even harder to identify it when you're doing things that seem productive.

• 1:14:15Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:14:16Speaker 04

  When you're saying, okay, I'm gonna spend, you spend four hours trying to get the image perfect.

• 1:14:21Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:14:22Speaker 04

  And it's, that often is just as bad as spending those four hours on social media. So it's harder to identify that and always be aware of like, and one, one big concept or one big book that, that has helped us fight through that has been the, the, the one thing.

• 1:14:39Speaker 04

  By. Gary Keller. He's actually in Austin.

• 1:14:41Tim Ferriss?

  Gary Keller.

• 1:14:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:14:42Tim Ferriss?

  Another local.

• 1:14:45Tim Ferriss?

  It's huge, huge real estate empire for people who don't know the name.

• 1:14:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:14:49Tim Ferriss?

  Gigantic.

• 1:14:50Speaker 04

  So we, we, we use that concept and we combine the carving out of the classes versus the carving out of the business. The carving out that 80% that doesn't make much of a difference. Um, and that's why we made time for it and we had, we had time. I mean, we do work hard. We work pretty much all day, all day of the week, every day of the week, but we, we do have time for, for leisure to, um, you know, space out the mind and do things that we also find fun.

• 1:15:16Tim Ferriss?

  So two, two quick notes on that. And then we're going to come back to introducing new products. So I wanted to hit the manufacturing and then we, we've, we've taken a slight side road, not a, not a, not a divergence because it's all convergence. Uh, but the two things I wanted to mention are number one, that, uh, I suppose it's really just one thing. And that is that the less people are thinking to themselves, wait a second, this is the four hour work week guy and these two just said they work all the time. How does he reconcile those two? Uh, it's actually really easy because the, the title is more of a, a metaphor. And the case studies within the book even are very, very, very different.

• 1:16:00Tim Ferriss?

  And, uh, the, the objective is to maximize your practical output per hour. And then if you want to build, say a business that covers your expenses and helps you put your kids through school and then you spend the rest of your time exploring other passions. That's one path. If you want to build like you guys are doing right now, an eight figure, nine figure business, that is another path, right? But the tools you would use, 80, 20, Pareto, et cetera, are all, it's the same toolkit applied to a different project. So products, you started not with one, you started with three. And how did you then go from the initial three to expanding? And was that always the plan?

• 1:16:46Speaker 04

  So no, initially the plan was solve our own issue, then it was getting those products into the market. But what happened is those people kept coming back to us and saying, okay, so cool, I have these products, what else? I'm still getting back pain in this and this other area in my life, or do you have a solution for this? Or this solves my lower back pain, but what about my upper back pain? So started listening to that as much as we could and started seeing how can we help our customers for longer and with more things. Again, really CS approach, data driven, started understanding, researching a lot of the keyword, what are the bestselling products in terms of back pain? How can we add value?

• 1:17:31Speaker 04

  Created a list of candidate products that we were going to launch and said we're going to launch another 22 into the market.

• 1:17:37Tim Ferriss?

  How did, okay, so you're data driven. How did you decide on 22?

• 1:17:40Speaker 04

  It was what we, it was a combination of what we thought we could get out of payment terms from our suppliers versus the profits that we had originally made because we were reinvesting 100% of everything.

• 1:17:49Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. So for growth purposes, you could, the max number you could afford to launch based on the assumptions you had, which were grounded in your data you had thus far, just 22. Like if you launched 30, you were really kind of playing more Russian roulette with potential finances.

• 1:18:07Speaker 04

  We were potentially going to run out of stock.

• 1:18:08Speaker 02

  Can I ask a question? Are there any areas of the decision making on the products where emotion intervenes? You guys seem like you're naturally very good at applying rules and discipline, but do you ever just say, I just really love this product? Or do you not allow that when you're making the decisions?

• 1:18:27Speaker 04

  We think we don't allow it. I hope we don't. Yeah, but emotion is always there. We try to, we try to make it as numerical as possible and as rational, but there's always something. Yeah, there's no perfection. But, but yeah, we decided to launch the 22 is also going to be interesting because it was going to force us to do it in a systematic way. We only had a few hours a week from our, from our school and we would need to develop 22 products. So everything needed to be formulaic and systematic. So that was when we, we started laying the groundwork for the systems that we currently have in place for, for the big launch that we'll talk about after the 120. So yeah, that's how we selected the products and then replicated the same, the same

• 1:19:11Speaker 04

  cycle that we'd done for those initial first and three to those 22 is what are the other competitors doing, what are they doing wrong, what are they doing right, what do the people want, and how can we get it all together in a single product, and how can we get it to market as quickly as possible. So we set ourselves a deadline of three months from the point we decided to the point that's going to be selling. And that includes the shipping-

• 1:19:31Tim Ferriss?

  Three months for 22 products.

• 1:19:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, and that includes shipping by sea, which is a month to Europe, and about a month to manufacture. So we only had a month to actually get it all ready to order.

• 1:19:41Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so the two of you guys, clearly very smart, you're, you're very analytical. And just before I forget, a quick pause. If you guys find yourselves getting really fatigued and worn down by the business, you should launch something just for shits and giggles. It is fun. No, seriously, seriously, I've done that just to like resuscitate my enthusiasm. So that, for instance, you can, I'm just envisioning in my head, you could have some type of ridiculous like rainbow unicorn slippers that you, you engineer so that every time someone buys one of your products, that's like, customers also buy. Just to inject a little bit of fun, could, could be worth it. But the, where was I going with that? I got off, off track with-

• 1:20:25Speaker 04

  Rainbow slippers by Tim Ferriss.

• 1:20:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, exactly. Signature series. So you, you guys are well-educated, smart, you're sort of in your professional sports prime in a way, right? Like you guys have a lot of energetic resources. And if you have to just live on like Red Bull and ramen, you can do that. But that sounds like a task you guys can't do by yourselves. And it also sounds like a task that would be very hard to script, because, I mean, God forbid, you're scripting the copy. I could see some really ridiculous stuff coming out. Don't give Ben ideas. So do you have, did you have and do you have help? And if so, what does that look like?

• 1:21:08Speaker 04

  Okay, so we scaled the team. Originally, I don't know if you guys are familiar with Dartmouth, but it's pretty much a little town in the middle of snow.

• 1:21:15Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:16Speaker 04

  So there's really not much room to hire full-time people, besides that we were running, like, we were still in school. So we went to platform like Upwork. There's many of them out there. I started looking for freelancers that would help us execute some of these tasks. And what we actually were surprised to find is the quality and the level of the people in those platforms. They're very, very smart people, very educated.

• 1:21:42Tim Ferriss?

  You mentioned Upwork. Any others that really come to mind for you?

• 1:21:45Speaker 04

  For the most part, we use Upwork. There's freelancer.com, free up.

• 1:21:50Speaker 05

  We've mostly stuck with Upwork.

• 1:21:52Speaker 04

  With Upwork, yeah.

• 1:21:52Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 1:21:54Speaker 04

  So we were completely surprised by the quality and the level of specialty of the people on those platforms. And we started hiring remote people that would dedicate one or two hours of their day.

• 1:22:09Speaker 04

  They usually had other clients as well that would do a very specific task. So say, copywriting. We would hire a copywriter in each of the languages.

• 1:22:18Tim Ferriss?

  Here's our 20-point checklist.

• 1:22:19Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:22:20Tim Ferriss?

  Follow this.

• 1:22:21Speaker 04

  Created SOPs.

• 1:22:22Tim Ferriss?

  Or improve it.

• 1:22:23Speaker 04

  Created the SOPs.

• 1:22:25Tim Ferriss?

  SOP.

• 1:22:26Speaker 04

  SOP, standard operating procedures. A fancy word for checklist.

• 1:22:30Tim Ferriss?

  And are you communicating with them via email, Slack, something else?

• 1:22:36Speaker 04

  Created a Slack for all of us. Everyone's in there, facilitates a lot of the things. And that's how we start running those processes.

• 1:22:44Tim Ferriss?

  And now, much like with the manufacturers, on any job board or freelancer community, there are going to be some amazing people and there are also going to be some clowns. So how do you guys qualify or disqualify people really quickly?

• 1:22:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. Great question.

• 1:23:01Speaker 05

  That's our biggest question. Yeah. That's a very big question to which we don't have a full answer, but it's our most pressing question.

• 1:23:11Speaker 05

  We took a similar approach to the copywriting initially, so same as those first thirty days. Tried to do as much research as possible, looking at companies who do hiring and especially the selection part correctly. So a really good book is The Who Interview.

• 1:23:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, Who is a great.

• 1:23:34Speaker 05

  It's a very good process.

• 1:23:35Tim Ferriss?

  It's basically a streamlined, shorter version of top grading.

• 1:23:38Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 1:23:39Tim Ferriss?

  Which a lot of my startups, which are venture backed, but same same. I mean, the best of them still operate with very similar metrics and mentality. Yeah, Who is a very good book.

• 1:23:50Speaker 05

  Another one called Work Rules, which is by Laszlo Bock. It's on Google's insight, how they apply, how they go about hiring and selecting candidates and some other really interesting thoughts. My whole library at home, I have around ten books, I think, just dedicated to hiring and selecting people. So it's a very important issue to us.

• 1:24:14Tim Ferriss?

  So what have you found to be, I know you don't have a perfect answer, maybe that doesn't exist, but what are things that you have implemented that you've found helpful for qualifying or disqualifying people quickly?

• 1:24:24Speaker 05

  Absolutely. So based on the research we've done, similar processes with the twenty point copywriting formula, with interviewing, we found a few key principles, which are, the main ones are structured interviewing is better. So if you incorporate some structure to your interviewing process, that will give you, on average, better results over the long run. And what structured interviewing means, you have a multi-step process. So that can mean a phone screen and then a cultural interview where you assess the culture and then a reference call and then maybe a work sample.

• 1:25:07Tim Ferriss?

  And who does a good job of, that's one example, but they provide that structure?

• 1:25:12Speaker 05

  Yes, exactly. We actually base ourselves off the process in who. So that's a key principle. And also having the interview questions predefined. Because otherwise, what happens is candidates tell their own story and cater it to what you want to hear in our echo chambers, in a sense, of what you've told them about the position or what they read on the job description.

• 1:25:38Tim Ferriss?

  It also makes it very difficult to compare candidate to candidate if you have different interviews.

• 1:25:45Speaker 05

  Exactly. Exactly. So having those questions predefined, and then there are certain questions for the areas you want to assess, which are most likely to yield a better assessment than other questions. Having those predefined and also stating beforehand, this is what a good answer looks like, this is what a bad answer looks like, this is what a mediocre answer looks like, that is very helpful in getting some rigor into the selection process to avoid just going for people who you like, who you relate with, who have similar backgrounds than you, etc. Secondly, we found that reference calls and heavy referencing, so that means at least

• 1:26:28Speaker 05

  probably three to four references, and then asking those references to provide another reference.

• 1:26:34Tim Ferriss?

  Which is very important, because of course, people who, job applicants who provide you references are banking on the fact that those references are going to give positive reviews.

• 1:26:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. There's ways to frame questions to try to correct for that as well.

• 1:26:48Tim Ferriss?

  What would be an example of that?

• 1:26:49Speaker 04

  So for example, we had a candidate where we were trying to test out for his or her work ethic. And, because obviously, if you ask somebody, do you work hard, they're always going to say yes, regardless of how you ask that question. So the best way is to see how others assess their work ethic. But if they're counting on the reference to give a good reference, they won't tell you, yeah, he has a, of course he has a good work ethic. So the way, we've done a couple, we obviously won't say all the tricks, but one of the tricks is that we go up to the reference and say, look... Say the candidate A, we'll call him Jim. Hey, look, Jim said sometimes he struggles to stay motivated and to work really long nights. What are your thoughts on that?

• 1:27:31Tim Ferriss?

  Which Jim has not said.

• 1:27:32Speaker 04

  Right. And so then, so then, so then you, based on their reaction, because if somebody is really, really hardworking, they'll say, what, Jim?

• 1:27:40Tim Ferriss?

  Really?

• 1:27:41Speaker 04

  Never.

• 1:27:41Tim Ferriss?

  That's strange.

• 1:27:42Speaker 04

  That's weird. They've, they've always been, you know, they'll react that way. Whereas if they're actually not, yeah, Jim's been struggling, but look, it's just because the boss and they'll come up with a reason to kind of save him.

• 1:27:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:52Speaker 04

  Uh, but then it clearly shows. Those are a few ways that you can kind of angle the question.

• 1:27:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Another one, which a friend of mine told me, I thought was quite clever, which applies in the US. Uh, and there are some legal restrictions and guidelines around this kind of thing. Uh, because many people will be terrified to say anything that might jeopardize the person's hiring for legal reasons. And so one way to get around that is to, if you, if you ensure that you send people an email, so you don't get them on the phone. You either leave a voicemail or send them an email, which is, I'm interviewing so and so for a potential position. I would love to know how much you would recommend them. No need to reply unless it is like an eight or higher. Right? And then they have plausible deniability and they can always say, I never got it.

• 1:28:42Tim Ferriss?

  But, and you have to make sure you have a sample size that's significant enough, or you know that these people are in contact so that that works. Uh, and you know, you don't get a false negative, if that makes sense, but that would be another approach. In terms of quick vetting, I'll give one, one more up.

• 1:29:02Tim Ferriss?

  Another tactic that was shared with, with me by a friend who's a many, multiple time New York Times bestselling author and runs a number of businesses and hires a lot of contractors. And what he'll do is he'll have some type of, he'll start with a work test, right? He'll, he'll start with a test of some type that has a very fast turnaround. It's like 48 hours this needs to be done. And they, the first step is very often to

• 1:29:31Tim Ferriss?

  Respond with certain types of information, but at the very end of the work task, it will say, do not reply via message or email. I call this phone number and leave a message with your answer. And it's, it's, it has to be in a larger context that it's easy to miss. And he's testing for attention to detail and doing things on time. That's basically his first hurdle. And it immediately screens out 99% of the people.

• 1:29:59Tim Ferriss?

  Who do just do not pay attention. Alright, so how many, how many folks do you have helping you at the moment?

• 1:30:05Speaker 04

  So we use the freelancer approach. By the way, one last thing I wanted to add to that work samples are the biggest indicator to job success. So if you can make somebody in a clear way, easy way to filter people out, say, hey, this is what I need to do. Just do a shorter version of whatever they need to do. Easiest way to clear out through people. But anyway.

• 1:30:24Speaker 05

  Really important note, there's some really good resources on YouTube. I think it's Y Combinator.

• 1:30:31Tim Ferriss?

  Y Combinator.

• 1:30:32Speaker 05

  Y Combinator and Stanford, or Y Combinator taught a class at Stanford. And there's some really good lectures there on team building. There's one with Vinod Khosla from Khosla Ventures. He's great on hiring. He believes hiring is the one thing to scale. And there's another lecture with, I think his name is Ben Silberman.

• 1:30:55Tim Ferriss?

  Silberman of Pinterest?

• 1:30:57Speaker 05

  Of Pinterest and the two Stripe co-founders.

• 1:31:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, the Collison Brothers.

• 1:31:01Speaker 05

  Yep. And they also talk about hiring, team building, incredible value right there. So I recommend that to anyone who's looking to hire or vet people.

• 1:31:10Tim Ferriss?

  Great.

• 1:31:11Speaker 05

  It's been of great value.

• 1:31:12Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's, that's a tremendous series of classes. I think they may have made some of them into podcasts as well. So people can check it out. I'll put all of these in the show notes for everybody. So you were, you were going to say?

• 1:31:23Speaker 04

  So I was saying that, so I was saying, yeah, so we started hiring freelancers, all from, from the college dorm and saying, to work out through those little pieces of the system, compiled everything in an Excel sheet and everyone knew what needed to be done. And within a month, those 22 products were live.

• 1:31:43Speaker 04

  And we've kept those people in place. There are about 26 right now.

• 1:31:47Tim Ferriss?

  Twenty six freelancers.

• 1:31:48Speaker 04

  Freelancers, some of which we only use, say, on a on-demand basis. So we don't have a copywriter sitting along doing copy all day. It's just when we launch a new product, they might come in. But there's about 12 to 14 that are pretty much every day running the day-to-day systems of of our company. So that's how we launched the 22 products. They were really successful. As soon as they they hit the market, we started iterating on them. And still to this day, we iterate on them and try to make them better. Have constant talks about how can we improve those 22? And took a step back and said, by then, we were already on on track to the to the eight figures of about the 10 million. And we said, look, we've done something right. We've scaled

• 1:32:30Speaker 04

  it up. And and and we started learning a bit more about how the bigger market and the consumer pack goods and just packaged goods in general worked. And so Ben and I researched into how CPG companies were doing their development, again, acknowledging that our key key component to success was our ability to to to use data as the development guidelines, the north star.

• 1:32:52Tim Ferriss?

  And CPG for folks is consumer packaged goods, which can range from protein bars to

• 1:32:59Speaker 04

  Shampoo.

• 1:32:59Tim Ferriss?

  Shampoo, to just about anything. Think think Procter and Gamble, or any of these large, large brands.

• 1:33:05Speaker 04

  Exactly. So we start learning how they were doing a lot of the development. Not any in specific, just in general, but they were doing a lot of the product development. It was usually not very data-driven. They would they would have focus groups that were not statistically significant, and there was not real consumer behavior or purchasing intent. And and they really didn't. The reason why we discovered they weren't really putting a lot of effort into the development is because they have all the leverage from all the household brands that they use then to push new products into the market and eventually hopefully become a household brand. So they have a lot of leverage into the distributors and the retailers. So there's no incentive there. But the digital arrow is allowing us to change that. And and

• 1:33:47Speaker 04

  that's what we've been doing with Supportiva without really knowing it, is going straight to the customer and saying, look, we can make it better. What can we do better about this product? And how can we make that make a better product for you? So we said, can we replicate that approach across the bigger, the bigger industries such as beauty and skincare and and the pet supplies and pet food and baby and even nutrition? So Ben and I said, look, if we want to get to that point, we obviously need to have people that have been there, done that, sort of as professors, come in and tell us how to scale to that point. So that's when we kind of decided to take a big turn in life and put the studies on

• 1:34:31Speaker 04

  hold and come here to Austin and build what we call the exec team or the people above us even that'll help us scale to that portion.

• 1:34:43Tim Ferriss?

  And one thing that folks might not realize, and I didn't know this until I actually got to Austin, is that some of the best CPG entrepreneurs and investors in the country, maybe in the world, are here in Austin. And a lot of that is thanks to a university known as Whole Foods, because the alumni and former execs and so on, and serial entrepreneurs who've built, say, consumables companies, whether that's like Epic Bar or Deep Eddy Vodka or whatever you might find, tend to stay in the area.

• 1:35:21Tim Ferriss?

  And so you have this very dense network of people who really understand how to build CPG companies, whether that's cold brew coffee, or shampoo, or gluten-free tortillas, or fill in the blank. There are many, many examples here. I had no idea before I got here. So are you guys looking to build or buy, or both? Meaning, are you looking to build all these brands, which you guys have shown you can do? Are you looking to buy or acquire in some fashion companies or products? How are you guys thinking about that?

• 1:36:01Speaker 05

  So we don't see it as mutually exclusive.

• 1:36:03Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 1:36:05Speaker 05

  We are very good at ramping a brand up from scratch. And we've done that and are doing that many times over now with the additional products.

• 1:36:16Speaker 05

  And then creating a longer term, higher growth curve because of our product development process, et cetera.

• 1:36:23Speaker 05

  So acquiring right now at an early, like an early stage brand or company that would fit our portfolio does not currently justify the premium we would pay for that.

• 1:36:36Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:36:36Speaker 05

  However, once these other brands are also up and at the same level as Sponyback and growing, it can, it's definitely within our trajectory to look at other brands we can bring in that fit strategically with our current brand portfolio. And then to bring them in, to roll them up, to leverage any, any complementary products, audiences, et cetera. So it's definitely, definitely a consideration. We've been speaking with other back pain brands already for Sponyback.

• 1:37:09Speaker 05

  Yeah. So it's within the trajectory from the early stage. It doesn't justify the price premium.

• 1:37:18Tim Ferriss?

  And there also, I should say, there are options C, D and E and so on. Not just 100% build or 100% buy.

• 1:37:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:37:31Tim Ferriss?

  For instance, there are almost infinite number of ways you can structure an acquisition. Where you might have, not that you necessarily want to get into exchanges of equity, but you could have an equity component where you're giving a piece of the company as opposed to upfront cash. You could avoid that or in combination with that have a very elaborate earn out. Clauses where people are, they're getting paid for their brand, but only after they've been assimilated and proven that they can transport their skills and/or perhaps their customer base and so on to the portfolio of products. So there are ways to do it where

• 1:38:16Tim Ferriss?

  you can mitigate against the upfront costs, but it is fascinating world that we won't get into just yet today. But what I want to ask you guys, because we're going to wrap up in just a little bit here, is, among other things, why? So what I mean by that is, a different way to phrase that would be what for? What I mean by that is, you're growing, you are going to be hopefully accelerating growth based on your current enthusiasm for it, which seems very palpable. Where do you want this to be in three or five years? What are you guys trying to do? And yeah, and I might, I might stress test your answer a little bit, so we'll see. But yeah, what do you guys try, what do you guys try to

• 1:39:00Tim Ferriss?

  do? And why is it worth all the time and energy and so on that you're putting into it?

• 1:39:05Speaker 04

  So I'll start with the why. I think, I think Ben and I have both really big drive for, for delivering value. And I know this sounds a bit, a bit abstract, but I think the role of an entrepreneur in the world is to find ways to do things better or more efficiently, and then try to do that as many times over with the help of other people. So that's something that's really driving us. And when we find a way to do things better, it's like, how can we do more of it? And it becomes almost like a drug into like, okay, we found a better way to do better products. And we see that direct impact in the people that we're giving them. So the back pain products, people go back and say, look, it actually helped. And when it becomes to, you know, the few products that we tested

• 1:39:47Speaker 04

  in the other industries, like this product is much better than the one I had. And that fuels a lot of what we do. Now, where does that, how does that tie into the company where we want to go? Is again, all we're doing is replicating that first initial back pain product that we're doing. It's the same concept is how can we deliver a better product, a very packaged good to a customer. And I think that the big companies have done it a specific way, and that way is changing and it's gotten better with digital. So we want Benitago Group to become the new

• 1:40:20Speaker 04

  I hate the word conglomerate, but the new group of brands or a new group of or a new accelerator for products, a launch platform for new and better products for customers around the world, where we actually give them a voice and that is reflected in the quality of the products that they're getting. That's the ultimate vision. How does that look like in terms of size? I have no idea. How does that look like in terms of structure? Have no idea. As long as our core focus of the way we lead our actions is how can we do that initial value delivery that we proved with our supportive act back in our colostorms? How can we deliver that same value many, many, many times over? So we're doing it 120 times. Hopefully we'll

• 1:41:04Speaker 04

  do it more and more times over. But obviously, it's not just the one time that you launch it is how can we iterate it many, many, many times over?

• 1:41:12Speaker 04

  Does that answer a bit?

• 1:41:13Tim Ferriss?

  It does. It does. It does. I'm curious to. I should have had you in separate rooms.

• 1:41:19Speaker 04

  It's a bit abstract.

• 1:41:20Speaker 05

  And then a lot of the intrinsic motivation for, I speak, I think both on behalf of Santiago and myself, comes from learning and actually going back to computer science, just solving problems.

• 1:41:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I think part of, I mean, I barely know you guys, of course, but I mean, part of what seems just, I'm using something very non-quantitative right now, which is just like my intuitive feel of you guys, is that you get a real high from creating the recipe and seeing if you can replicate.

• 1:41:54Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:41:55Tim Ferriss?

  Right? Like, did we get it right?

• 1:41:57Speaker 04

  It's the same feeling you get when you debug a program and it works and you're like, boom, now I can do the same operation billion times.

• 1:42:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:04Speaker 04

  Same thing.

• 1:42:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's exactly that. And the growth, the personal growth, working on new challenges every day, figuring out solutions to complex problems like hiring, how do we best approach that? What are best practices? How about product development? Just constantly learning, finding new problems to solve, even if the problem is on a day-to-day basis, breaking them down, making them small, solving, reverse engineering.

• 1:42:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's just and learning from the people that work for us as well. They're so good at what they do because they've been hyper focused and hyper specialized. That it's almost like a classroom. You know, a lot of people say like, oh, but then, you know, you're in pause in school. Like, how does it feel to not continue to learn? It was like, it's completely the opposite. We've continued to learn. It's like having a teacher work with you every day. From which you can learn a lot. So that is also a big driving force of why we want to keep going.

• 1:42:59Tim Ferriss?

  Who are some of the entrepreneurs or leaders you guys most look up to? Or think about modeling or studying? Let's start with you.

• 1:43:12Speaker 04

  Ah, you got me off base. It depends on what, so I don't have a single.

• 1:43:16Tim Ferriss?

  You can pick the context.

• 1:43:17Speaker 04

  If I have to choose one, I obviously choose the Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett because they're. But if I had to choose an entrepreneur.

• 1:43:24Tim Ferriss?

  You can choose as many as you like. There's no limit.

• 1:43:27Speaker 04

  It depends for what? There's, there's people that are, that are really good at hiring. There are people that are.

• 1:43:32Tim Ferriss?

  Like who? I want names.

• 1:43:34Speaker 05

  Vinod Khosla, Ben Silverman, Paul English, co-founder of Kayak.

• 1:43:41Speaker 05

  Brian Goldberg, who's a local here, who runs Skinny Pop Popcorn and Amplify Snack Brands.

• 1:43:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's just, there's Paul Graham, Sam Altman.

• 1:43:54Speaker 04

  Sorry for the other people we didn't mention.

• 1:43:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's okay. This isn't an Oscars acceptance speech. You don't.

• 1:44:00Speaker 05

  I have a list of around, so my personal notes, every time I learn something about people and hiring, I add it to that. It's a massive list of around, I think by now, twin, fifteen pages. All tips on hiring, like every note I take, every, it's like a personal notebook. Every time I learn something about hiring, how to hire better, how to manage people better, I add it to my list and I constantly carry that around. And there is fifty plus people, people's advice in there.

• 1:44:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that must, well, maybe I'll have a book someday.

• 1:44:31Speaker 02

  Where does that passion for constant learning come from? Is that just intrinsic to who you are? Did that come from somewhere external?

• 1:44:39Speaker 05

  It's just, I think, intrinsic, constantly wanting to get better. And like, being a better self tomorrow or going to bed at night, knowing I've learned something and I'm a better person in, in what, whatever dimension that may be than when I woke up.

• 1:44:56Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any, any books or resources you guys are going through right now? Or either something you just finished, something you're reading or digesting or thinking about right now, or something you're about to start reading?

• 1:45:10Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:45:10Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 1:45:11Speaker 05

  So overall, on reading and books, a core principle we follow and we've learned our lesson in that we, we got distracted by a lot of reading and research.

• 1:45:22Tim Ferriss?

  It's a great way to procrastinate.

• 1:45:23Speaker 05

  Exactly. Same, same. It's one of those A D that hides itself.

• 1:45:27Tim Ferriss?

  Sneaky one.

• 1:45:28Speaker 05

  It's a sneaky one. You feel like you're, you're doing, you're being productive when in fact you aren't. So taking that into account and limiting the amount of time you spend learning from a book or in a classroom or a course

• 1:45:42Speaker 05

  versus executing and actually getting stuff done.

• 1:45:46Speaker 05

  That's been a big learning overall. We take the approach of, we try to focus all the books we read, all the courses we take, on anything we can apply within the next 90 days, albeit six months, because we want to read for practicality.

• 1:46:05Tim Ferriss?

  So otherwise you're just gonna have to reread it again later. Anyway.

• 1:46:08Speaker 05

  And we do reread a lot of the books. A mistake, and I'm very ignorant, I'm very young. But something I've seen a lot of people do is they read many, many books and then never revisit them. So just from a mathematical perspective, there's also a distribution in the quality of books. And some of the books you've already read are much higher in quality and in potential impact than any book currently on your book list.

• 1:46:38Speaker 05

  So rereading that and actually honing in on key concepts, just normal learning principles like spacing out repetition can be much more valuable than reading another book.

• 1:46:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Is there a particular book then you're reading at the moment?

• 1:46:54Speaker 05

  Right now, I think it's called High Velocity Hiring, which is how do you hire for scale? Because as we're approaching the next year with nine figures and prediction, that's going to take a whole different organizational structure and with a key constraint being growth in terms of time.

• 1:47:14Speaker 04

  From a personal side, we were reading two of Ralph Dobelli's books. One is The Art of Thinking Clearly and The Art of a Good Life.

• 1:47:22Tim Ferriss?

  What was the author's name again?

• 1:47:24Speaker 05

  Ralph Dobelli. It's D O B E L L I. Dobelli. He's from Switzerland. Absolutely great books. They teach psychological concepts, so a lot of biases.

• 1:47:41Tim Ferriss?

  How did you guys choose those books? Because we're talking about how much time you can chew up and misspend on books. So selection, it's kind of like hiring people or vetting people. How did you guys end up both reading those books?

• 1:47:53Speaker 04

  It's referrals is how we source the list. So we look for people we've admired that have been successful at that specific thing and we ask them. And we keep a list and then we categorize them depending on what problem it solves. So in case of hiring, we have like a list of hires. So we're having a hiring issue, we go and try to read those. So it's mainly referred, I don't remember who referred over Ralph Dobelli.

• 1:48:16Tim Ferriss?

  That's okay. It's part of the process.

• 1:48:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, but ultimately a note on the reading and the learning is that the ultimate the ultimate teacher is experiences. The best way to learn is experimenting and you can sit down and read seven books on hiring, but you'll learn way more the time you hire a person and that it ends up being a really bad hire. So you know, you can be a victim of like thinking paralysis and sit down and contemplate, what are the different options I can, different books I can read on hiring? And that's good to have some knowledge ahead of time, but then ultimately take the leap and do whatever is it that you're trying to do? And you'll learn way more from the feedback and reflect on what you did right and wrong as well.

• 1:48:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it makes me think of something I was that was imparted to me by a woman named Kathy Sierra. Very smart, which was focusing on just in time information instead of just in case information.

• 1:49:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a good way to put it.

• 1:49:08Tim Ferriss?

  Makes a huge, huge difference. Well, this has been really fun. Lynn, do you have any, any, any last questions you'd like to ask before we wrap up with these, these gents?

• 1:49:17Speaker 02

  I do have one question. For the listeners who are not very mathematical, what advice would you give them if they wanted to follow your lead?

• 1:49:26Speaker 04

  I would say you have an advantage because you keep it simple. We've been victims of overcomplicating a lot of things because we, we find ways to overcomplicate it. So you don't really need math. Try to understand the world from, from a trend perspective. So all that takes is just read basics on, on stats. What, what is a correlation versus just a number and what establishes a correlation? But other than that is you really don't need, if it's too complicated, it's probably not the way. There's very simple ways of doing everything. So you probably have an edge on that. Yeah.

• 1:50:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, one of my friends, Nick Ganju, is one of the co-founders of Zocdoc, very CS, quantitative. And I want to say, I might be getting this wrong. He's, he's been on the podcast, if somebody might be able to, to correct me here. But I believe you recommended a book called How to Measure Anything, which is very helpful for taking fuzzy thinking and making it more discreet. Just easier to examine, which doesn't mean, I've never taken calculus, for God's sake. So I've, I have, I'm like, you know, calculate the what, hypotenuse? Oh, Jesus, really good. So I'm about as, yeah, about as basic as it gets, but you, you don't need a lot.

• 1:50:44Tim Ferriss?

  You just need to really get good at measuring what matters and very few things matter a lot. And you need to be very good at pausing and checking your assumptions, among other things.

• 1:50:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:50:57Tim Ferriss?

  So guys, where can people, if you would like them to learn more about you or just follow what you guys are up to? If, if that's even an option, but for those people like, who knows, maybe Ben Silverman, who's been in one of my books or one of these people, maybe they're listening to the podcast and they're like, oh, you know, maybe I should send a hand wave to these folks. Is there any way to do that? So it's Benny Tag, Benny Taggo Group, right? B N I T A G O?

• 1:51:23Speaker 04

  Benitago. Yeah, B N I T A G O.

• 1:51:25Tim Ferriss?

  Alright.

• 1:51:25Speaker 04

  We have benitago.com and we are both on LinkedIn. And we pride ourselves in not having any other social media outlet out there.

• 1:51:33Tim Ferriss?

  That is...

• 1:51:34Speaker 04

  We're focused on growing.

• 1:51:35Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I think that is a fantastic policy.

• 1:51:41Tim Ferriss?

  Well, thank you guys for taking the time. I know that you have lots of exciting things coming up, so I wish you well.

• 1:51:46Speaker 04

  Thanks, Tim.

• 1:51:47Tim Ferriss?

  And Elaine, thank you for spending time with us as well.

• 1:51:51Speaker 02

  Thank you, Tim. This was fun.

• 1:51:53Tim Ferriss?

  And to everybody listening, we will have links to everything, all the books and so on, resources, Upwork, the one thing, 1688, Cash Cow Pro.

• 1:52:05Speaker 04

  You forgot Cash for Ties.

• 1:52:07Tim Ferriss?

  Cash for Ties. And don't forget to Cash for Ties. Will all be available in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast. And until next time, thank you for listening.

• 1:52:19Tim Ferriss?

  Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric, as I do. It could include favorite articles that I have read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short.

• 1:53:02Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out, and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Charlotte's Web, which makes a CBD oil, a hemp extract, that has become one of my go-to tools. Now, I have never really talked about CBD oil, and cannabis has never really been the plant for me, I know we're talking about hemp, but nonetheless, after several nights of inexplicable insomnia, this was about a year ago, I just could not get to sleep

• 1:53:43Tim Ferriss?

  to save my life, and after other fixes failed, so melatonin, California poppy extract, dah dah dah dah dah, an elite athlete introduced me to this non-psychoactive extract, and bam! Problem solved, I had some of the best sleep that I've had in months. Now, I don't use sleep aids on a daily basis, but this has become part of my toolkit, and I hope to be exploring other applications soon. CBD oil products have exploded in popularity in the health and wellness and fitness worlds, and Charlotte's Web is one of the top players that offers broad-spectrum hemp extract with CBD in the form of oils, capsules, and topical products. Charlotte's Web products will not get you high, so that maybe that is good news, maybe

• 1:54:25Tim Ferriss?

  bad news to you, but it does have some powerful benefits and applications, and it works with your body's existing endocannabinoid system. Endo meaning "from within," like endo versus exoskeleton, for instance, so endocannabinoid system, works with your body. Some of the most common uses are for relief from everyday stressors, help in supporting restful sleep, which is what I most often use it for, to bring about a sense of calm and focus, a lot of my friends use it for that. CBD is also known, or becoming known, for helping athletes to recover from exercise-induced inflammation. Charlotte's Web hemp extract has naturally occurring terpenes, flavonoids, and other valuable hemp compounds that work synergistically to heighten positive effects, sometimes referred

• 1:55:08Tim Ferriss?

  to as the "entourage effect," which you guys can look up, making it more complete than single-compound CBD alternatives, or at least, that is what I've been told. I do not know much about CBD alternatives nor single-compounds. In any case, check it out, this stuff has really worked for me, so jump over to CWHemp.com/Tim. CW is in Charlotte's Web. CWHemp.com/Tim to take a quick quiz which will determine the best product for your particular aims, lifestyle, etc. And they ship to all 50 states. Charlotte's Web are offering listeners of this podcast 10% off of their purchase. While there are some exclusions, I personally use the extra strength CBD oils or the extra strength capsules and you can

• 1:55:53Tim Ferriss?

  see what might be a fit for you on that page. And there is a 30 day risk free guarantee, so why not try it out. So get 10% off of your purchase at CWHemp.com/Tim. And disclaimer, these statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Enjoy. This episode is brought to you by Peloton, which I've been using probably for about a year now. Peloton is a cutting edge indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right into your home. You can also do on demand, which is what I do. We'll come back to that. So you don't have to worry about fitting classes into a busy schedule or making it

• 1:56:35Tim Ferriss?

  to a studio or gym with a hectic or unpredictable commute. I, for instance, have a Peloton bike right in my master bedroom at home, and it's one of the first things I do many mornings. I wake up, I meditate for a bit, then I knock out a short 20 minute ride in my undies, hard to do that at the gym, take a shower, and I'm in higher gear for the rest of the day. It's really convenient and has become something that I look forward to. So you have a lot of options. For one, if you'd like, you can ride live with thousands of other riders across the country on an interactive leaderboard to keep you motivated. There are also up to 14 new classes added every day with more than 8,000 classes on demand, and you can pick based on length, 45 minutes, 20 minutes, whatever, music, hip hop, rock

• 1:57:17Tim Ferriss?

  and roll, or say low impact versus high intensity or interval. You can pick the class structure and style that works for you. And in my case, I quite like mat whoppers, and I tend to do on demand and listen to a lot of and watch many of the same classes over and over. But I'm kind of promiscuous and also enjoy classes from a lot of the other instructors. They have Peloton, an amazing roster of incredible instructors. ...in New York City with a whole range of styles and personalities so you can find what you're in the mood for. You also get real-time metrics that you can use to track your performance over time and that will help, I would say catalyze you to beat your personal best. Now that all sounds good, right? Gamification, yada, yada, yada. I didn't think that it would work for me or in any way incentivize me, but they really

• 1:58:02Tim Ferriss?

  100% hit the nail on the head. I was very, very impressed with how motivating it was and it worked tremendously to keep me pushing, which quite honestly takes a fair amount. I can get quite lazy, particularly with anything that edges on endurance, which is kind of more than five reps of anything for me. So, check it out. Discover this cutting-edge indoor cycling bike that brings a studio experience right to your home. Peloton is offering listeners of this podcast a limited time offer. Go to onepeloton.com, that's O-N-E, Peloton, P-E-L-O-T-O-N, dot com and enter the code TIM, all caps, at checkout and get $100 off of accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. So, get a great workout at home anytime you want.

• 1:58:47Tim Ferriss?

  Check it out. Go to onepeloton.com and use the code TIM to get started.