Transcription
This is Fog, an entrepreneur who took $1,000 and turned it into a business that now pays in more than any 9-to-five job ever could. And my name is Simon Scrib. I've been in business for over 35 years with my most recent startup being valued over $50 million US.
In this episode, Fog is going to explain the exact steps he took to escape the 9-to-5 and start his dream business. And I'm going to give him the steps he needs to turn this business into a money-making machine. And feel free to copy this blueprint. This is valuable no matter what stage you're at in building your dream. Let's go. Let's help the audience today. You've done something amazing. So tell us the first step.
So I actually moved to Berlin in Germany for university and from university, um, I made a few friends there and we always wanted to start a business. But we thought, okay, how can we stand out in what feels like a crowded market? You know, it feels very hard to like think of a brand new business idea. And we were actually massively inspired by two companies, uh, both based in America. One of them is Liquid Death, which maybe you already know. They do canned water and the other brand is Dr. Squatch, and they do, uh, like bars of soap mainly for men. What they did was, okay, we're going to stand out by marketing in a completely different way to all the other brands do.
Now you can upgrade your shower game with Dr. Squatch natural soap. I'm talking about natural, nourishing, cold-pressed, hand-cut soap for men. And so we thought, okay, what is a very simple product that everyone knows, everyone can recognize, whether they're from Africa, whether they're from Asia. And we landed on toothpicks. Everyone knows toothpicks. It's one of the first inventions of mankind from back when we were cavemen. But a toothpick by itself is quite boring. So we thought, okay, is there any way for us to get flavor into the toothpicks? And we found a way to get it on a very similar, uh, flavor intensity. We argue it's actually stronger, um, than chewing gum. And we also thought that chewing gum has had zero competition for a hundred years. And so we thought, okay, let's take on chewing gum and introduce flavored toothpicks. And we just wanted to give it the coolest marketing. So we invested all our money at the time, which wasn't a lot of money. I mean, we were like broke uni students. So we invested $1,000 each of our personal money and we started literally making the toothpicks from our family garage. We would try the prototypes and we got it to a point where we were like, you know, this tastes really good, like it literally freshens our breath. And so once we had that ready, we were also thinking a lot about, okay, how can we do the branding in a very cool way? Like, how can we make the product look cool? Got this like very cool design where it's like the lips with a toothpick in it, and we just thought like it looks very unique, very striking. And then it was a matter of, okay, we've got the product ready, now we need to kind of do what Liquid Death and Dr. Squatch did, do some very cool marketing and actually sell the product.
So, it was all riding on doing organic pieces of content that would hopefully get millions of views. I'm throwing this flavored toothpick onto a map and flying wherever it lands and giving this toothpick to the locals and I'm only allowed to leave the country if they like the flavor. And at the beginning, um, we spent, I think it was 3 weeks, uh, just trying lots of different content formats. We would like do street interviews, like coming up to people like in a try kind of funny, cheeky way. You trying to hold this wood and try and get some funny reactions from like grandmas on the street.
You trying to hold this wood?
I tried. Oh, it's very sweet.
Everything at the time was flopping completely. And then again, we kind of thought, okay, we need to do something differently that other brands aren't doing. And it was actually at that time where we saw KSI had a toothpick in one of his Sidemen videos. We thought, "Oh, this could be a crazy opportunity." So, we made a TikTok. We made like this long video, like a minute long.
Hello, KSI.
What's up, bro? Everyone says your Prime models have great flavor, and everyone says the same about our flavored toothpicks. So, when I saw you with a toothpick in a Sidemen video, I saw a perfect opportunity to combine your satisfying Prime flavors with our succulent piece of wood.
It went insanely viral. I think it got 3 million views in 2 days. So, we were just blown away. We were like, "Oh my god, KSI might actually see this." And turns out he did. And then he DM'd us. He sent us his address. Um, we we sent our toothpicks to him. Um, and before he'd like even tried them, just from like that video and like two other videos alone, we already gained like 60,000 followers. We were sold out. So, we were like, "Okay, how oh my god, crap. We need to we need to make more toothpicks in our garage." Like we were like, "Okay, let's do let's do some pre-orders." So, we did some 8-week pre-orders just so we could finance making more toothpicks on our website.
Just just so people don't miss that, you basically didn't have enough money to buy more product yet. So, you got people to pre-order them, which people pre-buy them for you then to get the money and go make it.
And we were like astonished that people were ordering it like with 8 weeks pre-order. And then KSI tried the product, um, and had the most insane reaction.
Oh. Oh, this is kind of hard, you know. Bro, I never would have thought of doing anything like this.
And he said he'd love for us to make a Prime flavor. Like, honestly, we thought like this is the most insane luck to start a business off, like the most insane platform, uh, to leverage off. Just off this momentum, lots of people ordering the toothpicks. And then at the same time, we were like, "Okay, this is insane how we've been able to get KSI to try them. Uh, is there anyone else that we can get to try the toothpicks?" We saw there was a Macklemore concert in a few days time. So we went to a Macklemore concert, uh, and we thought, okay, how can we get Macklemore to try our toothpicks mid-concert? And we thought maybe we can make a cardboard sign like his fans do usually, you know, where they say something on the cardboard sign and what if it says "Try a flavored toothpick." Maybe there's a small chance he'd see it and try it. We held it up for over an hour and eventually he like he was like, "Try flavored toothpick." He was like, "All right then."
Oh my god, it's a good ass toothpick.
I thought I was going to have to lie to you.
We then posted that video. Ended up being our most viral video at the time. This video got like over 13 million views. So, Macklemore wants our flavor toothpicks to sponsor his tour.
Oh my god, it's a good ass toothpick.
Will you sponsor the tour?
So, it's just insane like how many views we were getting on the product, um, compared like compared to any other business at the time. We were like, "Oh my god, like this is more views than like Duolingo is getting." Like Duolingo is like the GOAT when it comes to marketing. Um, so we were like, this is insane, like let's keep this up. We then, um, made more stuff around the KSI Prime toothpick. We released it. The sales were insane. We sold out the like Prime flavored toothpick, which was our Mango Madness flavor. We sold it out in less than 24 hours. The sad part though was, um, KSI didn't try the Prime flavored toothpick in the end.
Just before we go any further, I I want my audience to be able to go buy your product. So what's your what's your, uh, website address?
Uh, it's pickum.store.
Pickum.store. Store is actually the sponsor for today's podcast. I want to thank them for helping us help dreamers. One of the easiest ways any brand can stand out today is by owning your name online. Having a strong domain name, something that instantly shows you a real store makes people take you seriously. A .store domain name instantly tells people you're open for business. In fact, recently studies showed that .store domain names can increase traffic by up to 87% and help double your ranking on Google. It's good. Like,
It's amazing. I think I even heard Mr. Beast talk about it and he was like, "If you want to sell a product online, use a .store."
Mr. Beast says it's good. It must be good. Right. If you're building a business and want to stand out online, grab your own .store domain. And for a limited time, you can get one for just 99 cents using the code Simon at the link in the description.
So, what three things do you want me to teach you today?
So, I'd say the first thing is like hiring, getting the right people in to then also kind of links into the second one, like scaling, like social media. And then the last one is kind of retail. So like getting into more retail stores.
And I think for the audience listening, I want them to also listen to this because if you know what you need to do later, it helps you prepare when you start. So let's start with hiring as an example of what I mean. So when you started out, you had four of you.
Yeah.
And I'm assuming you picked clear job roles for each of you, generally what you would do.
Uh, yes.
Okay. Bit of hesitation there, which means you probably need to define that at the very beginning. What you want. Like my my my last business before, the one I'm running now, was a company called Fluid, and I was in charge of sales and marketing, and my business partner was in charge of creative and the creative team. And so really clear, we worked together for 15 years. We never had an argument once, and I respected her for what she did, and she respected me for what she did. You got to match the skills of the person and what they love to do with their job role. And ideally, you don't want to cross over, especially at the beginning. I mean, I think like it's it's a bit different when you start a business as well, 'cause it's like, I mean, you kind of have to cover everything. Um, and it's like you just have to plug certain gaps. It doesn't like in a way like it didn't feel like I mean, maybe we did this not in the best way possible, but like we didn't specify like massively, okay, your role is just this, yours is just this. I don't know. We would like assign tasks in a way. It also like evolved over time because again, like you said, like maybe you play to your strengths or your what you enjoy the most, and that can like you, I feel like you learn more about that over time. I think what's important partly for the audience listening to understand is like if you don't make it very clear at the beginning when you start, it can cause you problems down the line unless you get lucky because when you start off a business, you can be a generalist. You're doing a bit of content, that person's doing a bit of backend, that person's getting the toothpicks delivered, but eventually, you don't want someone who's a 25% shareholder delivering toothpicks, right?
So, at the beginning it makes sense, but later you're like, "Okay, you used to deliver the toothpicks. Now, we've got a delivery company doing that. So, what's your job?" And they say, "You know what? I'm really good at blog posting. I'm really good at writing things up." So, write a book like Simon Squib's book that's really good that helps you find your dream. Uh, or you know, or right, you go off and, um, write blog posts about how to how to, um, get a flavored toothpick if you want one for your company. Getting specialists in your business is really expensive unless you learn these hacks. One hack, there's two hacks really. One hack is just ask, because it's not who you know, it's who you ask. The second way is, once you determine exactly where your gaps are, you can say, right, who's the best in class at that? Let's say, let's say again, you want a retail specialist, right? Then you go to the, uh, platforms such as LinkedIn and you find that that specialist, and then you literally have a coffee with them, right? You say, "Look, um, we're we're expanding our business. We're hiring. I'd love to talk to you about a potential role and what you do." And one of two things come out from the meeting. One, you sit with them and you get on with them. You really like them. And most of the time, if they're good at what they do, they're often really well paid in their company. So these people will be on 100, 200,000 a year, right? Dollars a year at least. Specialists are really well paid.
Yeah.
And what I noticed with specialists that entrepreneurs haven't actually figured out, I figured that out by accident, is that if you go to them and say, "We're building the next big product. This is going to be big, bigger than Wiggly Chewing Gum. It's going to be massive, going to be a billion-dollar company. Would you like to join us and buy in?" So you get these people that have money that don't own a where they work. They're just on salary, and they know that cannot scale, right? And they have to work long hours forever to earn that money. But if they invest in your business, get equity, and then they work the business with you, they can scale themselves later. They don't have to do that job forever.
Before you start saying, "I go to retail and lose all your margin." Make sure you've ticked all the boxes on your social. So, I would literally have a camera strapped to my head. Today should be live all day. I'm going live, right? Your whole day should be live so that at least your audience can connect to you more and you get more chance of sales. And then, um, I think with TikTok Shop and Amazon Shop and all these things, they all have to be massively optimized because an impulse buy can also be I'm swiping up. I see you and I buy. Impulse has changed. It's not just impulse in the shop. And I know as you know, you're a young guy, I'm an old guy. I have a connection to the physical world like the stores, but I'm even I'm realizing that my limiting belief of thinking people only make a purchase at point of purchase is wrong. What you've got to do is optimize your your online for purchase. I sell more books on TikTok Shop than I do in Water Street. Okay, Water Street quite rightly take a massive margin.
So, but the impulse buy now can be this. You're not going live all the time. It's a missed opportunity and it costs you near nothing to do. And then optimizing your social. So when I look at your bio on your website and look at the bio on your feed, is it the best way to buy your product instant? And I feel some sort of sense of gratification? Is every video you're putting out saying, "Don't forget you can buy a product in the link in bio?"
Well, then it's also a question of like, I don't know, like because it's like this balance between being salesy and being good for brand.
Yes. I think you can do both, right? So I can give value in my content and then ask people to buy the book. Why not? Subtle is key. I'm not I'm not saying, "Hello, please, uh, buy buy a toothpick right now, please." But what you can do, and I would test this if I was you. This is part what I'm talking about optimizing social. Yeah. Is you have a little bit of a limiting belief system right now. Your limiting belief system is if you over-pitch the product, it will piss people off. Right.
Now, the reality is if you make a really great video and at the end you very subtly in the end frame you say, "Feel free to buy the buy the products in the link in bio," people aren't going to mind, you know?
Yeah. But because part of our thought is, okay, if we're in all these retail stores, we don't need to tell people to buy it.
But why why wouldn't you do both?
I mean, I guess.
As soon as you go into retail, you're you're you're going to strip away your margin, and you're going to still have to push people to that retail store. You once you're in the retail, they're going to they're going to ride you. They're going to say, "We're only going to let you be in this store if we're selling product." So, you're going to have to make videos telling people to go into a store to buy it.
Yeah.
Right. Instead of saying, "You're on this video, click this." Every single one of your videos can have a tag on the bottom of it instantly saying, "Buy the product." Right.
Yeah.
And I'm not saying overtell all the time. I'm saying do your existing content, but every time before you push the upload button, push button, is it optimized to potentially get a sale? I'm gonna get into retail in a minute, but I just, before we go and do something totally radical we think is going to save our impulse buy problem, make sure we've created impulse buy within what we already have.
Yeah.
Right. And and I and I watched your content every day. It's not optimized for what I'm talking about. Are you in any retail stores now?
Yeah. Uh, I mean this year we were lucky enough to enter, um, a store called Normal.
Right. Now, you're getting a lot of retail sales?
Uh, and retail sales are in like really insane. Like we've constantly been selling out and like, um, been restocking the toothpicks into the stores. Like it's been insane.
I think retail is one of those things I personally have come to hate because I've seen how they treat small businesses and how they push down on margin, and then they expect you to do the marketing to get it into store.
I mean, yeah, they they definitely push hard on margin.
I have an idea for you on retail, but you've already got a working formula on retail, and I've seen some of your social media content around this. You know, you are promoting outside the store, right?
Yeah.
And that helps. So these but these guys should be paying you for that marketing.
I mean, I guess like, like brand agencies get paid by supermarkets to do their marketing.
It's probably hard hard to convince them.
No, they've got they're doing already. They're already paying a company to do their social media, 'cause I think what I was going to say, one, a couple of retail ideas I got for you, and you maybe you could test it out with Normal if you're doing so well for that product in that store. Imagine if you were promoting the store in general and doing pop-ups and doing fun. They are spending a lot of money on marketing.
Yeah. I mean, 100%. And it's kind of like this mutually beneficial thing. Like obviously we have the product in the store. If we make videos about it, not only are they benefiting, but we're also benefiting.
I'm just trying to make sure you open up your mind a little bit here, right? These guys would pay you for marketing.
Yeah.
I think marketing in the future is an income stream, and then product secondary income stream.
So I make money marketing my book.
Yeah.
Right. I did a video, £10,000 on my book. That video made about £50,000 profit.
M. So the video made 50,000 of it, and then we had sales. So I just want your mind to open up a little bit that I've seen this marketing with this store, Normal. I think you could pitch into this brand. Would you like to pay us to do some marketing?
Worst is they say no.
Yeah. And they go, "No, no, it's a mutually beneficial marketing." Let's say, you can market the out of Tesco's or Sainsbury's. M. And more people going in the store to buy your toothpick means more people going into store to buy a Christmas pudding, more people to buy Christmas crackers. So I think you have an opportunity to pitch marketing because that's what a lot of product owners don't really do very well for the supermarkets. Just start to connect these things together, right? Marketing and retail, they're all the same thing.
And then finally, and this is the content side, um, what would I do if I was you? You don't have a retailer in the UK yet?
No.
And you got Christmas, big sales.
Mhm.
I would do a fake pop-up shop.
Okay.
I would go to Carnaby Street with a table, and I would sell toothpicks, okay? And I'd have an army of students or or whatever. Every time someone walks out the shop, you say, "You want to buy toothpicks as a Christmas present for your niece, your nephew, your brother, your sister, your smelly boyfriend's breath needs sorting out, you know, whatever." I I just think that retail is what cons. Yes, you want the supermarkets to stock your product. Do not stop pushing that. But I also love the idea that you can kind of build your own like retail shop. But I think it's just about staying true to what you said earlier about your original plan. You took a risk. You did crazy stuff. You did crazy stunts. I just don't think you should change any of that. Yeah.
Um, I only think you should get more specialists in. You should be more defined in your job roles and what you're doing.
I just think you're going to blow up. Continue to blow up. We're going to launch a dream Pickum, and all the profits are going to fund people's dreams. If you want to join the waiting list to get this dream Pickum, join the link down below. We'll do a little waiting list and we'll do a gold one in there. Give away some money to whoever gets the gold one. Give some direct one-on-one mentorship from me and my team if you get the gold one. So, if you want to get one of these toothpicks, join the waiting list down below. Okay, guys. We're off to have some chicken flavored Pickums. We'll see you later. See you.