1 Day Ecom Mastermind

It's not turning on. Let's figure out why. Now we have all so far. Can you see the left and right there? Yeah, it's in the red. So watch this.

To the place. I take myself to where I swam when I met you. I spent the best days of my life on the. It's not over your treat. I just want to treat you. I just want to treat you better.

Again where we started recording. I just want to treat you. I just want to treat you. I just want to treat you. I just want to treat you better. I just want to treat you. I just want to treat you better. I just want to treat you. I just want to treat you. I just want to treat you better. I just want to treat you. I just want to treat you better. I just want to. I just want to treat you better. I just want to treat you better.

What happens when life breaks down? When there is systemic contradiction, my name symbolized all that was corrupt to society. His name all was pure and I was being held in the embrace of a man who was pure. And these sanctities were preserved in those 10 words. And it is the decentralization of all of these that has put us in the mess that we find ourselves. Isn't it true? It is much worse. The person we end up believing in anything. Think of what it is when God himself puts his arms around you and says, "Welcome home." Cheers.

What happens when life breaks down? Systemic contradiction. My name all society. His name all and I was being held in the embrace of a man who was pure. Think of what it is when God himself puts his arms around you and says, "Welcome home."

All the lights. The night has just begun and we. Hi guys, sorry we have some food and coffee outside here. They're trying to keep us safe and sound, but we're living in a world of broken glass. The night has just begun and we only want to close our eyes and take a trip around the sun. Get to the northern lights. The night has just begun. We only close our eyes. Around the south. Around the south, we're going to die. Find me through the lights. The night has just begun and we only want to close our eyes and take a trip around the sun. To know the lights. The night has just begun and we close our eyes.

No heaven on earth if I can't be with you. So I can't tell the truth. I got I got your body all over my mind. I got so high I'm off my feet. We up in the sun in our eyes. Show me just like honey. Don't need no talking. Just need your body. Heying meine never leave to keep you in my life. No need to move. Whenever you hear I feel like I can lose you. Baby, I want to ride with you. Oh, I got so high. Oh, I can't.

I got your body all over my mind. I got so up in the sun in our eyes. I don't need no just so sweet like no talking love. Show me love. Show me love. Show me love. Show me love. Show me love. Show me love. Show me love. Show me love. Show me love. Show me love. Love and stormy tonight. We can feel this magical light as the sea comes speaking to me. We're dancing and seeking the light. We're dancing the light. We're dancing. Seeking the light.

When I see these thoughts in my brain, never know my head. Don't know how your eyes are. We're dancing. We're seeking the light. We're dancing. We're seeking the light. We're dancing. Seek. The man is fall. No more. But I see it in life. But I see what I see. It's seeking light. What does seek light? But it doesn't feel quite exactly what I'm doing by your side over it. I could let you know. But I know it's on my mind. Are you really? I know exactly what I'm doing right now. I can think it over. Say you want to go. Let you know you can take it over to let you know. Say you can take it away. I could let you know. Say you take it away. I could let you know.

We always wonder why we love it. Why we love the sun. We always wonder why we love it. Why we love. We can just like baby know it. We honestly too much time. Why we love. Why we love it? Why we love why we love it? Why we love. Heat. Heat. N. I don't want I've been falling down by my side. I just need help in. I just need you in my life. Keep driving. You keep moving in the morning. Yeah. Into pieces. So alone into pieces. I'm so I'm falling into pieces. I'm so alone into pieces. So alone I'm so fallen into pieces. So alone into pieces alone keep just inside into pieces. I'm so alone. I'm so I'm so. Falling into pieces. So alone. Falling into pieces. I'm so alone.

The heart is going to turn because I remember the hardest times I don't ever remember and I'll be going over the one. I could have thought that I know at the time because I remember the hardest times I never f to be all the time. I should have been honest in my heart. I remember the sh broke. So just remember to never. Never.

Comes in. They come to build us. There is freedom with freedom. There's a battle, but you never see the end of the road. You're traveling with me now. When they come to the world between us, we know that they won't. There's a hole in the roof. My possessions are suspic. But there's no right to build a wall between us. We know that they will. Don't come in. They come. Now I'm walking again. Only shadows are barely clearing the roof. Get to know the feeling of liberation. Don't come between us. We know that they will.

Overs they I suspect in your head almost unbearable when your breath touch my neck. Next to you lost in the past. There's a clock ticking next time. Slow motion loop forgotten wishes before you are always on my mind. Is it good for you? You are always on my mind. Is it good to fall? You are always on my mind. You. I suspect in your head almost unbearable when your breath touch next to you. Lost in the past slow motion loop forot wishes as real as you are. It is it always it. Always on my mind. What is it for? You are always on my mind. You are it. You are always on my mind. Is it good to fall? You are always on my mind. Is it good? You are always on my mind.

Here you are. Took my breath away. Now I'm breathing, but I love to hit you. Walking back to see your face and I've been feeling weed in my thinking back to yesterday. Really took my breath away. Now I'm breathing but I love to hit real looking at my eyes. Only one she call the proposition. She said I like the way you move. I like your company. If you want to get used down and if you want to get loose in it really. Now I'm breathing but I love to hit rewind. Walking back to see your face and suffocate. I've been feeling weed in my thinking back to yesterday. Really took my breath away. Now I'm breathing but I love to hit rewind. See your face in suffocation.

I know I know that I'm in my basement, but I get when I walk away. I better tell her that I can't quit. I hope she doesn't mind the distance. I'm thinking the way she made her first. She said, "I like the way you move. I like another day." I said if you want to get down your head thinking back to my breath away. Now I'm breathing but I love to hit you back thinking back to yesterday. Really took my breath away. Now I'm breathing, but I love to hit back to yesterday. See your face and suffocate. I'm alone now. Leave it all behind. You made it through this for us. Have you had a million times in each so many ways to brea. There's no need to know. Closer. Show me closer. I don't want to come home anytime. Coming closer. I feel closer to come closer. Open. Hey. Hey.

Are see all that I want you to feel. Don't give me the places we can go. And it could be amazing. I can taste it. The only thing I'm feel something that you need to have if it's something for you. Heat. Heat. Hey, started in your on those blue lights. Swimming in the shadows with those blue eyes. Knew that I was before I'd be touching. Don't save me now. Staring at your body. Feel me sinking deeper in your ocean. I know I'm flying. Yeah. Tasting even me now. Don't save me now. Crazy Starink I'm too fight. Hey, hey, hey.

Hello. Hi everyone. Please take your seats. We're about to begin. Thank you. Join me. Do the things that bring me joy. Do the things that bring me joy. Do the things that bring me joy. Do the things that bring me joy. Do the things that bring me joy. Do the things that bring me joy. Do the things that bring me joy. Do the things that bring me joy. Joy. The things that bring me joy. Joy. Joy. Joy. Joy that bring me joy. That bring me joy. That bring me joy. The things that bring me joy. The things that bring me joy. The things that bring me joy. The things that bring me joy. The things that bring me joy. The things that bring me joy.

I don't need to wait for other people to join me to do the things that bring me joy. And here I am sitting in a field with absolutely nobody else around me just enjoying being outside. Pure joy, joy, joy, joy, joy, joy. Things that bring me joy. Things that bring me joy. That bring me joy. The things that bring me joy. That bring me joy. Things that bring me joy. Things that bring me joy. Things that bring me joy. Things that bring me joy.

Hi everyone. The mastermind is about to begin. If you can all take your seats and we're going to begin shortly. Thank you. Stay. Hi guys. We're about to begin the mastermind. Uh please take your seats and we're going to be getting started shortly. Amazing. I'm going to love you like I'm going. I'm going to love you like I'm going to love you. I'm going to love you like you. You ever love.

All right, everybody. Everybody, good morning and thank you so much for coming to the 2026 Miami. Thank you so much. Give yourselves a round of applause. My name is Jared Orin and I'm the CEO of Activate Talent. For those of you who don't know, we do offshore staffing for some of the biggest brands in this room, but also in the US. And we hire people from Latin America, from South Africa, everybody from AI impleers to creative strategists, you name it. And I have an incredible person from my team here, Natalia. If you could raise your hand, she's in the back. Feel free to chat with Natalyia. And so, you know, this is so special. This is our second Miami mastermind. And if you look around the room, we have incredible founders who recently launched and some doing over 500 million. We have the full comfort team here in full force in the front row. They will all do one-on-ones with you to tell you exactly. I'm just kidding. Um, we have incredible leaders from IM8. We have Glow Recipe. We have the incredible Nick Chararma over here and dozens of other fast scaling brands. And every single one of you showed up with the same raw honest bottlenecks. We have all the responses and the surveys and everything you want to work on, every question you want answered. And we are, you know, we're here to talk Tik Tok shop. We're here to talk about creative fatigue, AI leverage, retention that moves LTV. And the most important thing is for you to know that you are not alone. This room is living proof that the best operators in the game are fighting the exact same war. And they're doing it with incredible heart, grit, and zero ego. But before we go any further, I want to give a very special thank you to the one and only Hudson Leo Grande. Hudson, this entire mastermind was your idea. This is our third one. And for those of you who don't know, we've raised I think around 300,000 total for the ADAA, which was all Hudson's idea. You came to me and you said, "J, Jared, let's get real operators in one room, the ones who are actually doing it at scale and give them the tactics and the community they need." And you didn't just suggest it, you showed up. You brought incredible people. Your whole team is here. Your energy is insane. And you are definitely the second best Fortnite player in the room. And, you know, overall, we're all better because you had this vision. So, thank you. And today, we brought you five absolute titans who have already won a lot of battles and lost that you're in the middle of. They are the operators who just lived it at the highest level. We have Nick Chararma. He's the DTOC guy himself. He's the one who built and sold Chararma brands last year. Danny Young, CEO of IM8, who took one powder from zero to 120 million ARR in 11 months. That's insane. With David Beckham as his uh co-founder. Is he coming today? Dave, I heard he might be coming. Um not supposed to say anything. And so, you know, and he's going for 200 million this year. He's, you know, the company's public, so everything he does is public knowledge. You can literally just go to the stock and take a look at it. It's really interesting. And then we have Hudson, of course, founder and CEO of Comfort, the bootstrapped phenom, heading towards a billion this year through pure community, microcreators, and the most incredible team. Sarah Sarah Lee who is the co-CEO and co-founder of Glow Recipe. You cannot go into Sephora without seeing on your right hand side a Glow Recipe Encap. And you can't even go to Sephora without seeing a Glow Recipe poster on the window. It's insane. So they are crushing. And we also have Zade Ramen who's the founder and CEO of Flex. And uh, you know, Zade is building an AI native private bank. He's already doing uh close to three billion in payments and he's going to talk about that as well. A lot of people in the room are already using him and so sorry. And so lastly, I do want to give a shout out to Valentina over here. She made everything possible for today. The organization, the coordination, the way you see the room, everything about this is all Valentina. Valentina, is there anything you want to say about drinks or anything else? Hi everyone, welcome. Uh, I'm Valentina, director of events at Flex. I know a lot of you guys have traveled from around the country to be here, so thank you so much for coming. Uh, just a quick reminder, we do have coffee, tea, water, and snacks um outside in the courtyard. Um, just we don't allow any food like inside um this area. Uh, so just keep that in mind. Um, come find us if you need anything. And without further ado, please uh welcome our first speaker, Nick Sharma.

All right. How we doing, Jared? Doing great. How are you doing? I'm doing good. I woke up in my comfort sweats. I got some IM8 this morning. I washed my face with some Glow Recipe and I swiped my Flex Card to get here. Your affiliate card is amazing. Um, just a quick introduction for those of you who don't know, Nick is the founder of Chararma Brands. He is the behind the scenes engine for Fastables, Hexclad, Carowway, Chamberlain Coffee, Judy, and 80 more brands. Um, Nick has truly done it in the game. You know, he he has created so many different AI implementation tools and different playbooks that he's going to share today. Nick, if you want to just give a quick background on yourself and we'll start from there.

Yeah. So, my background is um a little non Well, it's not that nontraditional in this room because everybody's background here is a non-traditional, which is awesome. Uh my background is mainly that, you know, I was a kid not doing well in school and got into the game of social media as a result, thinking that I could go run people's accounts for a couple grand a month and pay my bills that way. And uh found myself stumbling into the world of e-commerce just by way of being on Twitter and meeting another founder whose product I really enjoyed. Ended up going to that company. It was called Hint Water, Flavored Water Company, and built their e-commerce business, led them through rebrand, brought them on Shopify, and then I turned 21 over there. So I got to do a lot of learning on my way at Hint and then joined an agency in New York. Found out the corporate life is really not one I'm meant to live and uh ended up doing some consulting which turned into a growth agency. And at this growth agency, the entire idea was just productizing what I did at the beverage company. So three main things, acquisition, retention, and web experience. So those are the three things I I feel like I'm I'm good at and I'm here to talk about. I feel like a bit of an impostor in this room because everybody here is wildly more successful, wildly more handsome, wildly more good-looking. And uh so if I've got a couple nuggets here, I'll be happy for you. But um but yeah, excited to be here.

Okay, so let's start with uh a lot of brands in this room are doing between five and 20 million. And they want to understand how to get to 50 or 100 million. you know, what's the number one execution trap that kills the momentum after their first few wins and what's the rescoping playbook that you kind of consult with brands on and and how do you get them to the next level?

So, you know, a lot of times I so on the side I do some like consulting with brands and a lot of times I feel like I feel like the dentist, you know, when you go to the dentist and you ask the dentist, "How are my teeth?" And they go, "Well, have you been flossing?" And you say, "No." Okay. Have you been brushing multiple times a day with a good brush and good toothpaste? uh kind of you know that's the kind of diagnosis I see. People come in and they say okay what's wrong here? How come I'm stuck at this level or how come I'm not able to break past this level? And a lot of times it's just almost like a common sense checklist of okay well you know most times you get to that level it's a few wins in and you think that because your few wins have gotten you to that 5 million or that seven million mark you just need to keep doing that. So it's just more ads and more creative and pushing it harder and spending it more and finding new channels. But in reality a lot of times it's also building the rest of the platform and um a lot the rest of that platform usually gets forgotten which is you know the retention side the website the landing pages side the merchandising side the offer side the subscription side you know how do you turn churn or cancellation flows into back back into another funnel to bring people back and so these are all the things that I try to look at and just try to identify you know are we are we spending $50,000 on a programmatic vendor test because we think programatic display is going to help our CPA or drive new audiences. Well, that's probably just a waste of time when we can go and figure out how to crack a new audience within Meta. And so, you know, when I when I like to look at these companies, the first thing I look at is, okay, where's the opportunity that they're not focusing on? And I just think back to my own personal pattern matching and the things I've done, a lot of times it's really dependent around meta, the website, merchandising, the offer, and then figuring out what happens to that customer as soon as they buy. And too, too often, it's just focused on the ads and specifically a lot of times just on the creative and getting the clicks from creative to the site. So, um I would say the answer to that is basically just figuring out like what is the what are the things that are working? What are the things that aren't working? Are we proactively cutting the things that aren't working? Are we figuring out how we build out the rest of that platform around it or are we just trying to focus on one thing because we think that's what got us here should get us to the next level.

So, let's talk about landing pages. People are want to know is it better to send to the PDP or is it better to send to a lander that's you know similar to the adder or can you maybe talk about when they would use a landing page versus sending traffic directly to a PDP?

Yeah, so you know my my suggestion is always test everything. You should test the homepage or collections page or PDP. You should test landing pages and within landing pages there's advertorials, there's listicles, there's you know a hero offer that you're trying to push and you just have educational content around that. You got to test them all. You might find that one specific audience of moms responds better to a collections page because that's just how they're trained to shop, right? They like looking at options and then going in and figuring out what caught their eye and how that might work. You might find that a different audience would rather see a listical. You know, guys buying IM8 might want to just see a listical and realize that there's enough proof points that they should go buy the product and it will work for them. They don't need to go and do their own research about it. So, my recommendation is always test it and you know, I'm I'm again I come from the school of thought of like test everything and just throw things at the wall. Like the beauty of meta or really any digital channel is you've got this really tight feedback loop. Whether that's understanding if people are clicking, people are landing on the site, people are staying on the site, people are scrolling halfway down, people are spending 30 seconds on the site, people are clicking the CTA to the next page. These are all events that are easily trackable. And so because you have that feedback loop, there's no need to to not test everything and see which one works. Um, you know, some brands will find that they'll test everything and they'll say, "Well, for us, PDP is the best thing." And that might be true for a certain selection of products or a certain audience you're going after, but it might be completely different for a different audience or a different product you're selling among your catalog.

So, let's go back to the mom's example. You you found that mom's work for you. We just we you know we just read and lost 72 hours this guy who grew to a billion in sales for his teleahalth company with you know very shady but affiliate focused driven tactics and when you talk okay moms work really well for my brand they're going to this advertorial that works well from there how do you find the mom creator community and how do you exploit that and and target them to then maximize that that sales for your brand with that landing page like how do you grow from there once they hit that Mark.

So, I mean, there's definitely softwares that exist to go find influencers. My personal way of where I like to go find influencers that I've done for 10 years is I just go on Tik Tok or go on YouTube shorts or go on reals and I go find, you know, let's say we're selling um flavored water, hint water, right? I might go to Tik Tok and and look for a mom who's talking about quitting Diet Coke or look for somebody who's talking about transitioning to a healthier lifestyle. And then whoever's got good engagement there, regardless of how many followers they have or how many times they've posted um you know, on behalf of other brands, I'm going to go and find people who are are just basically good at talking to a camera. A lot of times these used to be YouTubers because you know vlogging was basically speaking to the camera and resonating with the person on the other side. But now you can find a lot of these people on Tik Tok or uh YouTube still or Instagram wherever. And um for me, I personally still like to do it the manual way. I think that you at least for your the audience of creators you work with. Um, if you do it manually, you can you one, you just hone in a little bit better on who these people are, especially if they're your first 50 to 100 people you're working with, but two is you can also generate a feedback loop with creators. Like, you know, my one of my favorite examples is Sephora. Sephora has a contractual meeting with all their creators on a quarterly basis to just hear what their audience is asking them for or telling them about or what kind of questions they want to learn about skincare products and whatnot. So, so yeah.

Okay. So, you're speaking at NRF on the top 10 retention tactics. You know, maybe you could share some of that today and and what brands are doing to increase retention. You also have your own AI advertorial creator, right? So you're super familiar with with Claude and um and Clawbot I think as well you know, are you doing anything on the retention side with Claude or Clawbot to increase LTV and increase retention life cycle?

Yeah, I mean, there's been you guys have probably started to see there's now um, you know, ESPs aren't fully doing this yet, but there's layers on top of ESPs you can add where you can add a model layer. So, you know, if you come to my website and I see you looked at the black jeans size, you know, 32. When I email you back, I'm gonna I'm gonna speak about that in the actual text, not just a catalog looking, you know, swap in for the product you were looking at. And um we're kind of in this space right now where well, first of all, to answer your question, the top top retention tactic is just speak more personally, more personally, be more personalized. And you know, in me in my mind, retention has always just been a battle of being a top five placeholder in somebody's mind. So whether you're selling or whether you're selling jeans or whether you're selling a supplement, it's all about how do you just make sure that you are constantly top five or top 10. So the person who's consuming it is reminded of the benefits and why they started in the first place and they keep coming back. The the best way I've been approaching this is basically um wait by a show of hands, how many you guys are using AI right now or tinkering with AI and plugging in models and then how many of you guys are using it in a way where you're actually grabbing API keys from models and putting it into your own software stacks. Okay, amazing. So that's where I think so so you know AI when it started was anonymous Indians, right? It was just a bunch of Indian guys doing things based on what they saw on a camera. Then we went to chat GPT and it was more generative AI. And now we're at this point where you can just pull out the models specifically for what you need. So you can create a flow that's okay, Jared hits the site, the pixel identifies him, goes and matches him in a database, uses that information to write an email, send that back to Clavio, and then send it out to Jared. That type of those types of workflows are I think where we're going in the next, I don't know, two to four months, maybe even sooner with how fast things are coming out. and uh and where I think brands will have the biggest advantages in terms of time and resources saved to do more work and uh work harder for you.

There's a platform called out something out. Signal. Outer signal right? And so what Cody is doing or what he posted on Twitter was that he's taking all those all that customer data feeding into Claude and then generating specific customer centric Clavio retention emails with different flows. So that was really cool to see.

Yeah, there's the honestly the cool part is like so I I'll say it'll take you for those who didn't raise your hands to the second question. It'll take you two hours to go from not knowing anything about how to use these platforms to being able to do that. And that two-hour investment will get you to unlock things like what Cody's doing or you know there's there's tons of models. The ones we hear about are Claude and Gemini and Open AAI but you know there's a bunch of Chinese models you've never heard about. There's a bunch of Indian models you've never heard about. and the ability to understand how to construct models in a workflow is probably going to be the single biggest thing you could do in the next three months.

What is this $500 fake brand test?

So, the $500 fake brand test is uh basically what it sounds like. It's how can I test something for as cheap as possible and understand if there's room here or if there's legs here to continue. And so, you know, that number's probably gone up a little bit now. Maybe it's five grand, but you can still, you know, if you call it all in, maybe 40, 50K, you can pretty much test and even launch a brand with physical product if you wanted to. The entire idea behind that is basically, you know, you have these feedback loops that are so tight and and so quick you can spend $500 and understand, okay, is this is headline one, two, or three going to get the best click for my messaging? Okay, now I've locked in headline one. Now, let's go to the next thing. from a creative standpoint, should we focus on video? Should we focus on lifestyle video, studio shot, UGC, founder centric, and what's going to get the best clickthrough? And and boom, you've understood that. Basically, the entire idea is just quickly testing things to understand, okay, is there does this product or does this brand that I want to try to put out have legs? And um if it does, you'll see those numbers come through in the $500 test, right? Even if you're not acquiring a ton of customers in 500 bucks, you can see that the CPMs are are there. You can see the clickthrough rate. you can understand your bounce rate, you can understand your opt-in rate for email, and you can use a lot of these numbers to kind of judge and figure out whether something has legs or not. Um, I would say the $500 has probably gone up a little bit now, but you know, for the most part, the the the concept is still there where you can test something and if it's got legs, hit the gas pedal.

Can you can you talk about one time pre-sale where you thought your business was going to end and what you did about it?

Yeah, I mean, there was a there was a celebrity makeup brand that we launched last year at Chararma Brands and um before it launched, you know, we were the the CEO of this brand is kind of like a more traditional CPG background in beauty and personal care. And so everything we were doing pre-launch um directed by them was like forecasts and what's our cost per click and what's our bounce rate going to be and what's our you know all these things that us as like in the weeds marketers were like why is a CFO even wasting time trying to calculate number of sessions we're getting in the next quarter and um and and it was it was a huge like influencer celebrity brand so part of the risk there was also like okay this is a big influencer but can she move units can she actually move products and drive sales And um, you know, in that in that case there wasn't anything too specific we did that was not that, you know, to counter the thought that we didn't think it was going to sell. We just really doubled down on all the fundamentals right is our opt-in really good when we launch. Is the UX of the site really good? Is it really easy to understand knowing that these are going to be majority maybe you know 15 to 30 year olds coming from Tik Tok traffic maybe in a Tik Tok browser or an Instagram browser. And um it turns out it was one of the biggest Shopify launches uh ever.

What contributed to the launch that crushed it?

The biggest part was a pre-signup list. So almost every day for about 14 days prior, we had a different kind of hero piece of content go out from the creator and uh there was something not the exact same piece, but something similar to it that went out from the brand page. And we just basically built up this very quick trust between the creator and the brand name by pushing out a bunch of content the two weeks leading up. I think we collected something like three to 400,000 email addresses as a result.

Where did you put the creators? Discord, WhatsApp. How did you manage them?

So the the creator I'm talking about now is almost like one one famous influencer. Got it. Okay. Um big YouTuber and um and then and then after that they started to take their you know creators they were working with in a bigger way and put them into Discord. But In this case, it was really like collab posts from the influencer with the brand um on a daily basis with really really high quality content. That was one another thing that I thought was interesting was uh you know, everybody's always about like low quality content at a high volume, which I think works once you you're in the game, your foot's in the door, and you're you're established to some degree, like people know you're there. But to get in the door, the high quality content is really what took the lead.

Out of everybody you consult for, all these really incredible brands, what is something they are doing with Claude or Claudebot that we might not be aware of that hasn't been shared on Twitter because nobody wants to share what's actually working. They just want to talk about how it doesn't work. Um, what is working that you're seeing? And um, yeah, let me start with that.

Yeah. Well, it's funny. I saw that thread on Twitter yesterday and basically if you guys didn't see it, it's just people being like, is is there any real use here or are we just making things and then we don't use them after 24 hours, which is probably majority of the tools. Um, which to the first point I'll say that's there's a lot of value in that. There's a lot of value in going and making something for 24 hours and never touching it again because you're understanding the guard rails and the how of how of everything works, right? Like the way you use AI today is like the equivalent of using Facebook power editor, you know, 10 years ago because you're seeing how all the pieces work together. In six months from now, more of these pieces are going to be hidden because they're just going to keep happening on their own. So the more you do today, the more context you have. For me, I found that there's there's not like uh it's not it's not as easy as just out hiring a role by creating some piece of AI or creating some sort of workflow or process. I found that it's more like the people who are doing things at a high level can now do them at a even higher level. So for example, if you have somebody whose entire job is CRO, right, on the website, you now don't need to wait, you know, a week to go get your designer to design something and then another week to develop it, right? You can get that done instantly. If you're putting up a new advertorial, you don't need to wait, you know, three days for somebody to turn that around and then go through a day's worth of edits and then another day of revision and then it comes back, gets final approval from the brand team and then it goes live, but oh wait, now you need to optimize the publisher site because there's a weird popup or the the button you want is not there. That can all be done in a matter of, you know, 40 minutes now, right? And so I think I think a lot of the steps that used to take, you know, multiple days are what now is getting shrunk. Whether it's.

Computer use. Yeah. So, computer use is really cool. For those of you who don't know, it can just take over your computer and let's say you're QCing on or QAQC on Shopify, any landing pages or anything that you want in your app or whatever it is, it will debug it in real time and then fix the errors and relaunch it and completely QC everything that you're doing. And it's the coolest thing ever when you see it actually do it and give you a full report that's 10 pages long that you'll never read. And uh it's it's truly incredible.

Yeah. I mean I um, you know, there's one prompt I love using which is after something after I have a live link I'll say all right generate five QA agents with five completely person five completely different personalities and archetypes and personas based on who is likely to come to my site and run a few full QA tests. So you might have one going through desktop in a way that's a little more frantic. You might have one on mobile that's you know more of an older person. But similar point here at the end you get a QA list that again would have costed you more and would have taken you more time. Um, so I think I think that with a lot of these workflows I mean I've built a full AI advertorial creator which has all of the learnings that I want in any good advertorial and I can immediately now host an advertorial. So if we write an advertorial on uh IMA for example we can immediately host it on you know fit thingsaily.com. No need to go and talk to the publisher. No need to do anything. That's where I think AI is super beneficial. You can create, you should basically just think about what are the things that you are doing that are taking too long. Is it, you know, is is the QA part of a website before it goes live with a new theme. Is that taking too long? Well, you could build an app that has, you know, a hundred different personas where it QAs constantly. Um, you know, are you trying to figure out how you make emails better or more personalized? Well, you can build a better email creator.

What makes your AI advertorial creator so good? Like what's it trained off of?

Well, you know, for me, uh, now looking back on it, I feel extremely fortunate that for the last 3, four years, I spoke for an hour on a weekly basis about something that was really relevant in e-commerce with my podcast. I've been doing the same thing with the newsletter for maybe four or five years. I have, and then I've done a ton a ton of other podcasts for other people. And you know the great thing is those are basically all my active thoughts over the last four or five years on e-commerce whatever I think is good and those are now all consolidated into like 8,000 pages in a markdown file where uh any agent.

Can you explain what a markdown file is?

Yeah. So a markdown file is like a txt file but read by agents meaning you know Claude Manis open aai etc. And a markdown file is only different from a txt file in the sense that you can actually, you know, a txt file is just plain text, no formatting. A markdown file has some, you know, it's got like two hashtags to indicate that that's a headline one or a headline two, whatever it may be. So it's basically a plain text document that is extremely easy to uh consume and learn from for these agents. So then they can use that as a filter. So for example, if we were to write an advertorial with chat GPT and then you write a parallel advertorial with Scriven, which is the app that I made, then you would see right away the differences in maybe the length, the tone of voice, how long before the brand gets introduced, you know, how we bring the founder story in, how we go and source reviews or posts from Grock or from Reddit or wherever and bring those in. And uh the other thing too is when you have your own app or you create your own app, you can also like plug in multiple models. You might have Grock to go and do research. You might have Gemini to synthesize a bunch of uh recorded calls that you have which are also a great source of training data for anything that you do because it's actively talking about how you're thinking. Um and then you bring it all together and create sort of a final product.

Really cool. What questions do we have for Nick? The one thing we didn't talk about which I think is actually a huge force multiplier is um is offshore talent and which I know is you know plug to activate talent sure whatever but I'm telling you guys offshore talent runs circles around onshore talent when you find the right people and I'm talking about somebody who is maybe making you know anywhere from 1 to 4k a month around the world is competing at a level of somebody here making 150 to 300K annually, the same level of output, and you add AI and the and and not only add AI and you know give them the abilities to use the software, but like actually teach them, spend time with them and grow them in terms of what is possible from an AI standpoint. And I'm I'm convinced that is the next big break. That's our number one role is the chief of staff or an EA that we train on Claude and then place in the companies or we just we just did one for Hexcloud and we place their their implement essentially and uh and he's got an incredible background. He comes from Salesforce and amazing but I totally agree with you 100%. Um anyways, what questions do you have for Nick? Anything is on the table. You can ask anything. Yeah, why don't you just stand up and and I'll repeat it. Go ahead. Creative director.

Yeah, it's a good question. So how do you almost weaponize your creative strategist in a more effective way either leveraging AI or or maybe some other tools, right? So um you know I I think one is is like just immerse them within all the platforms and let them go and learn the models, right? Like I said earlier, all the models have different strengths and um sometimes there's little nuggets just within that that you can pull from. But to me the the whole opportunity here is one is um you know one is obviously like using AI to to just bounce things back and forth or share ideas and sort of give it like like one one way I like using AI is giving it an idea and then it comes back to me with 10 more almost like a I call it like the lookalike lookalike idea generator, right? So like how do you give it something and and get something back? The other thing is then how do you actually get these creative strategists and try to download their brain as much as you can into a you know uh into one of into into AI. But the way I'm thinking about it is like ideally you're using not just a regular closed closed source platform like a regular Claude. You might be using something like an open claw where you're able to download it into there and save it to a local memory file or some sort of a markdown file which then you can use elsewhere. Um to be honest I don't have like a specific format of doing this. My best way so far of doing it has been um you know trying to figure out a series of questions you can produce from the model to then ask your strategist. And it's it's a bit of a like it is essentially an interviewing process to some degree. But the more you can kind of make that a part of a daily ritual whether like for example every night my Claudebot his name is Jet. He.

asked me three really deep questions that sort of help him understand more of how I think. So, you know, I can just quickly pull up last night's questions as an example. And just while he's pulling that up, it's like the most incredible thing he said is, the more you fill the markdown file, the more you spend time on the markdown file, the better output you're going to have.

>> 100%. So last night I was doing too much.

>> Talk to us, Jet.

>> Okay, so Jet asked three questions. One, when you're evaluating a new opportunity, a deal, a brand, a partnership, what's the internal filter? What makes you say yes versus no? The second one, what's the annoying thing I do or bots like me do that annoys you most that you haven't told me yet? And the third one is, what do you, where do you want to be in 12 months? Not the business, but you personally. So now, these three questions, right? If it's asking me three questions, in your case, it might be more around the creative side. It might be, "Hey, take a look at this ad and give me your opinion." It might be, um, might be the other way around. It might be, "Hey, let's build a swipe file of stuff and submit it and try to identify patterns."

There's another thing I built because, uh, for that same reason, called swipe.nick.co, and it's basically just a collection of swipe files of landing pages. So, anybody in my audience can go submit a landing page and immediately, uh, once I approve it as a good landing page, it pulls out everything that's good about it, everything that's bad about it. Um, what's consistent across other landing pages that are good that it also does. Um, and basically, you know, again, it just kind of like makes that process a little bit faster. But I guess the short answer for you is like, figure out that knowledge transfer process. Um, and, you know, the way I'm, I, the way that I think about using Jet or, you know, your AI is try to think of it more as like a second brain. So, how are you able to give it more context so it understands more? So, your creative strategist, if they use Fireflies or Otter or Granola, one of these call recorders, all those transcripts should be pushed in. That's where the real sauce is.

>> One more. Go ahead.

>> Yeah. So I'm curious, you talked a lot about AI like workflows and things like that, like Claude and OpenCLAW and things like that. Um, I'm curious about your opinion on like the brands in the room using software like, obviously I'm the co-founder of a software company. Should they use software like mine or should they just like not pay me and automate it all themselves? Like, what's the balance there? When do you try to automate stuff yourself using Claude versus using software like mine? Like, Cody Cody asked me like four times a week for an API for example, because he wants to just do it himself. So curious on your thoughts on that.

>> Yeah, I mean, I think the, you know, I think like if, if you're a software company, you're sort of now service as a service with a software. Uh, there's got to be more, I think you have to provide. Like, if I'm thinking as a founder in this room specifically, everybody here is extremely cost-conscious and knows exactly where every last penny is spent. And that's probably how they're looking at this and approaching it. I would imagine there's also a world where a lot of people are going to say, "Oh, let me go do this on my own," and then when it doesn't work, I'm going to come back to you.

>> Um, so yeah, I don't really have a great answer there. I think the API is an easy unlock for you to bridge the gap between the two because people can bring your the goodness of your product into theirs, which is, I think, where a lot of software is going to be built, you know, by companies themselves or brands themselves with APIs being plugged in. Um, but at the same time, I still think we're in a spot where people are, you know, out of convenience, people will come and work with you directly too.

>> Amazing. Let's give a round of applause for Nick. All right, everybody. Let's move to our second speaker. Meet Danny Young. Danny is a five-time founder, high school dropout, selling mangoes in San Francisco, moving to Hong Kong, starting a Groupon-like competitor only to be bought by Groupon, and becoming the CEO of Groupon East Asia. He's the builder of Hong Kong's first NASDAQ Unicorn, Prenetics. He's the now today he's the co-founder and CEO of Prenetics and the force behind IM8 Health. It's the world's fastest growing supplement brand co-founded with David Beckham and backed by number one tennis star Aryna Sabalenka. And we also have a new celebrity face as well. And so please give a round of applause for 0 to 100 million ARR Danny Young. Let's go.

>> All right, Danny, if you can tell us a little bit about your background, how did you get here? How did this happen?

>> Um, firstly, yeah, guys, I want to give you guys a cheat code since we're talking about the AI piece. So, I've been here in the US for the last 10 days. Cheo use Manis. Madness is like amazing. People think it's a Chinese company, but Manis is just a bother for like $2 billion, right? So, I use it every single day. I'm like on the top-tier subscription. I'm not a shareholder, by the way, of that, but it's just amazing for everyone to use. Yeah. Um, but going back now, thank you Hudson. Thank you Jared for having me today. Yeah. My story is, uh, a little bit unconventional. Um, I was a very bad kid. My parents grew up. We had no money. I immigrated to the US at the age of five. Started selling baseball cards at the age of 12. Uh, at 15, I got kicked out of three high schools and not just one, right? Uh, and I was like, after the third time, I was like, "Yeah, school is not for me." Uh, you look at me now, I got kicked out for fighting every single time and I was like, uh, not for me. Then I started telemarketing at the age of 15. Uh, by the time I was like 16, I was already managing people in their 30s because that was the kind of like the only route for me because I was hanging out with some very bad kids, gangsters, and blah, blah, blah, and they were all older. But I look at them, they're like, "Oh, [ __ ] these guys don't have any money, right?" So, I was like, "What do I do?" So I started working at, and I started, uh, you know, working at internet companies at 24. This is where I started selling mangoes. Uh, literally, I was look, I was going to the fruit markets at 6:00 a.m. every day to pick out the best mangoes, watermelons, coconuts, and all that stuff. Uh, it was a restaurant business, but it's a Chinese dessert restaurant. I franchised from Hong Kong to the US. So, I did that for about three, four years. Uh, it was a great learning experience. Yeah. But always felt like I could do more. And then my friend, just one conversation. She's like, "Hey, uh, she's a hotel interior designer." She was like, "I'm looking for furniture in the US for some hotels." I'm like, she's like, "She can't find it." I'm like, "Why don't you go to China?" She's like, "I don't know how to." I'm like, "Why don't I do it for you?" And that time, this was very early days in Alibaba. And I just searched Alibaba, find custom furniture. Of course, I messed up the first times because you really have to focus on the quality. Uh, and then after a few times, and we, we did well, but again, I think you just have to seize that opportunity. But it seems there's a lot of, um, early founders here. I'll share one funny story. Now, I look back, it's really funny. Uh, one time, I again, going back to my co-calling days in telemarketing, right? I co-called MGM City Center Director of Purchasing, Erin Ham, and I still remember that conversation. I'm like, "Hey, can we have a meeting?" Surprising to me, she's like, "Let's meet next week in Las Vegas, right?" At the time, I didn't have any employees, right? But strategically thinking, you're like, "MGM, they're not going to work with a small company." And perception is reality, right? So, then I got my girlfriend at the time and my best friend at the time like, "You guys have to come to Vegas with me. You guys have to pretend to be my employees, right? I'll give you guys business cards, blah, blah, blah." I give them the business cards and etc. And then they pretended they're my employees. They didn't see, they didn't say a single thing in the whole meeting, right? And then I talked and everything etc. And then after the meeting, got back and then it's like, "Oh, I said, thank you so much for meeting me." Then I would sign out of my email account and pretend I'm the other employee to say, you know what, uh, next steps, you would talk to with me. And I think the key thing when you're a small company, no one wants to work with a small company, right? Because there's too big of a risk. So you have to give the perception that you're a much bigger company if you're a small company, right? So that's very, very key. So that was kind of a, a funny thing early on.

>> That's an amazing story. Um, you know, the first question that people had for you in, uh, in the survey that we did is that you took IM8 from 0 to 120 million ARR in 11 months in the most saturated supplement category on the planet for CEOs and operators that are fighting crowded markets. What was the single biggest execution lever that separated IM8 from every meto brand, science board, production, formulation, or go-to-market? Like, what's the exact sequence of moves every founder should copy before they burn cash testing ads, and if they don't have immediate access to David Beckham?

>> Yeah, I mean, it's a great question and to be completely transparent, honest, I don't believe we could have been able to build this because everyone says, "Oh, wow. We grew so fast, right?" The reality is, I couldn't have been able to do this without my last 30 years of entrepreneur experience, right? Just going through a lot of the failures, what worked, what doesn't work. So I was able to, because as an entrepreneur, you're making like tens, 20, 30 decisions on a daily basis, but we're able to do it so fast because I have so much experience built up, you know, from my time at Groupon, right? So, you know, after the hotel furniture, I did Groupon, right? So, I, I moved from US to Hong Kong and basically, span of four weeks, and to launch an e-commerce company, I never did e-commerce company before, right? I never lived in Hong Kong before, even though I'm looks, I'm Chinese, right? But I never lived in Hong Kong. And six months after, we were then acquired by Groupon, uh, at 51% majority stake, and then we led that to being the largest e-commerce company East Asia in 20204. So, that I think provided the backbone or the infrastructure for us to scale, you know, basically looking at customer access, landing pages, and now we can do all of these different things so fast with AI. So, going back to the question, I think it was a combination of all those different things I learned at Groupon and scaling that very, very fast. It was also a combination of, you know, the last 10 years, I've also founded Prenetics, which is a life sciences diagnostics testing company, right? And taking a very scientific approach, um, you know, to consumer and then put into IM8.

>> So, did you pivot with with Prenetics? Because you were already a life scientist, you were already doing this, like, how, how did that come about?

>> Yeah. So, I mean, I think that's also a very crazy story thinking back. So, during COVID times in Hong Kong, you know, we pivoted to doing PCR testing, uh, to the tune of, in the span of about two and a half years, we did 700 million revenue. Uh, at one point, we did 40,000 PCR tests on a daily basis. And we started that pivot in three weeks, getting PCR tests out there. It was like two, three thousand people, crazy supply chain, you know, 24/7 operations, literally everyone, myself, including the executive team and works, were working, you know, 18 hours a day for about two and a half years for COVID, right? And then we had a billion-dollar valuation when we listed in 2022. So, you know, I was pretty happy with that, right? But, however, I still today, I still have not sold a single share of Prenetics. Um, and we had $1 billion valuation and we dropped down to 40 million market cap within 18 months. All right. So, at that point, the great thing about that is I really know who my friends are, right? Because when you're at the height, everyone wants to be your friend. You're like packed for like months, blah, blah, blah. Everyone again was in Hong Kong, right? So, it's also really rare to have a company listed on the NASDAQ. And, you know, at when we're at 40 million market cap, we're like, "Oh, [ __ ] we really need to do something, you know, dramatic." And we needed to go all in on this because I had shareholders. And to be fair, like even today, you know, I could be sitting on the beach every day if I wanted to, just given, you know, what I've done in my past. But I also have a big responsibility to my shareholders. And I can tell you, every single one of my friends became a shareholder of mine, right, in that journey, you know, from Prenetics up to leading the public company. So, I'm not gonna let them down. And then when we knew we needed something, this is where we're thinking, "Okay, how do I merge my experience with consumer and sciences?" And then wanted to get into the supplement space, but it's such an incredibly, uh, competitive market. When many people told me, "Hey, don't get into the supplement industry because, you know, there's a lot of bad apples, bad eggs, you know, so, and everyone's launching a new supplement like every day, right?" And coincidentally, this is where I always believe in fate and time. Um, and coincidentally, right around this time, I still wasn't sure that I would get into the supplement space. And then my friend, given my business background, introduced me to David Beckham, um, over, and it was a very casual conversation. It wasn't even planned. I was with my friend in Hong Kong. He's like, "Hey, Danny, I'm going to see David for dinner in like two weeks." He's like, "You, do you want to join?" I'm like, "Yeah, there's no down." There wasn't any downside I saw, right? So, I flew over to London. I met with David. We got along really great, and he was very intrigued about my consumer background and my science background, mainly because for him, trust and credibility is the most important. Because I'm sure you can imagine, for the last 30 years, everyone's been pitching David to do a supplement, and he's rejected. Um, and, you know, we got along really well, and we said, he said to me, he's like, "If he puts his name on this product as a co-founder, then you have to promise me it will be the best product in the world." Because if something happens to the brand, no one's going to care about Danny. They're all going to go after David, right? And he also said, "It has to taste good."

>> Is there anything you can share that makes it the best in the world? I mean, you have some of your incredible team here as well, you know. Is is there something specific you can share that's very detailed?

>> Yeah. And and again, I don't, I never point anything to like one specific thing. It's a combination of hundreds of different things that I think we, looking back, we did right. Starting with the name, the colors, we just want, we wanted to be a disruptor in a new category. So, everyone knew about greens powders, right? So, if we launch another greens powder, we'll just be one of many, right? And then so we took a big chance of launching a reds powder, which, to be honest, no one knew what a reds powder was, right? So, if we wanted to come into the market, we knew we had to be disruptors from a brand positioning perspective. I've, and then on the product side, we looked at, okay, you know, I, I literally tested like 30 to 40 different of the greens products out there, looking at their clinical dosage, their formulations, and say, "Okay, how can we do better than every one of these guys?" Right? And then we said, "Hey, you know, we want to create something which has clinical dosages." Yeah. So, if you look at our ingredient list, we have 90 ingredients, A to Z, prebiotics, probiotics, postbiotics, 100 milligrams of CoQ10 that you normally won't get, 500 milligrams of MSM. So, clinical doses were key. And even before we launched the brand, we ran a clinical trial, which is also unheard of in the supplement industry. We had NSF certification for sport. So, that means if you're an athlete, you know, it's free from 280 banned substances.

>> How long did that take to get?

>> I mean, everything. Yeah. Again, was it, was it from the time I met David until we got the product out to the market, it was roughly about 18 months. Uh, but we worked with an amazing scientific advisory board. So, the likes of, you know, Dr. Don Mule Museam from, uh, the Mayo Clinic. We even had the former chief scientist of NASA, James Green, on our board. Right. So, we have some amazing scientists that collectively hundreds of years of experience. And then I'm working with them on the day-to-day basis to get this out.

>> Okay. So with CAC, kind of switching topics here, with CAC climbing everywhere, what's the highest ROI retention lever operators should install immediately? Creative testing machines, customer journey ownerships, post-purchase flows. You know, you guys are a massively, you know, subscription company with a rising AOV constantly. You know, how do you get this done?

>> Yeah. So, um, our CAC journey and average order value, right? So, last year when we started out, our average order value is about $110. Yeah. And our CAC is about, you know, 130, right? Uh, in the quarter, Q1 of some this year, we've actually introduced a 90-day subscription. And because we can do that now, because we have social proof. We couldn't do this previously because, you know, who's going to pay upfront, you know, basically, you know, three months if they haven't tried the product? But now we have 16,000 reviews online. We have all, a lot of these athlete ambassadors. So, we were able to introduce a 90-day subscription program, and that got our average order value double to roughly about $220 right now. Um, and our CAC actually still remains the same in terms of the ratio. And so, we're very happy about that. So, any new customer coming into our website, they're averaging, average order is $220. Three months upfront, we ship one time, and so that's been very good for us, uh, at least in this quarter.

>> So, you have a new celebrity too. So, I want to get into ads with TikTok because I, I love your, what you guys are doing. Um, but you have a new celebrity. Can you talk about that and and any anything specific about the deal and how that happened?

>> Yeah. Um, so very excited. We just announced this yesterday. Um, so we just announced Giannis, um, as our new global ambassador and shareholder. And then so, thank you. Thank you. Um, we also have Giannis' family office CEO here. So, if you guys want to pitch to Dylan, he's there. Yeah.

>> Dylan, raise your hand. Where are you?

>> Where where's Dylan go? Yeah, he's here. He he left.

>> He's with David.

>> He's Okay. Yeah, but he he also invested still in the family office there. So, uh, yeah, I mean, that happened again. I think we've been very fortunate, um, with our product. We've had amazing athletes that just love the product and they've actually are the ones reaching out to me, right? So, it's a very different perspective, right? So, we had this happen originally, you know, with Aryna Sabalenka, world number one tennis player. She was on the product for three months, um, last year before, you know, she actually her, she felt greater energy, recovery. I'm sure for any athlete, they're monitoring their diet and performance on a daily basis very, very intricately. And then she said she felt great. She contacted me. We had the same thing happen to Ali Berman, another amazing F, uh, athlete, F1 driver. And recently, will be on this, right? So, and one of, one thing about these partnerships is that it's a combination of cash and equity. And I think that's very important because a lot of founders here, they're like, you know, they, they want to maintain their equity stake, but the reality is, you have, maintain 95, 100% of equity, but it doesn't worth anything. Why, why bother, right? So, I've always been very flexible, even at early stages of a company, to reward equity. And for these athletes, it also creates lots of upside for them because it goes beyond a transaction, right? Because if you're just giving them cash, etc., you know, they'll just look like, "Oh, you know what, they'll just do the minimum required." And you don't want that. You actually want to have authentic relationships with each of your ambassadors, you know, which I'm very fortunate to be able to have authentic and real relationships with them.

>> I'm not sure what you can say publicly or not when it comes time to doing a deal with Giannis or anybody else or anybody in this room that wants to do a celebrity deal. Where can they get screwed over and how do these people expect to get either paid back or do they get quarterly distributions or how does that work?

>> Yeah, I mean, the the devil's in the details, right? For a lot of these contracts, right? Again, you want to, again, for for us, wise also, one thing you have to do is like, for each of these bigger ambassadors, we don't do anything less than a three-year deal, right? So that's also very important. It's not like we don't want to do a single post and blah, blah, blah, etc., because it's also very inauthentic for the brand side as well as to their side because if it's just one post or even one year is not so authentic. So, you have to make sure that you firstly make sure that it's aligned that, and I always tell them, "Are you really using the product?" Oh, by the way, here's Dylan. Yeah. See, there, there's Dylan. Yeah. From from Giannis's team. Um, yeah. So, the first thing you have to make sure they're real users of the product because nowadays, you know, consumers are able to spot what's inauthentic and authentic. Right. Number one, make sure that they're real users of the product, that they're also open to a three-year relationship, and that you also have category exclusivity, right? Because if, let's say, you know, Giannis is well, you're pitching IM8 today and pitching AG1 tomorrow, it's like [ __ ] right? That doesn't work. So, you have to make sure that you get that category exclusivity, which is very important. And that means they're genuine users of the product, right? And again, there's always this tendency to try to just do something with them, but again, you want to hold out for a long-term relation which works, uh, best for both sides.

>> Okay, let's get into something super fun, the bounty board.

>> So, for those of you who don't know, um, Danny has a really cool program internally, uh, for Claude and AI and a lot of different types of tools. And they have a bounty board ranging from hundreds of dollars to, and stop me if I'm saying too much, um, tens of thousands of dollars to solve different challenges in the company. And anybody from the top to anybody from the bottom of the company can try and achieve these challenges to to solve the bottlenecks in the business. So, I don't want to give away too much, so I kind of want you to talk about it.

>> Yeah, I didn't know you were going to ask about this. Yeah. Uh, right before I left for Hong Kong, we, so we did, again, I'm a big believer in Claude, Claude.co, etc. Anyone can build right now, doesn't matter who you are, right? Is that you don't have to be a coder, and it's so easy. So, and the reality is for your teams and employees, if they're not used to using AI or creating applications, it's very difficult for them to get started. And you also have to give it a reward, right? So, of course, you can just tell them, "Hey, you know, use this or you'll get fired," right? You can do it that way, right? But we chose to, you know, what? We, we had a Claude AI workshop about two weeks ago, the first one in a series of Claude AI.

>> By the way, he he tweeted about all of that and so if you look at his tweets, he shows different pictures and images of everyone doing a couple of things he's going to talk about. So definitely look him up on Twitter and he'll, he'll you can see a lot of the posts about it too.

>> Yeah. Yeah. So, we, we did a workshop and then so, you know, about 30, 30, 40 people in the Hong Kong office, we brought people in, and everyone had to get their computers and actually build something with Claude code, not just use AI, right? Because using AI is like very easy, but yeah, what can you build part of your workflow that's something that you're doing on a manual basis? And we're forcing people to do it. And then the great thing about this is then after, you know, 30, 60 days, I actually know who the super brains are, right? Because at the end of the day, you want super brains, individuals that use AI and also make good judgment. Everyone else is dead weight if they're not doing that, right? And then, yeah, go ahead. Uh, and and then basically, what we did then is, you know, instead of just telling everyone, "Do this," we, we had a list of 50 different items that anyone can work on to solve, right? So, it could be something about retention, customer service, whatever it is. And we gave out a pool of 5 million HK dollars, you know, which is about $700,000 USD. So, $100,000 HKD for each one of these bounties. And anyone can sign up to do it. So, then everyone's very excited, right? Because at the end of the day, you know, the reality is, people get motivated by money.

>> I heard you're doubling all that as well. I'm just kidding. But, um, my question though is, with everybody in the company doing this or trying to do this and solve the bottlenecks, is that taking attention away from what they are currently doing or should be doing to scale the business?

>> Um, yeah, for me, I don't believe so. I actually believe it's a necessity if they want to stay relevant in the business and in the company, right? Because again, I think AI is moving so fast. If you're not at the forefront of this, you'll get left behind, right? Not just for the company, for their own good as well, right? Because if they're not going to be able to survive at, you know, Prenetics or IM8, guarantee you in six, 12 months of time, they may be able to make it somewhere else, but they're also not going to be able to survive. Yeah. So, I think we did that as a way to, you know, do it for them, but as well as for the company. So, everyone becomes more valuable. They become more valuable not just to the company, but their own self-worth. Um, and, yeah, so I think again, I tell them, "Hey, if you're, you still have to do your whatever your responsibilities are, but I don't care if you don't sleep, right? You have to like do this to be able to stay relevant to the business and the company in this competitive environment."

>> Can you share a bottleneck that someone has solved and what that look like? You know, are they connecting it to NetSuite so they can understand and maybe not pay for additional users and query NetSuite to understand where inventory is going or?

>> Yeah, I think that's key, right? You be, you have to be able to connect all these AI systems like Nick said, to all the API keys, right? So, I was with, you know, Samantha the other day, and then we, just head of operations. We just solved something where we have lot, we have a lot of orders, uh, and then there's a lot of manual messy entries orders with the order systems come in, and then some individual basically created an application to automate that process. So, basically, we don't have to do these manual order entries from a supply chain perspective.

>> Very cool. And it's so easy, right? So, but then sometimes people are so scared to do it because they don't want to look stupid. Correct. That's the reality. So, you have to just show them step by step how to do it. And if they still can't learn, then they're not going to be a super brain. So.

>> Something cool too, a tip with Claude is if you're in Claude code and you want to be able to do something on your computer or a web app, you know, you can just say, "Give me a prompt for to to make it in co-work," and then just have it run in co-work at the same time. It's the simple, easy way of doing things.

>> Yeah. And I, I just switched around, you know, I still use ChatGPT, but much less so. Yeah. Now, Claude for copy is amazing. For applications, code is amazing. And then for landing pages and presentation, Manis is amazing. So, I'm like on top tier all those systems.

>> Amazing.

>> I don't talk to people that much nowadays. Yeah, cuz I also, to be fair, like the last 12 months, I get so much more value from talking to the AIS because I get the framework so easy, upside, downside, and you, you spend, uh, be much more productive because you don't have to set up meetings, right? Meetings take so much time, right? And then so, if you can cut out meetings and just get to what you ever need to get to, and you can execute so much faster, right? So, he's cut out a lot of the [ __ ] with AI.

>> So, so actually, so Giannis posted on his Insta about you guys and he got 5 million views.

>> Uh, 3.5 million.

>> 3.5 million.

>> In like 24 hours. Last 24 hours.

>> Be 5 million now. And, uh, and that's incredible. Do you then take that exact post and run that as ads? So people have already seen it now on his Insta and you're almost, uh, like retargeting them in a way.

>> Yeah, correct. So, those, those situations, again, we don't, we can't plan for. We never know how many views it's going to get, right? So, I think the great thing about us is that, you know, we have this engine where, you know, yesterday Giannis posted, he has 19 million, you know, followers. Then of course, you know, David reshared, he has like 80 million, you know, Aryna has like 5 million, Ali has like 3.5 million. So, that collective effort really feeds that algorithm. And then so, then again, in in 24 hours, then we have three and a half million. Last year, we had one AI video that we created, $25,000. Looks amazing. And then we had Aryna at the end of that AI video. It had 233 million views, right? On Instagram. So, when we get that type of content, so that's amazing top-of-funnel content. And then you can retarget a lot of these users. And again, at least they, he's seen it or heard of that. And then so that's where, you know, we've been able to grow so fast on content.

>> How was the sales lift when he posted?

>> Um, sales lift, so I think initial sales lift, I think was a little bit more like 10 to 15%. So, to be fair, was not that significant. But we're not looking at just initial sales lift, right? Because it's about again, the authentic storytelling over time. And then that's where people will then ultimately see, "Hey, this is something that, you know, Giannis takes on a daily basis." They'll see it first time, you know, next month, three months, six months, 12 months. That's where you'll get the ROI rather than looking out, you know, and to be fair, I didn't expect any immediate uptake. Um, because you're looking at this from a long-term partnership perspective, right?

>> Unbelievable. Um, what questions do you guys have for Danny? Go for it.

>> You mentioned initially that it was really, it was a bottleneck for you guys to ask for a higher AOV or higher commitment from your customers in the beginning. Um, just because of that lack of social proof. With that being said, we have, we have a similar model with subscriptions. We have about an 80% opt-in rate. Um, and we've struggled a lot to push that initial AOV. What were the things that you guys unlocked in the beginning to build that trust or to optimize for like subscriptions in in the start? Because we built our company over the last four years with initials and like regular direct, direct sales and have then transitioned to like a subscription model and have yet to build that trust to have them commit for a longer time in the beginning.

>> Yeah. So, I think, um, again, I don't know what your product is, right? But I would imagine, yeah, basically you have to understand what's your one-time purchase price and then what's your monthly subscription, right? So, for us, it's 20% discount, right? So, I think I've seen a lot of DTC you that discount is not enough, you know, for them to warrant that subscription. And you have to create value for the monthly subscription. So, for us, even we have a 20% discount, but we give like a free shaker, you get five free travel sachets. And then even recently, for the 90-day transformation program for the 90-day subscription, it's not just a price difference. What we give you access to is we give you a 90-day transformation program where any individual they subscribe, they get access to our team of doctors and trainers, right? So, you get access to talk to Dr. Dom, uh, you get access to Bobby Rich, is David Beckham's trainer, right? So, on a quarterly basis, we allow, we will have a Zoom where you can ask questions, they'll give you their training course and blah, blah, blah. So, you always want to create value add for your customers because at the end of the day, for them to subscribe is a commitment, right? It's a commit. So, you have to think about, you know, different things, right? So, you know, 30-day money-back guarantee, even right now for our 90-day, we give them a 90-day money-back guarantee, which is quite rare in the space, right? And if they don't like the product, then you have to be confident in your product to be able to do so. And our refund rates are still very low. Even though we give 90-day money-back guarantees, our refund rates are less than 2%. Right. So,

>> And launch optimizations.

>> 100%. We're optimizing subscriptions. Yeah. Because ultimately, when you're running ads, you know, you're losing money on that first order. Correct. So, if you're not optimizing for subscriptions, then you're already putting yourself in a big wall to, yeah, climb over.

>> Who's next?

>> So, what you said about the bounty program for the like AI solutions is really interesting because we've had some internal conversations. We've got a lot of VA tasks and stuff that could potentially be replaced.

>> You know, um, what would you assign the ROI to that? Like, obviously the goal is to grow the business and have the entire team be able to 10x their output. But so far, are you able to assign an ROI, um, or some kind of measurable?

>> Yeah. So, it depends what that bounty task is, right? So, for example, yeah, if our retention rate is, you know, 65, 60%, and you can help get it to 65%, that's significant ROI. We're talking about millions of dollars given where we're at. Right? So, if I'm giving $100,000 away or even a million dollars, that one task unlock is worth $10 million, right? So, I'm not too concerned about measuring one specific aspect, but it's a whole. And it's also about kind of making sure the team knows that we are very serious in this AI piece, right? Because it's like, it's sending different messages. And again, at the end of the day, we're able to then identify, you know, real individuals that can, hey, that we want to invest in these individuals as well by giving them the tools. We're giving everyone, you know, Claude code for free, $200, right? A month basis. And if you go above that, we we're happy to pay for that. So, we see this as an investment into the future growth of the company, you know, for even us to stay relevant.

>> So, just a follow-up. So, I mean, we plugged in OpenCLAW into Slack. Um, but I do see a lot of value in Claude code. I think a lot of people are intimidated by it just because it has the word code in it. But to your point, do you think it's worth it to train the team on how to use Claude code and get them their own subscriptions even if they're not in like a coding-centric role?

>> Yeah, 100%. Yeah. Because at the end of the day, if they're not using that to build something in, let's say, next 30, 60 days, you just shut it off, right? Correct. So, then it becomes like an investment for a limited amount of time. Thank you.

>> In the back. What's start there?

>> Oh, sorry.

>> Oh, like.

>> What was the question? Can you repeat that?

>> Or can you can you repeat it, Danny?

>> Uh, three KPIs that we look at every day, right? So, again, I have, we have it set up where, again, I'm on WhatsApp, a lot of the data that comes in WhatsApp. So, again, we get hourly reports on basically return on ad spend, uh, you know, CAC, where where our marketing channels are coming from, right? So, it's not just, I mean, every single day we're looking at the return on ad spend, right? Uh, at the same time, the average order value, you know, total revenue, of course, uh, payback period. Um, but it's a combination of all these aspects to see where there's slippage or leakage. And then again, we're running, you like, like Nick said, tons of tests on a daily basis. So, right now, you, part of the reason why we, I think we've been able to grow so fast on especially on Meta is we've been able to unlock spend. Right. And just because I want to spend 200, 100 grand a day on Meta. If I don't have the creative assets to do so, I won't be able to do so. Right? So, now I have 2,200 ads out on our public ads library. We have 50 different landing pages, uh, you know, across 15 different personas, right? So, we're testing so much of this on a daily basis.

>> Last question. Oh, go ahead. With you're working with celebrities and and, um, sort of the macro influencers. Are you also using micro nano influencers and creators?

>> Yes, we're using everything, right? Yeah. To to be fair, our best converting ads are actually not the athletes. Yeah. It's actually the doctors and scientists, nutritionists, right? However, we have the halo effect with the big athletes. By the end of the day, you're going to trust your doctors, your trust your nutritionists, your dietitians. And of course, then we also have like lifestyle, uh, ambassadors. So, you need a range of all these different things to be able to successful.

>> So, now that you know that, how do you curate that community?

>> Um, yeah, so again, we've, we've been fortunate that we have lots of inbound interest from, you know, just because the product is so good. So, we got so much inbound interest, right? But even like, you know, last week, we did something where, again, we started after having conversation with Hudson, they're like, "Building, how the affiliate program?" So, then we got like, you know, basically 100 people from Hieros joining the community, right? Starting with that targeted group of individuals.

>> Amazing. Everybody, please give a round of applause. Oh, one more, one more.

>> Now, one, one more, uh, advice I would have for early founders and because I've seen this a lot of times is legal stuff, right? Legal stuff is especially early entrepreneurs, etc. Yeah. Just don't waste time with that. Yeah. Don't worry about, especially if you're a small company, no one's going to sue you. And and give you an examp, if you're a small company, no one's going to sue because you have, don't have any money, right? So, why would anyone sue you, right? And I give you an example. When I moved to Hong Kong and I was doing Ybuy, which was a replica of Groupon, right? And then I wanted to work with, of course, Starbucks, you know, McDonald's, and all these brands. And then of course, they're like, "Hey, I don't, why do I want to work with you?" I'm like, "Okay, no worries." Right? Then what I would do, I would actually buy Starbucks vouchers, physical Starbucks vouchers, and then I would actually sell them on the website. I would say, you know, $50 for $100. On the voucher, it says not for resale, right? So, I didn't care because at the end of the day, I knew I was gonna get a letter from Starbucks, but because we're so small, they're not gonna sue you. So, but we still put it online, but from a consumer, they're like, "Oh, wow. You guys work with Starbucks? You must be legit." Right? Going back to the perceptual value place, right? And then I would go to Pete's Coffee and say, "Oh, Starbucks worth of us." But they didn't know it was a fake deal.

>> How many did you buy?

>> Bought like, like a thousand, right? But you lost money on it, right? Because I bought it for 50 bucks HKD.

>> User acquisition.

>> Exactly. User acquisition. I sold it for, I lost, bought it for 100 HKD. I sold it for 50 HKD. Right. But it's limited to like a thousand. But because I did that for like all the big brands. So, then I would put their logos on my website. But of course, I didn't have rights and permission. But again, I got all the legal letters. But they're not going to sue you.

>> Is this because you're a Hong Kong entity and not US?

>> No. In the US, too. Even US too, they all same thing, I would imagine. Yeah. There was also, if you're like two, three people company now, studio, you know, but now it's different now. I shouldn't say that, but because I'm a public company CEO, but.

>> Tell us more, Danny, tell us more. So, but.

>> Well, that is amazing. Thank you for sharing that. Danny's going to be around all day. Feel free to ask him any questions. Thank you, Danny. Thank you so much. We're going to take a break. That door is going to open with food and drinks and and feel free to take a break for 30 minutes. I won't tell you what to see on my own. I'm kind of afraid of you now. You, I want to be the lights on you. To stop on my own silence. If every high comes down, don't want to be flooding you now. I won't tear you. It seems to be the right stop. Every. Just a reminder, we'll be back in 20 minutes. Back in the seats in 20 minutes. For you. You let me share you all together. There's nothing like feeling the heat. Heat. I'm better off alone. Windows down. When I was young, no one taught me how open arms how we let it out. I wish I could see. I tell myself that I'm better off alone. I better off alone. I better off alone. Heat. Heat. America. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. I We are United. Hello. It's right now. Enemy. Thank you. Heat. Heat. All right. Another one. Out there. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Thank you, Jack. Goodbye. There you are. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Heat. Heat. Take it down. Everyone. Hallelujah. Fire. All right. Hey. That was right. Hallelujah. Are you ready? Heat. Heat. Hallelujah. I told you. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Hallelujah. State. Heat. Heat. To come back. And then we are getting Heat up here. Hi everyone. If you could please take your seats. We're going to start tonight. Please take your seat. Thank you. Hallelujah. Hi everyone. Please take your seats. We're about to begin. The Heat. Heat. That's really. Hello. Good. Yeah. What's that? Heat. Heat. Okay, everybody, if you can please take your seats, we are going to get started. Thank you, everybody.

You, please take your seats. We have the most incredible Sarah Lee, co-CEO of Glow Recipe, and I'm so excited that she can spend some time with us today. Wait 30 seconds.

Okay, if you want a master class on turning Korean heritage and L'Oreal Islam into a global skin care empire that dominates Sephora while obsessed with community, this is it. And everybody in the back can come and take a seat. We welcome talking as much as you want. Just go ahead and do the next room down there. Everyone will please take a seat.

All right, everybody. Please meet Sarah Lee, co-CEO and co-founder of Glow Recipe, alongside Christine J. And after 11 years at L'Oreal, she quit her corporate life in 2014. She pulled 50K in savings and started a K-beauty curation site before pivoting to their own fruit-powered clinically effective line in 2017. The result? In 2023, they will receive 300 million in sales. They've had explosive year-over-year growth and now they've become one of Sephora's top skin care brands globally. They have 35 markets and most incredibly, they have something called the Glow Gang. Everybody in the back can take the conversations to the other part of the museum. That would be awesome.

>> Kevin, take it away.

>> Okay, so please welcome on stage Sarah Lee.

>> Thank you.

>> Sarah, give us a little back. Shark Tank. You had a deal. Didn't have a deal. You can't go into Sephora without turning to your right and seeing the most beautiful endcap for Glow Recipe. You can't even go outside without seeing a Glow Recipe banner on Sephora's windows. Give us a backstory. How did this happen?

>> Uh, where do I start? Um, I had the business for about 11 years. So that was...

>> So it wasn't an overnight success.

>> It was not an overnight success, for sure. It took a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. But I've always been a beauty fanatic. I grew up in Korea and the US, and my family all instilled in me the importance of taking care of ourselves with skincare. So that was something I just naturally grew up with, and I always knew that I wanted to do something for my career in beauty as well. And so I started working at L'Oreal as a corporate marketer. And three and a half years, the company transferred me to the New York office. I met my co-founder, and after seven years at a total of about 11 years of working there as a product developer, marketer, brand, we decided to launch our own brand. But initially, the whole idea came about because we were catching up in my New York City studio apartment drinking wine and she together. Every time we got together, and we realized that we were to sharing those or actually developing products inspired by skincare. The two of us that have bilingual, bicultural backgrounds in in your office of 10,000 people, we're the only two that share this very unique position, and we're so passionate about skincare. So we need to bring what we love so much to the US and further global markets. What we saw was a lot of these brands were amazing in Korea, but they didn't know how to go. A lot of Korean speakers right now, but you still are a little bit of communication, how the ingredients are broken down, there's no interest, but you don't always get it right away. We felt compelled to tell the story in a way that resonated with the US community. Um, and then we also realized that further down the line, we wanted to create our own products, but we didn't want to start there. We actually wanted to start a curation destination, Sephora, but for started. So that was 2014, and then that we were shorting, and I think that was definitely one of the huge milestones that I'll never forget. And we actually decided to, your point, not to take any capital with that because we wanted, we were cash flow positive, by the way, already, but we wanted that...

>> Which was, it was...

>> Amazing. But it was definitely a life-changing experience. A couple years later, we saw that in the beauty market, especially skincare, there were a lot of products that were a little bit intimidating, not very, expensive. Before the other side of the aisle, where products look, colorful, but not really. So, you world because that is what approach that's also powerful, and that's how that's an amazing story. Congratulations.

>> How did you get into Sephora? Can you walk us through that process? Did you DM a buyer? Were you at shop, or how did this happen?

>> Was available in 2015.

>> You've been in there for quite a while.

>> I will say, initially, we had our own website, glowrecipe.com, and of course, it was a dream where I shopped and was always inspired. It was my playground, if you will. Um, but I had the privilege of having worked at L'Oreal before I started the company, and that's actually a really important background because I, you know, I was a beauty executive, so I sort of had the network and the connections, but more in makeup, less in skincare. Um, but definitely knew how this, the speed and the pace of, um, the Sephora partnership worked. But, um, what was interesting was when we were bringing on the world of Korean skincare to the US, Sephora was really interested in doing that themselves too. And so we were connected through that mutual passion and interest and the vision. And so when Sephora was the first ever large retailer in the US to bring on the Korean skincare sort of introduction, we were part of that, and we were the thought partner there, content partner there. We helped them curate the brands and products before we even created our own brand. So we were able to actually introduce some of the curated products and brands that we had on our website to sell at Sephora. So that partnership had already started, and then one of the brands that we onboarded as part of that partnership did extremely well. I mean, it was one of the top skincare brands right off the bat. The, the moisturizer at that time became a bestseller at Sephora. And so that naturally was a great segue for us to have a great opportunity. One, because we earned the credibility and trust from Sephora, um, in terms of how we could market a brand or a product, but secondly, we were able to just foster and nurture that relationship. So when we were ready to introduce our own brand's concept and idea, we had, um, set up a, a casual informal lunch with the head merchant, and, um, I had my little iPad concept slide with a few words and some beautiful imagery. I also had a little lab sample. It was really not fully polished or, you know, anything of that stage, but I just wanted to kind of, you know, one, make them feel like they were part of the thought process, and two, get their first feedback. Like, I wanted to see if we were on the right track. And so, it was a watermelon-inspired product that was, you know, supposed to give you exfoliation, hydration overnight. Shared that vision. Um, the, the chief merchandising officer during lunch was asking a few questions, and then she said, at that time, this was 2015. She said, "This will be the next Fresh." And I don't know if you guys are familiar with Fresh. It's a, it's a skincare brand. At that time, it was the number one skincare brand. And I couldn't believe my ears. "Why? Why do you say that?" I asked on the spot. And she said, "Well, you already have a built-in community, which is very modern, which is what we need. We don't have a lot of brands that have that. But then you know how to create product with leveraging beautiful ingredients like watermelon." And so from then on, we went back to Korea, started manufacturing products and really making it, um, uh, you know, fully polished. But they were part of a journey. They gave feedback on formula, packaging, and everything. And, and then immediately when they saw the, the, the full product, they said, "We want to launch it in all doors in all of us." So, so that was a whole, um, experience because we weren't ready to go out that wide, but it actually gave us an opportunity to just have this amazing brand awareness. We were in, like, a little cubby of a wall of Sephora in, I believe, at that time, about 600 doors across the nation, and then from there, we started selling out constantly, and it was just, you know, it, it just put us on the on the broad.

>> I love that. That's incredible. Um, you know, Glow Recipe, you cracked TikTok pretty early, and you built something called the Glow Gang.

>> With raw educational content, creator flywheels that turned into Sephora end caps.

>> So, you also still personally answer hundreds of DMs daily. I would love to know maybe some of the campaigns that, you know, you and I talked about before this, and if you could share the playbook for those, and and and how to amplify it.

>> Yeah, I think one of the re-, like, there's a few reasons why I think we were able to grow at the speed that we did. One was unique, innovative formulations, which is very much the foundation of any beauty company's success. But secondly, it's the power of community. And what I mean by that is when we first started, again, in 2014, 2016, um, we were very raw. I mean, we call this now like "Loi," but we already had that concept from day one, and it really invited the 10 followers, the 15 followers that we had on Instagram at that time, um, behind the curtains of what, what was going on with our startup journey at the time. And I think that made people want to feel more invested in what we were doing. And so as that grew, um, we were able to kind of, in-, start sharing, like, what we truly believed in beyond the product. For us, one thing that we, as a founder, that I'm personally really passionate about, is inclusivity. You know, as a female founder, as a, as a Korean, uh, woman, um, that has seen, you know, some challenges and limitations, but also a lot of my peers that felt the same way. I, I think beauty gives you so much confidence and empowerment, but at the same time, there were a lot of limitations. So I just wanted to challenge that. And I think with my co-founder being on the same page, we're thinking of ways to tell that story versus just saying, "We're all about inclusivity." I mean, everyone can say that. How do we execute it and show people that that's truly what we believe in? And one way that we have started from day one was to show skin in the most real way possible, because diversity and inclusion doesn't mean that, you know, you're from different backgrounds and races. It could mean your skin tone and type and texture are very different too, and everyone should feel welcome to be part of our Glow Gang community. If you have wrinkles or acne or lines, it doesn't matter. We're all going through the ups and downs and cycles of our skincare journey. So, let's do it together was kind of the, the mantra. And so, what we did was, we called it "Real Skin Acceptance." Um, we never retouch or, you know, edit any of our visuals or images, um, from day one. Like, all of our campaigns had very raw, sort of skin texture. You could even see their pores in any of our campaign images. But one really huge milestone as part of that journey was, we were brainstorming internally, and we said, "How can we show people that this is what we believe in versus again, like saying this?" And we decided to actually, for the first time in the industry, initiate a blind casting campaign. So, what this meant was, we would cast models that are from our community, not real models. And what they had to do was share their beauty stories and what inspired them to love skincare and their skincare journey through, like, a Q&A, and they would have to submit their their applications online. And we didn't even see their names because sometimes names can be telling of their backgrounds. So we gave them, like, numbers, and we ended up never seeing any of the faces. And then we had a diversity board who actually saw the last round of, you know, the finalists, and they helped kind of put together the, the final 10. That was probably the most meaningful campaign that we've done to to to date. I, I, I just don't think that was ever done because a lot of brands would feel, I mean, I felt very anxious and nervous about what the outcome would be. We're spending all this budget and investment. What if, you know, the photo shoot becomes a disaster? What if, you know, the models don't really align with what we thought that they would be? I just didn't know what to expect. But, um, you know, we had 10 people that probably never ever dreamed of being a star of a beauty campaign. We had one model that was, uh, a Down Syndrome advocate. We had a, a Black model who grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood. We had an Asian gay man. I mean, it was just such a diverse group of models. Again, people that were already fans of the brand that had to be, kind of, the natural way to make this work because they were applying on our website.

>> Um,

>> How did that work? So, they, that you had a survey form, and how, how did that work?

>> Yeah, we, we just promoted in our own social, and they had to apply sharing their story. So that was very, it was all about the inner beauty.

>> So, what I'm curious about is how you measure success for a campaign like this. Do you measure success with revenue? Do you, how do you measure success?

>> Yeah. So, what's interesting about this campaign is that it wasn't just about an awareness play, even though typically campaigns like that are, right? Like, you just showcase beautiful images or stories. But because we were showcasing their get ready with me, you guys are familiar on TikTok, um, we were just capturing their organic get ready with me with our products, our two bestselling products in particular, which are Dew Drops and Watermelon Toner, while telling their story. You know, "I grew up in a, you know, certain neighborhood and I always felt, you know, insecure. I was bullied, all these stories, but I really survived mentally by feeling great about my skin and feeling good about taking care of my skin by myself." And so that was very powerful.

>> So, that's amazing. And they were telling their stories so organically, repeatedly. Their families, their little number of followers were all posting about them because they were all touched. We were crying every single day reading their stories, hearing their stories. I remember when we announced that they were the finalists and the winners. I mean, I had to go off cam, um, Zoom, because, you know, everybody was balling our eyes out. It was just so emotional. Their family members were there, like, couldn't believe the result because, again, it was just something that they never even thought was possible or imaginable. And so it was just this very beautiful, organic network of content that constantly came up of the brand, but also the products, and their get ready with me were being captured and reposted and stitched, and it just became, again, like this network of, um, organic content. So, as a, as a result of that, we saw a tremendous lift in sales with not just those two products, but the whole brand.

>> Were you running ads to their their videos?

>> We, we ran ads. We, we went all out, actually. We spent, like, it was probably the highest investment that we've had until then. And then since then, we were growing too. But we did out-of-home ads. We did a ton of wild posting in Miami. We did double-decker bus, um, ads in, um, we went to London, Toronto, um, LA. I mean, just all the main wild posting opportunities that we could get, uh, we did in addition to billboards. We were on Times Square with them. So you can imagine, I mean, they were, there were people gathered in Times Square billboards, like, in tears, and also capturing that. So it was just constantly shared and posted.

>> Were you also running Meta TikTok shops?

>> Absolutely. Yes. We went all out with our digital ads. Just to back up for a second, you just to explain the process, you had a survey, you had something on your website, they applied, someone on your team reviewed them, they reached out. Just, just curious for anybody that wants to try that with an apparel brand or or something else they have.

>> Yeah. Yeah, I mean, again, this was such a powerful, um, initiative not just externally, but internally, because our team members, the entire team felt so excited and passionate about doing this campaign because it's so in line with our core value that everybody mutually shared. But also they're seeing this emotional sort of roller coaster across all of the, the, the candidates. So, yes, we had, I think we had about 8,000 applications.

>> Wow.

>> In, like, two days.

>> Did you put an email out to everyone? You said, "Hey..."

>> It was, it was email or social media, and that was it.

>> Okay.

>> Um, and so, I mean, we had to spend, like, nights and days reviewing applications, and we had to divide and conquer. I was part of that too. Um, but some of the stories were really beautiful. And so, even while reading the applications, there were a lot of tears. And then, um, and then when we internally brainstormed and said, "Wow, you guys, I think we're on to something. Like, it's moving us. Can you imagine what happens with the external community?" Like, that's why people, like, the en-, internal team was working tirelessly because they just were so excited about this campaign. Um, so, yes, we went through all of the applications, read every single application, we filtered the ones that really moved us. Um, and then the final stage is when we had the diversity board, which was consisted of a beauty editor, aesthetician, um, you know, journalist, and whatnot. It was just, you know, beauty, like, uh, experts from different walks of life that were passionate about this same value. They helped choose the final 10.

>> So, digging in on Sephora, what are the most important metrics you look at as a brand?

>> I think obviously revenue, um, is is huge. Um, but we look at a few things. We look at how the the the marketing levers are actually working. Because one thing, we're currently an exclusive brand to Sephora right now, at least in the US. And one thing that really is important when you're exclusive is to make sure that the support plan for your 360 launch execution or any sort of initiative is very comprehensive. Like, you really need all touch points to be supportive. Um, so you have to measure all of them. You know, like, did this campaign work? Did this, like, Meta campaign work? Um, we realized recently that Meta is really effective for us over some of the other platforms. So we kind of lean in heavily there. Do we do, um, like, a social takeover or campaign with them? How do we measure that with engagement and how that translates to lift in sales of that particular day? Um, it, there's a lot of different metrics. Um, we also think about, uh, conversion to, like, the rest of the products within the same brand, not just the one single product. Um, we think about, you know, retention rates. I mean, it, the laundry list goes on and on, but we have very extensive meetings with marketing, digital, and merchant teams to go through them together.

>> H-, I'm really curious, like, you did so well with a few of your SKUs, and you have some incredible hero SKUs. How do brands, how do you think about the next trending product? How does that work? What kind of research is involved? What is the next trending product you're launching? Give us some insight into that.

>> That's a good question. Um, you know, one thing that you always have to to be doing as a beauty founder is you have to just be, like, on the pulse. Like, you have to be on social media. You have to be reading everything. Like, I just, I spend too much time on TikTok, to be honest, but that's part of my research. Um, I go back to Korea every few months to make sure I understand exactly what's going on. I work with our, you know, manufacturing partners and labs all around the world to have them present the latest and the greatest. But at the same time, that has to be mixed with where are your white spaces in your portfolio? And part of it is also your gut. Because if you're doing what everyone else is being pitched, you're not going to stand out. So, how is it going to be still within your brand DNA, still something that people would want to use for their daily routine? For me, that, that was important. I didn't want to launch a product that was a nice-to-have. It, um, you know, I didn't want it to be kitschy or trendy. I wanted always to make sure that even though the product sounds a little out there, actually, when you start trying it, it could be your daily staple. So that's actually exactly what happened with our Watermelon Niacinamide Dew Drops. When we first pitched that product to our retailer partners, I don't know if you are familiar with that product, but it's a niacinamide serum that also helps, you know, make your makeup look great. It works as a primer, treatment, and highlighter, but only made with skincare. No single makeup ingredient. And it was such a revelation at that point. But when we pitched it, people didn't really understand, you know. So the forecast was not that long, strong. I was very underwhelmed by, you know, the numbers that I saw when people were putting the forecast. I said, "Guys, this is going to be big." I mean, come on. It's going to be a primer. It's going to be such a versatile product. Um, but it takes time because when it's so new and so unique and different, not everyone will will understand that. And so we had to kind of prove it. And I think it took about a good three months for it to really pick up and then actually become, I mean, I'm sure a lot of you are using it already. Um, my makeup artist this morning was saying, like, "I can't live a single day without it." It just becomes a staple if, if you know how to use it and leverage it, but that it took some time for education to take place.

>> I'm just curious. My, my last question is, one tip, one tip to brands thinking about getting into, you've seen so many brands fail and succeed in Sephora, come and go. They come and go all the time. One tip to brands wanting to get into Sephora or Ulta or any other shop.

>> So, one thing I will say is that you're not working with a retailer, you're working with people. That I think is something that not everyone realizes, right? Because I mean, we always say relationship is everything, but it's really true with the retailers too, and the merchants and the teams rotate, too, if you think about it like that. Not one person that you built a relationship stays on. So, what do you do? You adapt, you pivot, and you find time to nurture that relationship, and that moves mountains. And that's my experience. I spend personally a lot of time building relationships, you know, flying out to San Francisco or inviting them to Miami or whenever I could to just tell that story because every opportunity, every lunch, every coffee is a moment to just instill what you believe in and the vision. And when somebody actually believes that, that's when it unlocks everything. It's not just a business pitch. It comes from a personal relationship. And I, I just really think that that applies to everything in life, including retailer partnerships.

>> Completely agree. Completely agree. What questions do we have for Sarah here? Yes. Right in the middle. If you want to stand up, I can repeat.

>> Question is, did you need to raise capital to get into Sephora and keep inventory in Sephora?

>> Um, that's a good question. We didn't at the time because we already had our re-, um, e-retailer, and at the time, we're fourth year into our business, and so we were very cash flow positive, and in a way, our e-commerce site became this nice kind of seed money, if you will, for all things that we needed for the Sephora inventory. But also at the same time, you know, I was personally very involved in negotiating every little margin point to cost of goods to Qs with manufacturers and the retailers, and also our warehouse. Like, every little penny counted. And that's when, when you're so scrappy, um, and you can, like, actually make a difference by personally getting involved in every single detail, you can make profit. And so I will say, you know, we had a good foundation because of the e-com, but because of this scrappiness, actually, we were profitable right away.

>> Okay, we have time for just one more question right here.

>> Mentioned what top three tips that work really well.

>> Oh, really good question. Um, education is actually such a core part of what we do, um, for marketing, but also just, you know, to, to get people to understand the brand. I will say what worked for us is making education very entertaining. Education does not need to be serious, especially when you're kind of playing in the social media game. We all know our attention span is less than two seconds. So, how do we make it digestible, easy, fun, sometimes humorous, so that you can actually remember what that content was, but also at the same time, the user feels a little bit smarter after watching your content. So, she'll come back for more. So, like having that bite-size, very snappy, funny, humorous, or even if it's not funny, like giving them that "aha" moment, um, was for us very effective. We actually coined the term "skin entertainment" because we didn't want skincare to be too serious or boring or intimidating. We wanted it to be fun and approachable, and for people to enjoy the process. Um, secondly, it, you know, we didn't just talk about the product education. We kind of incorporated it with lifestyle. So, for example, "Did you know that you shouldn't really use a towel after you wash your face?" Did you know that? You know, again, there's an "aha" moment. And the reason for that is because towels usually have these little textures, and your skin is very delicate. So, if you're someone that's used to rubbing the towel and pulling and tugging on your face, it's going to cause micro-tears over time. You can't really see it, but over time, that's going to compromise your skin barrier. And if you've heard of skin barrier, if it's compromised, it means you're going to have breakouts. You're going to have sensitivity, inflammation, acne. All these things happen when you don't really know that it's because the foundation was getting weaker and weaker. So, like those types of lifestyle hacks that's combined with the products that actually gives you the "aha" moment, the eye-opening moment. I think those are really powerful, and again, it just incentivizes the the audience to want to come more, uh, back to your website or back to your channel to to to learn more about it. Um, what I wouldn't do is just making it a, a chore. I do think at some point when we were so focused on education, education, education, there was a point when we were just kind of turning it out for the sake of doing that, and that's when you start to lose momentum or engagement. So, we had to reset and bring it back and make it back to the, the original spirit.

>> Amazing. Thank you so much, Sarah. Thank you.

>> Thank you. Great job. Great job. Crushed it.

>> All right. That's it, right? That's so we don't have anybody else. Is that, you know, every time I look to the left, and I look at a speaker here, of some of our incredible speakers, every time I'm sitting here, I look to the left, this face right here is just looking back at me. So, I'm excited because I am so excited to introduce our next speaker, Hudson Leo Grande. He's the CEO and founder of Comfort Clothing. So, Hudson was a, uh, Forbes 30 Under 30, recently turned 30. And, uh, for those... Oh, no. Are you, you're still 29? He's 35. He's not even not telling you. H-, okay. So, you're, you're still 29. He's actually up for a couple of awards right now that, uh, I don't know if I'm allowed to talk about, so I won't say it, but he, uh, you know, at 16, he was homeless, battling anxiety and depression to building Comfort, the comfort apparel brand that's redefining what a hoodie can do. Inspired by his by his own pain, he launched in 2022 with just 50K in three hoodie colors. And the product was just a slightly weighted hoodie in lounge, in loungewear, talking about "You Matter." And so completely bootstrapped, he's on his way to a billion in sales this year. TikTok's number one apparel brand, over millions of units sold, no celebrities, no retail stores, no, you know, just Hudson and his incredible team. So, Hudson, please come to the stage. Please give him a big round of applause.

>> Hudson, welcome. Thank you for for taking the time to, uh, to organize this and to be on stage here and and tell us, uh, you know, for those of you who don't know your story, maybe just a really quick synopsis.

>> Sure. Oh, I love this. I got to get the how far I have to be away from this thing. Thank you guys for coming. I appreciate it. I love that we were able to, we were here yesterday looking at a lot of empty chairs, and I'm just happy we were able to fill them, and a lot of people are here and and having a really good time. Um, yeah, my story is, it's a lot of you guys know it, so I'll get through it fairly quick, but, you know, we, um, I started my entrepreneurial journey when I was 16. Big believer in the law of attraction. Thoughts become things. And, uh, I just started this whole process of like, you know, if I could close my eyes and envision the life that I wanted, and everything that I could see in my future, because at that time, I didn't have anything. Um, I thought about the cars, the houses, you know, the, the traveling, like the quality of life, everything. My, my mental, my, my physical, the way that I looked, going to the gym, everything. Uh, it started there, right? It all starts in your mind. So, I did that, and, uh, you know, I started, uh, I dropped out of high school for a little bit. I started in an MLM, a network marketing company called Vemma. Some of you guys probably know what that was. It ended up being a pyramid scheme, but it was good. It was good for what it was. We were traveling the, the country and meeting new people. Don't, don't look over there and laugh the whole time because then I'm not going to be able to do this. So, we, we, um, you know, we, so we, we started there, and and I just was going across the country meeting people that were super excited and energetic about life and and what, what life could be, right? Because I was still in technically in school at the time. Uh, from there, I, uh, finished up at night school, and, uh, that was a very interesting experience. I saw a lot of people that had a lot of hardship and a lot of things they were going through, and, uh, it just made me want to take my problems and run the other [ __ ] way. And I think that was a big wakeup call for me was like seeing that there's people all over the world that are struggling, and they, they have no purpose yet. They have no passion. They don't know where they want to go. They don't know who they want to be, and they're lost. Um, and I took that, and, uh, I started my oral care company in, and when I was 19. Uh, it failed the first five years. It made no money. And I, and I say this truly because I want you guys to understand something. I was the [ __ ] worst at e-commerce. You guys look at me now and you're like, "Oh my god." Like, some of you guys call me the GOAT. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. But, but I, I started with zero. Like, I knew nothing. Danny goes and builds a [ __ ] hundred million dollar brand in 11 months. It took me six years to even figure out how to build a website. Like, there's a difference to how this game is played. And for me, it was just, it was a lot. Like, I, I, I, there was so much coming at me at once. And I was in my mom's basement. I would b-, I would buy labels from Venezuela. I would buy, like, these little jars from China, and I would buy food-grade charcoal from America, and I would build it all in my mom's basement. Should a, like, Danny said, little brands don't get sued. I would have been [ __ ] sued 50,000 times if people knew that I was building an oral care product in my mother's basement. So, just to give you, like, an understanding, like, you don't know what you don't know, but if you believe so much in the vision of where you're going, you're going to [ __ ] get there. It just takes some time. Um, so you guys look at me as like, "Oh, Comfort's the fastest growing brand ever." We are. We're going to go clear a billion in revenue this year. We're going to [ __ ] walk through it. Like, but that's my, I wear that [ __ ] on my, on my sleeve. Like, that's me. You know what I'm saying? Like, I say it with my chest, and I love this game, and I, I love what it's becoming, but it wasn't always like that. Uh, so Purely White Deluxe, still have it today. You know, business does 20 to $30 million a year. Uh, you know, we have no employees, kind of, sort of, a little bit, maybe some of my team works on some of it, you know, but it's not in the contract, um, but it's really good. And, uh, and, um, you know, with Comfort, I had a lot of anxiety, a lot of stress, uh, super depressed at a point, just wanted to be successful. And, um, I wanted to create something with a lot of meaning. Comfort is like, I get 700, 800 pieces of mail a week from people that are either fans or customers or or other entrepreneurs, and I listen to what they say, and I read a lot of it. Um, and it's impacting and changing people's lives. Every single brand here, and even Nick, like, just working and building with brands, you know, we're making a, a real impact. And I have, like, some Raja here from Invisaware. I have Lucas, who's one of my investments from Hos, like the fastest growing activewear brand. Like, these businesses that I either invest in or talk about or, or I, I work with, they're making real change. Like, Invisaware is literally a company that if you double-click on your necklace, and you're a young girl, and you're thinking you're being abducted, and the stats of how many people are abducted in the United States is [ __ ] sickening. You double-click your necklace, it calls three of your emergency contacts, it calls the police, it calls ADT. Like, you have all these, all these people that are, Am I saying that? I'm doing good, right? You have all, you have all these people that are going to be contacted. Imagine if you were in a situation as a young woman or even a young man. Like, I feel like every kid in America should have it. And, you know, I'm here to help them with their marketing and their growth. And I know Jared, I'm going really off tangent, but I'm going to take a little bit. So, we, so Comfort was meaning. We built meaning. It's not a piece of clothing. If you think hoodie and you don't think Comfort, you live under a [ __ ] rock. That's just what it is. And a lot of brands try to copy me. A lot of brands try to mimic me and steal from me and all this stuff. And we had a very interesting experience that I'm not going to mention live. Um, don't worry, Char, I won't. But, uh, you know, a lot of people that you think are your friends or not, and they want to take from you and they want to steal from you. And, uh, you guys are the innovators. You're the people that are going to build this [ __ ] brick by brick, and no one will be able to [ __ ] tear you down because you worked so hard for it. Comfort for me, 16 million, 170 million, 670 million, 1.4, 4 billion. You know, I'm technically the youngest billionaire in clothing. Obviously, you wouldn't [ __ ] know because I don't act like what people think I would act like. Nothing changes, guys. It's, it's the game that we play, and we get addicted to the results, and we get addicted to the process, and seeing your family happy, and seeing your brothers happy, and your mom happy, and your friends happy. Like, that's the [ __ ] that we want to do. So, Comfort was an ideation around how do I bring so much meaning behind a brand and so much community that no one will ever be able to duplicate what we've built. We reinvented modern-day marketing. We brought creators and influencers. What's up, boys? We brought, we, we, Shabbat Shalom, baby. What's up? We brought, uh, we brought meaning to to clothing in a way that it's never been done. Okay. And, uh, it's, it's, it's a really, it's an interesting way to that we went about it because we had no money. But when you get people bought into the brand at a level that is unreal and unheard of, I would pace my apartment back and forth and take phone calls with people just to have them believe in me, just to believe that this brand could be something great. Um, and that's how it started. And now it's like, well, we have 4 million units sold on TikTok. Everybody knows who we are. People want to work with us. But in the beginning, it's actually better because you're going to find the people that like really believe in you. Those people are still with me today. They're steering the ship with me. They're bringing the results with me. So, again, Comfort, that's my story. Purely White, Comfort, depression, anxiety, everything. Building meaning behind clothing, launching products, building an amazing [ __ ] team. Like, that's how he did it. So, I'm going to go into a lot.

>> No, I think, I think that was that was awesome. That was amazing. Um, but you touched upon so many things that make Comfort so successful. And again, I think I've pointed out your team so many times. I think Comfort is and has the highest retention rate of employees because they love working there. So, maybe you can touch upon that, and then I would love for you to touch upon your Monday meetings, and and and how that operates, and and, you know, give us a little taste.

>> We've never had an employee quit ever. Just think about that. No one's ever said, "You know, I think there's something better for me. I'm going to go somewhere else." Never. Not once. Everybody here, I have 17 of my team members here. I have my dad here. Like, like I have like so many of my family here. Like this [ __ ] is a family. It's just like they were at the dinner last night. Like everyone is just together. Like everyone looks at, they say like, "Oh, don't, don't call a business a family. Like, don't, don't do this. Don't do that." I have so much passion and emotion behind what I am building that my energy becomes infectious. And when I bring you into my company, and we just hired our, our VP of Operations, he was from Fashion Nova. And at dinner last night, I'm asking him, I said, "How do you, I'm trying to find him somewhere. He's somewhere. There he is in the way back." He's, uh, and I said to him, I said, "How does this feel? How does this dinner feel? Verse everything." He goes, "I've never, he, we couldn't do this." That answer of like people laughing and joking and having fun and and and getting on calls and wanting to wake up and work. It's not work anymore. It's a lifestyle. You're building, like, this, this, this, this insane [ __ ] engine that just, every time we think our foot is fully on the throttle, it's not. It's like, you just upgrade cars. Go from a BMW to a [ __ ] Ferrari in a month, and the team is there for it. So, I build with love and passion and purpose and focus and energy, and I believe in my team, probably sometimes a little bit more than they believe in themselves. Um, and I believe in my creators a little bit more than they believe in themselves. And I, and I, and I, and I just want them to know that, like, you could be anything you [ __ ] want. You just can't quit. So, we are a representation of a company full of 85 people that are building a billion-dollar company. And if you ask anybody, we're make, we have our revenue is $10 million per employee, like, more. Um, and people say we're crazy for how lean of a team we have, but I believe that, like, we're just right. We hire when we have to hire, and we look, if we doubled the business tomorrow, what would break? Everybody here has to think about that. If you doubled your business tomorrow, what would [ __ ] break? And a lot of people here with me, like, Ken was literally my first employee. Like, we look at the business now, and it's completely different from what it was when he was with me when we were doing, we did $16 million year one. I had no employees. It was me and Kimberly, my director of influences. We built this [ __ ] with on Fiverr and Upwork. Like, we had no idea what we were doing. And we were buying courses, trying to have people help us. They were telling me, uh, that that I would never make it in this industry because I didn't know about, uh, there was a snow teeth whitening, my company would never work, or this company, like, how the [ __ ] did that go? So, I think you just can't listen to what people say and do because they project their insecurities onto you, and they really just don't believe in themselves, and they say it to you because they don't want you to [ __ ] believe in yourself. Because if you make it, it shows how much better you are than them because you're a believer in your own mind. My team, I trust them. I love them. When I met Jillian, who is like my right hand, I got her on a call with Dave Fogerty, who is the owner of the Udie. He's one of my mentors still. And, uh, he was like, "Whatever you have to pay her, you pay her. I don't care how we get her. You better kill this interview, and you better make her feel like she can never work anywhere else." And I was so nervous, but acting like calm and collected that, like, heck yeah, we're going to get it, you know? But I didn't know. I was like, "This could go really wrong." Cuz I felt after I met her, I knew I needed her. Um, and I let her know that I need her every day. You know, I wouldn't have, I wouldn't have a business without her. So, you know, and I'm very unorganized. Like, really [ __ ] bad. So, she helps us. Dakota. All right. Relax. So, so, um, yeah, that's what it is. And then the Monday morning meetings, you got to do a meeting every week with your team. Every single week. Monday morning, 80% of my company is in on West Coast. So, 10:00 AM, everyone gets up, and, uh, at 7:00 AM for them, they're like, like, just kind of like waking up a little drowsy, like, 80 coffees in hands, and I'm like screaming at them, reiterating the vision. I'm like, "We're going to a billion. We're the fastest growing blah blah blah." I'm [ __ ] yelling. I'm going crazy because I want them to remember what we're doing and why we're here and what we're building. This is not a job. This is not a [ __ ] "I wake up at 9 to 5, I'm in my cubicle, I get out, and I'm done." This is like, if it's Saturday, and something breaks, and you're not there, I don't, where are you? Like, wake up. I'm going to call you until you answer the phone because we are in a place right now where everything is very crucial. So, every Monday morning, we reiterate the vision. I go through what I

learned. I work for my company now. I'm no longer like I'm not the big boss. I'm like, "What do you need? What do you need? What do you need? What do you need? Who do you need me to meet? Who do you need me to go to dinner with? Who do you need me to go see that knows something better than we know so that I could bring it home?"

So, every day I'm bringing things home so that they my team that's better than me can go execute properly. So, I have not looked anywhere at you guys. Sorry, everyone. Very beautiful.

>> They have been nodding and agreeing to everything. >> Um, so that that that's where I'm at guys. Like Monday morning meetings are incredible. You got to do it. You got to tell your team how much you appreciate them. You do not act like they're replaceable. You don't play the card of like it's so easy to get rid of you. It's not. Um it's just not. Especially when you're growing super fast. If I had a high churn rate, comfort would be would would be dead in the water because I'd lose the people that learn the things and then they would quit and then I would be stuck because I don't know how Alex does what she does or Dakota. I tried to do finance. the company almost went out of business. So definitely not going to work for me. So Cherry and Dakota like without them like my business I have no business. So you got to treat them properly and respectfully and you got to make sure that you're always looking forward for them first.

>> Amazing. Amazing. Thank you for sharing that. Another uh fact that you shared earlier is your spend. So you told me you're one of the top advertisers on Snap and hearing that from a brand is insane. Where is Snap? Where is Snap? What up, Snap? I see that's one hand. Oh, there's another hand. Sorry, Jared. Keep going.

>> So, tell us what are you spending per day on Snap? How are you making this work? Because it's not easy. And And I know some of your reps are here today, so they could probably just tell the playbook, but why don't you go ahead?

>> Yeah, we're the biggest spender on Snapchat. Um, and uh, you know, sometimes we spend upwards of 100 150,000 a day. Ryan, am I kind of in line with that? Okay. So, we we we spend a lot of money on Snapchat. It's the lowest hanging fruit. Like, do you know that Snapchat and Tik Tok are only off by like a couple million users? Everyone's on Snap. Even if we're not, there's tens of millions of people that are on it that are on TikTok. Let me explain the funnel for a second. So, Moses, you look great. Sorry, Mo. All right, just have to Okay, so so we we have Let's Let's go full circle. Meta is number one. It's just It just is. You spend the most money on Meta. It has the most It has the most influx in the business. That's good. Tik Tok shop, incredible. Google incredible Tik Tok website incredible. You run Pinterest. No. How many of you are running Pinterest?

>> Curtis is running Pinterest. >> [ __ ] three people are running Pinterest. That that that that will explain it. How many are running Snap?

>> Even less. >> No, not All right, relax. Four people. So, if I have four people in this room that are running Snapchat ads and I'm spending over $100,000 a day and I've been able to figure out through incremental growth because that's a word that I learned as of recent. It's very it's a very good word. It means this. If I go and I spend money on Snapchat, where do I make the money in other places? on Meta, on Tik Tok. What is the incremental growth of all my other channels by using Snap? So, if you're not using Snap, you're crazy. And I'm kind of like creating some competition here because there's people on the live stream. People are going to clip this. People in audience that have clothing brands. No problem. [ __ ] it. I want you guys to go try it because it's amazing. Work Magic and Northbeam are great at measuring incremental growth. Okay? You go, you get a good rep, you work with them, and you learn how does Snapchat affect my overall business. Meta has a huge overflow into Tik Tok. And I'm sure a lot of you, how many of you guys are using Tik Tok shops? Damn. [ __ ] Not as many as I want. How many of you guys have Amazon? All right. That Well, there you go. 30% of your revenue is going to be lifted by just having Tik Tok shops for the overflow on Amazon. It's game over. Everybody's going to type in the keyword search terms on comfort hoodie are unbelievable on on Amazon. I personally don't sell there for a few different reasons, but it's good for you guys to have Tik Tok shop if you already have an Amazon brand because your revenue is going to skyrocket and you're not even paying the sp you don't even turn off the sponsored ads and just let it rip organically and go to the top. Like that's the best way. And back in the day, we used to do search find by, which was huge, where you'd have a friend go buy it on like the eighth page, and then you'd go and you rank up to the top. I don't know if that's still a thing, but that was really cool. I'm going to ramble for a minute. Sorry. So, anyways, Snapchat, you got to get it because there's a lot of users and on top of it, like, it's video content. Like, it's gified. When you're going through your favorite creators video and then the sponsored ad pops up and it's an ad from a company that you know off Tik Tok, you win. So, I want you guys to go utilize that. I think it's an unbelievable way to generate money for your business and also lift all the other channels up. You have to do the whole circle. It has to be every single ad. Um, so yeah, that that's where I got for that.

>> You know, speaking about finance and and paying for those ads and you know, do you have a specific system that you use? Like how do you how do you manage all that? Because if you're spending so much, that's really really hard.

>> With uh with finance, I know where that's going. We use Flex. I don't know if you guys have heard of them. They're right there. They're also the ones that are hosting the Oh, it's actually right next to Wayne. Look at Wayne. It's not Bruce Wayne. It's just Wayne. Uh

>> Wayne Wayne is the CEO of Aroma 360 Hotel Collection. >> Hotel Collection. They're unbel Oh, yeah. Sorry. I I should have done that. And and listen, they're incredible. And and he's going to come up and talk about it in a little bit. When it comes to cash back, when it comes to working with a great bank that understands the business, that's super helpful. I mean, my team would not lie to me. They have the absolute out of every bank we work with, and we work with a lot of banks, uh, Flex is by far the best. So, anyone here that's looking and and and Z will explain why they're doing what they're doing and how amazing they are. But, yeah, we spend a ton of money. We get a ton of cash back. We made we actually got over $3 million in cash back uh, just from Flex last year. So, if you think about the amount of money that you could put back into your business, it's it's a no-brainer. Um, yeah, it's definitely a no-brainer.

>> So, back to >> Right. Right. It is a no-brainer. >> So, back to community, Hudson, you know, you've talked a lot about in podcast and other masterminds, building a community of microcreators. You know, you've talked about people having multiple Tik Tok accounts doing different different types of apparel. um for people here who who may not be managing a Discord or a WhatsApp, you know, if you could touch on Discord and managing that, but also touch on microcor we don't need the highest person. The algorithm is just going to do whoever's closest to you and and how does that work?

>> So, I I want you guys to listen to me very closely on this because this is probably the most important thing I'm going to say this entire time. When you're recruiting creators and you're a new brand, okay, go find the creators that have an amazing aesthetic, an amazing voice, they've done a great job with their own personal videos, but don't go for the creator that has 300,000 in GMV for the month that or that makes a ton of money every month that is making content for these huge brands in their niche. Okay, they're not loyal to you. They're loyal to the money. You need to create relationships, community, and trust. So, you call people, you get on the phone with them, you go and you DM them, you explain the game, you dangle the carrot, you show them what Invisaware is going to be, you show them what HOS is going to be, you show them what CGK Linens is going to be, right? You show them where it's going, right? a huge Amazon brand. But when you go to Tik Tok shop, that's your [ __ ] play. You go and you work with these businesses and you explain to them or these these these people and you explain to them where your company is going and how much you care about the business and about what you want to do with them. If they feel like they're just like like a replaceable like content machine, they're not going to trust you. They're not going to like you. they're not going to want to work with you cuz someone like me is going to come in and I'm going to make them feel like family and they're never going to work with you again. So, you have to treat people the correct way. You build that out. You get a bunch of core creators. You have them make a ton of content. If they're not making enough content, you put out a crazy reward. You say, "Hey, if you make me 500 pieces of content, I'm going to pay you five grand." Now, mind you, it may lose a little bit of money for you in the beginning, but it's an amazing play to understand what works for your business. The hardest part about getting a brand to scale. I mean, listen, it's not that [ __ ] hard. You have a problem and you have a solution and you make sure the solution is so good and the TAM is so big that everybody in this room will want to have your product because it works. That's all you want. the TAM has to be big enough because I know plenty of founders that are in that are that are superior to me in their entirety of how they've developed their businesses, but I make way more money because they're in a smaller they're in a smaller TAM. You want to make sure that you have the right TAM, you have the right market, you have the influencers that believe, trust your brand, they want to be successful, they believe in you, they believe in your vision, and then you go and you deploy them to go make 10 videos a day and you have all these creators doing it. until you find the common denominator of why the content wins. If I say in a video, my hot points, Dakota may like an oversized hood. Jill may like that we are a mental health brand and we help with stress and anxiety. Cherry may like the fact that we have every color under the moon. There's a company called Colorful Standard. We have more colors than them. Just think about that. Okay. Then we have Lauren. And Lauren says, "Well, you know what? I really like that. um you know like the creators are authentic and I love that the brand is you know like very affordable. I like the affordability. Um, you know Genevieve may say I love that it feels like a luxury item but I'm not breaking the bank. If I have my content creator say every [ __ ] thing that I just named and then I have them show every color and I make sure that I make it so hard for you to say no. I may be wearing a blue hoodie, but Raja may like a black hoodie. And then I show the black hoodie and she's like, "Oh my god, I didn't know they had a black hoodie. Now I'm going to go and buy it." Showcase every single thing. It's by design. So you find the common denominator of why people want to go buy the product and then you go and you throw it into AI. And honestly, like I thought I was going to be like the AI guy today. I'm not the AI guy. Nick and Danny smoke me. But I'm building some cool [ __ ] My technology company is not super happy with it. But I'm building some cool stuff. Actually, no. You guys are pretty happy with it now. They they took ownership over it. That's why they're happy. Um I was kind of like, you know, just like just doing everything just, you know, I didn't know I had no ramifications of like what could happen if everything got leaked. So they took it under control. Um I've been building a lot with OpenClaw. I have it on a Mac Mini on a separate computer. I talked to it on Telegram. His name is Apollo. Super cool dude. Um, and uh, he he helps me a lot. So, I've been running AI a lot with my business and I'm developing new products and I'm getting trends and I'm scraping ads. A lot of my friends companies, I'm scraping the ads that they run and I'm going and I'm looking. I'm saying, "What's the oldest running ad on Facebook ad library?" If they're still spending money on that ad, it means it's a good ad. You go and you take that ad and you run into your business. I see some of you guys taking notes. Take notes. This is some good [ __ ] You guys are going to use it. It's going to make you a ton of money. Okay. Then you have the next piece. I look at where I'm going into retail. We just did American Dream. We got LAX. We're going into Chicago. We're doing Aventura. We're probably going to steal Hudson Yards from Aroma 360. Um so we're doing a lot of cool stuff. And uh we want to know where are the bulks of our customers. So I built a map and I put it in density by color of where all of our customers are, their age, their age, their demos, every single thing. what what products they buy the most of everything. So now I can know where I'm going to launch in retail next. Chicago and Brooklyn are my biggest uh are my biggest cities uh out of everywhere for comfort. And we didn't know Chicago, but now we know that we want to go launch in the mall there. You guys got to use AI properly. Everyone's nervous and afraid of AI because they think it's like this like this like black box. It's really not. Like go to [ __ ] Claude and and just start having conversations with it and start asking things. Jared said something that is really unique. Like when it makes an error, it fixes its error. You don't even have to f like it's gonna fix it. You're gonna say that was wrong. It's okay, let me fix it. So you have this like little like freaking sidekick all the time working with you. And that's really good for when you're building your brand, too. I do it with my creators. My creators are now going to have their own profile, their own top videos. They can now upload their content inside of each individual thing. my team can then go look at it and bulk upload and now we're going to use everything via AI. We did it all manual, but as things change, you want to be able to make it easier and easier and easier for your company. So, with the affiliates, it's very easy. Get on phone calls, recruit, share the vision, explain to them where everything is going, and then Yuka AI is great to use it. Tribe is an amazing platform to go when you're doing meta ads, like go use the outreach method. Go have outreach where you can get hundreds of people that already are selling product that want free samples from your company and go have them have the product and you got to go look what's their estimated post rate. Do they post 30% of the time or 99% of the time? I want a guaranteed post. I want to flood the algorithm. I want to make sure that I own the [ __ ] market. And that's how you're going to do it. So we take our creators ads. We upload them everywhere. Snapchat, Pinterest, Meta, etc. My creators have so many net new ways to make revenue. I make them so much money that they're never going to look anywhere else. You build the community, the culture, the framework, everything. That's going to help your business stay afloat in the early days when you don't have a tremendous amount of money and there's a lot of bigger players in the game above you. So, Comfort does something amazing with their socials, right? And this is two parts. So the first is Comfort's amazing at reposting other people's post 150 times a day. It could be 500 times a day. So everybody is featured on Comforts or whoever is approved is featured on Comforts Insta. And when you were always told, "No, you're going to cannibalize Insta and that's not going to it's not the way." And and you've learned it is the way. And so I'm kind of curious now and you also mentioned you're going into American Dream and LAX and a lot of other locations. Um, how did you make that decision? Instead of just being in retail, you now creating your own space and how are you going to use your massive creator army to drive the most insane opening possible?

>> Humbly, I'm the aside. I'm the aside to Amazon. I'm the aside to Target. I'm the aside to [ __ ] everybody. I draw the traffic. I I did it. Like, it's me. So, like, they want what I built. Um, so I want to build my own stores. I want to make sure that I do it the right way. We have a great team in place, but like yeah, we know we let this one guy, this is guys, this is real. I had a guy bulk order, pre-order. Ken, you know where I'm going with this, and he started selling our products at a way higher price in the mall from like a from Smith Haven Mall where I'm from, Long Island. And he started selling them in his place. And we found out I was pissed. Then we got on the phone and he was like the nicest guy. He's like, "Dude, I'll do whatever you ask. Like, you're the best selling in my the best seller in my store." So, we still let him sell till this day. But we got a lot of data from him and it showed that out of his top 10 products sold every single month, Comfort's the top 10 products sold every single month. And these are Panagonia, Northface, Ed Hardy, Addicted, This, that. We beat everybody because we've built a lot of culture and community around our business. So, we want to own it. I'm a big believer in ownership and not agency. If you can build it in house, build it in house. The tech team's probably like, "Oh [ __ ] he just messed up." Cuz I told the whole team that we should use some agencies. But it's good like know where know like the capacity of your team and how like how struggling they are in each department and then like go deploy agencies correctly when you need to. Don't just give an agency to your and some people are going to say this, but like you don't want to have an agency for a lot of your your media sometimes, right? Like we didn't use an agency for Tik Tok because we wanted to build it in house cuz if we got rid of them tomorrow, we're with nothing. Um, and there are some amazing Tik Tok agencies out there that can help you scale. I 100% believe in that. But when it comes to your business, you want ownership. I've been [ __ ] over a lot working with agencies. So, you want to be careful and work with the right ones. There are some amazing ones, but you want to be careful with who you work with. Okay? Like, keep it on the back of your head. So, when it comes to us, um Jared, what was your question? Okay, two parts. Um the first one is how are actually you know what? How are you how are you going to drive um foot traffic to your stores? How about that? Especially at the launch.

>> All right, cool. QR code right on the outside. We're going to do that. We're going to give 500 hoodies.

>> What's the outside? What does that mean?

>> The outside of like the whole store where like they have right now it's like messy. It's like him kicking a soccer ball. Soon that's going to be a comfort logo. It's going to be beautiful. And uh we're going to have a big QR code. The QR code is going to have a landing page on our website with our team. You're going to be able to scan it and see what exclusive discounts, offers, and products you're only going to be able to get at American Dream.

>> Okay. So, so it says comfort at the top.

>> Comfort at the top. Big QR code. Go to the website, you get all the information around American Dream, when we're launching, etc. And then for the first 500 people that show up, you're going to get a free hoodie with every purchase. You guys know who Simon Beard is, owner of Culture Kings. Raise your hand if you know Simon. Okay, actually there's a nice nice amount of people. Simon's a G. He built Culture Kings and did some incredible things when it was building his business. So, I want you guys to go look at what he did. He gified and trained for retail in a way that I've never seen people do before. And he's a good friend of mine. I help him a lot with influencer world and he's helping the team when it comes to anything retail related. That's another thing that I want you to go do. Go find people who are really [ __ ] good at things you're not and go have conversations with them and then go learn from them and then go be better than them at the thing that they taught you. That's the best thing to do. So,

>> the easiest way to do that, by the way, you can literally just DM anybody on LinkedIn and then ask them for a quick call. It's so easy. People don't do it.

>> 100%. LinkedIn, IG, you see them in public, you just go up to them like just just it's just an easier way to go do it. Just go right up to them, shake their hand, get grab their hand, and shake it with them. It's a really good way to do it. But I think, you know, when it comes to retail, you want to gify it. I'm going to tell you something really cool, too. Uh hopefully no one copies me. We're gonna go and we're going to do live boots where we have creators going to all our retail locations and they're going live and when we put up a sale, they're going to the sale is going to automatically go into the store and then it's going to be like a frenzy of shopping and we're going to game the whole [ __ ] thing. And then when people leave my store, they're going to get street interviews of you just tried on my product. Now I'm going to now I want to see how is your experience in store? What did you like? What did you not like? Everything. Now, we're going to run that as an ad. Now, we're going to have thousands of ads a week that are net new pieces of creative from real life customers that bought our product that love us.

>> Wow.

>> All right. Like, it's [ __ ] I came up with that one myself. That was a pretty good one.

>> Good job.

>> I want you guys to like understand like it's not hard. Just like just bring it back. It's all going to be marketing at the end of the day. It's all marketing. Comfort was the viral hoodie brand before anybody knew who we were.

>> Do you want to be in all 50 states? What's the goal?

>> We want to be Well, we're actually launching in LAX as well. Just imagine that. Yeah. Airplane mode hoodie. You're going by You're going by Hudson News. Skip a little bit over. Go right into comfort. Get a neck pillow. Get get a airplane mode hoodie. Get a travel blanket and then call it a day. like I want to be in every major international airport in the country. I want to be a two and a half three billion dollar brand next year, which we'll do. We'll [ __ ] walk through that number. And um and now the pressure is on you guys. And uh and I and I yeah, I think that at the end of the day, it's like it's just the circle, guys. Marketing and then if we're going into retail, we want to make money, but I just know that the retail is going to make me so much money on the marketing side when I go DTOC. So just go and make that the funnel. If you have a location, go utilize that location to your advantage. The retail side is going to be great, but you have so much content you could be generating as a business by just changing the mindset of what retail used to be and what retail is now. Everything is changing. All I did was see that everybody sucked at what they were doing and I just made it better. I'm not better than them. They could actually put me, all these brands could just put me out of business and they could just took my strategy and ran it, but they didn't want to and the team didn't believe in it and the private equity said it was a stupid idea and they just [ __ ] drowned in their own [ __ ] You guys have to see where the puck is going. Tik Tok live. People are making hundreds of million dollars on a live in China. What do you think is going to happen in 5 years? If you're not going live right now, you're an idiot. So, go live. Tik Tok Shop just released and then I'm gonna let Jared ask me one more question. Tik Tok Shop just released. If you have a creator in the US who makes content, they can toggle on that the content was supposed to be for the UK, right? So they're like, "Hey, it's US or UK. That's for us right now because we're going to be live in uh July in the UK." All my US creators get thousands of videos. They generate and they bank. And then I say, we push the big red button one day and we say, "Okay, we're launching in the UK on chops. Go have 30,000 pieces of content go to the UK." It's all my US creators. Now they can go make content in the UK. What happens when Australia goes live? What happens when when Canada goes live? What happens when all these countries follow suit now that the whole like BS around like Tik Tok being banned is gone? everyone's going to it's monkey see monkey do go have your influencers here and then have them go run those countries up and then go ship to these countries and go website and then go crush the website and then now you're a [ __ ] huge conglomerate in the UK. That's how the game is played. That's how you go global. That's how you win the game. Okay, it's not hard. Just go think about where things are going and then go be there when they get there. What else, Sharon? I think let's just give you a round of applause for

>> No, thank you. Thank you.

>> Hudson,

>> I I think we just go to qu Let's just hit some questions.

>> One second. Hold on. We we your whole your family's here and your whole team is here and I think one question I was asked by your team to ask you is what when you put your head down on that pillow what keeps you up at night or what you know that extra you know 30 seconds after a good Fortnite game.

>> Do you play Fortnite at night by the way? H

>> no only a couple times. Um, I want to be who I say I am, right? I wake up and I look in the mirror and I want to be this this person that I always imagined, right? I And I'm speaking real here, so if you don't like what I'm going to say, it doesn't matter. When I was a kid, I wanted to be good-looking, have a good physique, have a lot of money, have a nice car, travel, have good friends, have a great relationship with my family. That's what I wanted. I wanted to like I looked up to that version of myself. Um, and I work really hard every [ __ ] day to be that person. And I have a lot of people that rely on me. And you know, I had a great conversation with my buddy right here, and we were talking about he's like, "Why do you do all this [ __ ] Like, why do you why do you do it for free? You could charge so much money. It's at a I could retire right now and retire my kids right now and I I I could not say that six months ago. Um I I do it because there's so many like I remember the scared 16-year-old that just wanted everything and was so afraid that he was going to have nothing. And I used to just be afraid like Wayne and I were talking about it today. Wayne has blackberries in his office. And I said, "Why do you have blackberries?" He goes, "Because I always remind myself like never to be Blackberry, right?" You probably said it better than me, but it was pretty [ __ ] good. And it stuck with me because I'm looking at like this older version of me that like I posted a real and it said like, "Did we do it?" And then it's like the Thanos and he's like, "Yes." And he's like, "What did it cost?" And it cost everything. I wasted my my not wasted, but I my whole 20s I [ __ ] I I'd sacrifice my life to this, you know? Like I want to show that I'm the best in the world. I never want to be in a position where I see another man walk into a room and I can I say that he's better than me. Um I want to be the best and I believe that I'm the best. And it's not a cocky thing. It's not an arrogance thing. It's just a truth. Like you guys all have to believe that you're the best at what you do. If you don't believe you're the best, you never will be. Um, so I go to bed every night and I think about all the people that work at my company and all the people that trust me and rely on me and and and love me and and and sacrifice their time for me and like believe in me and my vision. Um, and I never want to let them down. Um, you know, I'm I'm not worried about me. I'm worried about them. And when I wake up and I know that I have so many people that are thinking about me, I have to think about them, too. And that's what keeps me up. And that's what keeps me aligned. And that's what keeps me focused. And that's what has this burning fire and fuel that is in me that I can't get [ __ ] rid of even if I wanted to. And I care about things even when I don't want to care about them because I love this [ __ ] Like I look out here and I see everybody. I'm like, I would never have it any other [ __ ] way.

>> Do you think you're born with that fire or that develops over time? I I think you have it, but I I think I think life experiences can can shift or or or speed up the process. Like I 16 it started and uh you know there's a couple times I wish that I didn't have it. But um overall I'm just so happy that I do. But yeah, I think I think everybody truly realistically I think everybody can be an entrepreneur if they just focus so [ __ ] hard on bettering themselves and being the best version of themselves. And a lot of people say they can't, but I believe it. I had a conversation with one of my friends the other day about being an entrepreneur, and I told them, I'm looking right at them, and I said, "Bro, you could do anything you [ __ ] want. You're incredible." Um, and some people don't believe it yet, but I believe it. Um, and I believe in everyone that I work with, and I think everybody can be the best of their ability. So, that's what that's my thoughts.

>> Let's take some questions. Who's got questions? Right here in the second row.

>> Hello.

>> Hello. Um on this topic of mindset because I feel like you always open with that. Um coming from you say you were homeless. You started with a scarcity mindset like what are you consuming and what mentors are you learning from where you can like show up and speak like this and motivate all of us?

>> I I used to listen to Bob Proctor. How many of you guys know Bob Proctor? Hell yeah. Hell yeah. Bob Proctctor. Um, rest in peace. I I was listening to the same meditation every single night for two years straight. It's called paradigm shift. And it's all these imaginary walls that we put up in our mind. and we um we don't know that they're there, but they block us from achieving greatness. And I I had that um I had like like Eric Thomas was a very motivational speaker. I had like Tony Robbins I listened to. But honestly, like it was me. Like it was me. Like I saw people doing things and I looked up to them and I admired them, but like it was me. I was scared shitless to go on a podcast. Um, like I don't know, however long ago. Like my first one was like a couple years ago and I stuttered and I and I asked if we could do a different take and I I I just I was nervous. Um, but I knew that I wanted to do it, right? But I was just so nervous when it got there that like the jitters were there. Uh, but like for me to motivate you guys is like you're all just like me and I'm just like you. So like I'm with my peers. I don't feel like I'm doing anything different. Um, so that's what gives me the confidence. And also, I see a lot of people speaking and being excited and I meet all of you and I shake hands and we have conversations before I come up here and it makes me feel like I know a lot of you. I look in the audience and I see people I just had a full-blown conversation with and it makes me feel good. So, I think uh the motivation has to come from within. Um, but you just have to know that like you can have you can have the best life in the world. You just cannot quit. Um, you know, my dad put a something in our room when we were kids and it said, "Never, never, never give up." And it's like, if you just never [ __ ] give up, how can you lose, right? Um, and some people quit too soon. You ever see the image of the people with the pickaxe and they're going for the gold or the diamonds and then right before they get there, they [ __ ] turn around. That's most people. Just keep going till you hit the diamonds. It may take you a couple years, but if you're focused and you're always learning and you're always growing, you're going to win. That's it. Next question. Where's the mic? Over there. Um, why don't we go go right here and then we'll go there to there.

>> Congratulations on everything that you've built.

>> You sell a feeling before you sell your product. And I wear comfort because of what it makes me feel. I can relate to that with what I'm building currently right now. Let's go back to the beginning stages of your business. first six months, first launch. You mentioned your team a lot.

>> You mentioned Kimberly being one of the first people on your team.

>> My question is, what did you guys do? What was your biggest move that you made to help you scale from zero to 16 million in your first year?

>> We found what people related to. The marketing has to be relevant. For instance, we ran a tariff ad when tariffs were hitting and everybody was like, "Oh my god, tariffs." And some people were like thought it was like political. It wasn't political. We just saw it as like an angle to to to to get people that were already thinking about it to see it. Um, and it was about how we weren't going to drop prices. That ad made us 2 million a day. Um, it was our most lucrative static ad of all time. And it was because it was relevant to what people were talking about. My videos that I make with my creators are relevant. Mental health is a real thing. I'm not some like [ __ ] guy that sits up here and [ __ ] preaches mental health. I'm the largest contributor to the ADA. Like literally out of every company, we're one of the biggest to the Jed Foundation. Like this means something to me and we then had people that it aligned with and we brought them in and they speak about it because it means something to them. That's what you need. People cannot just sell a product because they want to make money. It has to be more than that. more than money. My why is more than money. I didn't say like every day that I woke up that I just want to be rich. Like it having the car is cool, guys. Like after the [ __ ] fifth time getting in it, it's a car. Like it's just a [ __ ] car, you know? Like you want to do [ __ ] with your family. You want to go on vacation with your people. Like you want to go and like have this amazing life. That's what you want to go do. My creators, I preach that vision and then I want them to go have it. And then when they are like in the midst of like they're we don't script anybody. They're organically talking about their true experiences with the brand. So like first six months was like how do we test that and create that? How do we create that emo how do I evoke so much emotion that like everyone in this room will align with me and like I have everybody here looking at me. Everyone no no one's on their phones. Maybe some of you but like everyone's engaged with me. Why? Because I'm being emotional right now. I'm I'm evoking something in you that's making you [ __ ] think about yourself. Do that with content. If you could do that with content, you win the game. All these other big brands, they don't understand the mindset of like the consumer. They just think that if they put a [ __ ] ton of money behind something, like all of a sudden something is going to work. It doesn't work that way. So, you have to be able to to cultivate and curate a video and segments of videos that make your customers feel something that will get you there.

>> Thank you.

>> You're welcome. Who else? See, let me see. I have to I have to.

>> Hi, Hudson. Um, so my question is in regard to what Jared asked about driving foot traffic to your retail locations. I am about to launch an influencer marketing app. It's the first to market connecting creators with retail and brick-andmortar storefronts. I was a creator myself and noticed that there was this large gap in the industry especially as it relates to affiliate marketing. So you have a great success obviously working with creators. I heard your strategy on driving paid ads to these live events in store.

>> Right.

>> Yes.

>> Okay. What is your affiliate plan working with creators in your retail locations? So, well, that's a really great idea and I know we briefly spoke about I think that's amazing. My my goal with my affiliates right now is every single affiliate that works with my company is going to have access to go to my location and make content and book out time slots to film interviews with every single person that leaves my store that is willing to do an interview for a discount. someone wants to make content with my company, a customer, the next time they come in and shop, they get a free gift. What is that free gift? I don't know. It's a mystery. Who knows? But we're going to have one. And that's the goal. You want to we we just want to gamify everything with our affiliates and get them excited enough to come into the retail location and make retail like cool again. You know, everyone's saying like retail's dead, malls are dead. It's not true. It's just not true. There's these international if you go to American Dream and you tell me retail is dead. Like I was like mind blown. There's people [ __ ] surfing in the middle of the mall or snowboarding or skiing and I'm like this is insane. So yeah, that's my strategy. I want everyone to come in and work with my business and be able to interview people and work with the customers and work with the employees and like really like showcase every single touch point of the process of how to start to like the p the way the person is checking out.

>> So, have you not considered affiliate marketing for retail at this point?

>> Like grabbing affiliates and having them promote on social media that you're in retail? Yeah, because I I love your strategy in terms of having them have live offers and the interviews and everything, but a lot of your creators, I follow you closely on socials and I see you repost. I had this great month. I I made all this money and it's so I mean life-changing for a lot of people. So affiliate marketing is a huge money maker for these creators and to give them the opportunity to do that also in store when they're driving those sales. Um true. So that's what my app does, but I would

>> I love that [ __ ] Yeah. No, we're gonna have to talk to you guys.

>> I was wondering if you had thought about it because it would be helpful to me.

>> No, I I not to the level that you just explained it. I have not. And I usually don't say that. So that's unbelievable. That's an amazing We're definitely going to talk about that and then you can maybe take a couple more people, but just me. So thank you.

>> Uh

>> last question.

>> Oh man. All right. No, I got two more.

>> We're going to have our whole panel.

>> No, no, I got No, no, I got two more. Okay.

>> You Yes.

>> Hi. So, obviously you guys are going growing very quickly. What do you do when an team member comes and says that they're overwhelmed? Like what do you say? And is there something you do before hiring someone else to help them? Like what's what do you do?

>> Yeah, my HR department is here. Uh,

>> it's not called HR.

>> I know. I just like saying that to her. It pisses her off a little bit. Um, overwhelmed is a mindset. Okay. Um, and and I always reference the story of when I started comfort. Um, you guys know the feeling. Raise your hand if you've ever been really, really, really stressed out. Okay. Raise your hand if you felt that again, but it didn't feel as crazy as it did the first time. Okay. Maybe some of you still feel it the same. I you have this level of like if I stress myself out and I don't quit, I I can kind of break down this invisible ceiling that I've built for myself of like being stressed out and then I can like normalize the stress. And it does sound a little bit toxic. Um, but you have to learn first of all how to manage it properly and also like how to delegate properly. So, usually in the overwhelmed craziness of the conversation, there's a really good fix. Um, there's never been something that I've done that I didn't have a way out.

I love the way out. I love finding it. Like your back's against the wall, you're dodging [ __ ] punches, and then all of a sudden you just hit them right in the face and whatever that problem is drops to the floor. There is a way out.

My team, they work super hard and I know like my Dakota is super stressed out right now. Like you can't even see her, but she's stressing and then like she's not going to be stressed tomorrow. You know, we're going to get her a little cratom kava tea from my my my friend's tea shop and she'll be fine. But you got to like you got to show them that you care about them and you love them and and you're there for them, right? If you're stressed out, I want to be stressed out too. Bring me whatever it is and I'm going to fix it with you. Not just like, "You suck. Go [ __ ] figure it out." You want to make them know that like, "Hey, let's figure out together how we're going to collectively make this easier because this isn't the last time that we're going to feel this emotion."

So, if we're going to feel it again and again and again as we're growing fast, and obviously you guys know the the brand 437, the activewear brand, she's [ __ ] killing. I want to give a round of applause. >> That's so sweet. >> You're awesome. Your stuff is awesome. So, I know you're feeling stuff because your brand is growing really quickly and you have a very short work week. >> So, so I I can understand that growth and that level of emotion. But yeah, you got to just be there for your team. You got to show them that you're with them and um and I think that there's always a way out and you just got to go find it with them and be sure that like you're never leaving them alone when they're feeling that way. That's how I would say it. >> Thank you. >> All right. I got I got one more. I'll answer that dinner at dinner. Um, [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] I'll answer you later. What's Yes. Hello. Thank you, Hudson. >> Got you, brother.

So, recently I finished reading Elon's uh autobiography, and I always like thinking about thinking bigger. Obviously, where you are today versus where you were at 16 is a big jump. When you see Elon and Trump thinking massively, where do you see yourself still thinking small? Like you said, three billion extra, but how Elon's at a trillion and he's thinking about saving the world. >> Yeah. >> So, how often do you catch yourself injecting humility, >> still saying, "I'm grateful for where I'm at, but like understanding >> God wants infinite for you and your soul's purpose." So, how do you even think more massively than just comfort hoodie Hudson?

>> Yeah, dude. That's huge. Um, well, first of all, if you have there's a self-doubt aspect that you need to [ __ ] eliminate. If you have it, you you eliminate. And I said it in a podcast, like that little birdie, that like little devil on your shoulder that's like you can't do it. It's like try that. Try that somewhere else. Like that shit's not going to [ __ ] work on me. So the self-doubt has to be eliminated from the beginning. I don't care to be a trillionaire. Like, I just don't. Um, I care about helping people and changing the world. And if the money comes with it, incredible. In the beginning, my answer may have been a little bit different. I cared a lot about making money because I wanted to be financially free and I wanted to be able to take care of my friends and my family. I'm developing things right now outside of comfort that are going to change the world. I can't be vocal about them yet, but when they come out, you'll see. and I'll be very vocal. Um, we have a lot happening and um, you know, I believe that like if you wake up every day with a focus and all you want to do is better yourself and better others around you, the world, the frequency that you operate on is going to lead you to that. So Elon's purpose, whatever his end goal is, he's been driven that way from a very long time ago before no one even [ __ ] knew who he was. But it just continuously happens on the journey. So I'm like, "Yeah, we'll do a billion this year." Guess how much Louis Vuitton makes in a year? 96 billion. So what is it going to take me till I'm hundred and something years old to go do what Louis Vuitton did in one year? No. I'm going to go I'm going to go play the game. I'm going to be a 10 billion dollar company in the next four years. I'm going to take out [ __ ] everybody along the way. humbly that that that is the way that I want to do. So, so that's that's my answer is you got to remember where you started and you got to look at where you're going and you got to be excited about the vision and the journey and the mission, right? Like you coming up to me at the coffee shop randomly when you saw me the other day. Like I love that [ __ ] like like you're so focused on the growth and like I don't forget conversations like that because it shows that you want more. You will be led in the perfect direction just because of where you're operating, dude. Like I have no doubt with that. But that's how I think about it, guys. Thank you. I appreciate you guys a lot. We're going to keep going. And we're going to have Zade come up on stage. Zade, if you want to come on up.

>> All right, we're going to move right into our next speaker. We're going to have Zade Raman here. >> Hey, everybody. Zade, why don't you give a a little background on uh on on what you do here and and what is and >> you know what's funny is um I do a bunch of these >> and you know I do a bunch of these and um there's some speakers who are really really [ __ ] boring. Hudson is definitely one not one of those. Um so yeah, so quick story on myself. Uh I'm the founder CEO of Flex. um have done a few companies. Uh prior to this I started a company in the education software space uh that helped schools to digitize content. Uh and that company got acquired by a PE fund and then after that um started an AI company uh which was trying to build chat GBT before chat GPT was a thing. Um ultimately sold that company JP Morgan. Uh so been around the block a couple of times.

>> Hold on Zade one second. Hold on one second. Moses, we love you. And Hudson, we love you. Can you guys just take it down the hall just a little bit? We can't hear. He can't hear me. It's okay. Okay, go for it. >> We love you. Yeah. And so um you know after building a couple of these companies uh and having gone through a couple of exits uh the big kind of aha moment for me was as a business owner like many of you in the room um running a business is really really hard right you're dealing with so many problems you know finance you know banking um you know all sorts of different things that you got to do and the reality is that as a business owner you just want to focus on the job at hand, which is building a $ 1.4 billion company like Hudson, right? You don't really want to be dealing with all this sort of administrative work that you got to do. And so the big kind of aha moment for me was finance sucks. Sorry, Dakota. Um, and and it seemed to me that like there just so many different things out there helping business owners in a very fragmented ecosystem, right? You got cards, you got banking, you got expense, rewards, working capital, lending, payroll, benefits, insurance, tax. Why are these like 20 different companies? Why hasn't anyone figured out how to consolidate all of these different things in one place? And so that's what we're building at Flex. We're building the full financial home for business owners all the way from the time you make a single dollar of revenue to the time you spend it personally on your lifestyle. Um, and so for everything from, you know, giving $3 million in cash back to uh your ad spend uh all the way to sort of managing your working capital, banking, all your payments, payment processing, and so on and so forth.

>> And you have 60-day interestfree business credit cards. So you can instead of doing 30 say, "Well, how can you do that?" you know, because everything's on a on a typical, you know, net30 term. Like, how are you doing 60 days? It's something that's really you can't do it with AMX or Visa or anything else. >> Yeah. No, so um obviously, you know, how many of you use AMX as an example? And most people in the room love AMX, but AMX is really a uh rewards company like they help you travel first class to Dubai and those types of things. They're not really focused on your cash conversion cycles. they're not really trying to understand your financials holistically, underwriting the appropriate credit limits and those types of things. And so we realized there's a huge pain point in just cash flow. And so there's a pretty obvious opportunity to offer 60 days of float on every transaction. So you buy inventory, you have two months to pay back interest free. And by the way, if you pay us early, we give up to 2.5% cash back. Um, and so it became like this very obvious way to sort of enter the business and a lot of business owners use that to manage inventory, ad spend, uh, sort of just, you know, day-to-day expenses. Uh, today we're doing about 7 billion annualized in payments. Uh, so double since uh, that number. Um, and um, you know, the main kind of hook is that if we can help you with short-term cash flow, we can sort of fuel your ambition over time. And so those customers end up using our banking products. Uh they end up using our payments products. Uh and they ultimately get working capital from us.

>> So you've worked with so many founders, right? So how how are you become how are you like founder friendly with with the way that you guys operate because you've seen so many stories. How does that work? >> I asked my friend Lil Wayne earlier um what is the one thing Flex is good at? and he was like, "Flex lets founders be founders." The moment you lose control of your business, you're effed. And part of that is just cash flow. Things can flip in a moment's notice. Uh when you need to make an expense, when you need to pay your vendors and you don't have the cash flow at hand. And so for us, it's all about just letting you be more ambitious, right? Um, and so we think that, you know, by really truly understanding your business, not just one aspect of the business, not just your credit score, but truly understand how you're doing as a business owner across your entire financial life. We can not only give you more credit, which of course helps, but frankly, we're building AI products to almost be like your co-founder, like an AI CFO, to help you be a better business owner, give you insights uh on how to run your business a lot better. and you know do things that your peers are doing that you're not and those types of things.

>> What do you think is the biggest trap? What's the biggest trap that sophisticated CEOs fall into? >> They don't really know their numbers cold. It's actually really surprising. We come across I'll give you one kind of anecdote. So Hudson gave a number earlier. Uh it really actually struck me. So we sent Hudson roughly $3 million in cash back last year, right? What's really funny is that we actually send another brand $10 million. But here's the interesting thing. Hudson does more revenue than that brand. Um, so the CAC to LTV math of this other company that's spending 3 4x more than Comfort is way worse. Um, and so, you know, by not sort of fundamentally understanding that disconnect, while this brand is, you know, printing a lot of sales, it's not doing as well from an income standpoint. And of course, now the brand is looking for private equity buyers and is having a hard time exiting. Uh, and so it can be quite challenging if you don't fundamentally understand your numbers. not just how much money is in the bank, how much you did in sales today, but you know truly understand the math in the kind of formulas of what a good business is. Um a and frankly most business owners don't have that sophistication, right? Um and so we are building tooling to like help you understand that a lot better over time. Um and I I think you know if you can understand the numbers there's absolutely no reason why you can't go from 1.4 4 billion to 2 billion to 10 billion and then eventually 96 billion.

>> So from whatever you're allowed to tell us if if you know comfort is using you aroma 360 and a lot of other brands right if someone says to you okay you know you know Hudson is so inspiring on stage I want the comfort setup with flex like what does that mean? Yeah. Well, look, uh, easy peasy, right? Like, first, let's give you 60 days of float on everything you spend. Second, if you really want rewards, let's set you up with the highest possible cash back in the industry across every transaction. Third, let's set you up with banking, so you know, you have, you know, free wires, free E, those types of things, and you're earning on idle deposits. Uh and then fourth uh let's sort of take over all your payments and automate it. So you don't need to worry about bills, you know, worry about, you know, sort of a vendor didn't get paid. You can sort of predict um what your cash flow is going to look like the next 30, 60, 90 days.

>> Amazing. Does anybody have any questions for for Zeta on banking or maybe a comparison of what you're using now? Whether it's cash back, whether it's flow, you know, most people charge a lot of interest to have 60-day float. Yeah, we got a couple questions. Let's go over here in the middle. Sure. >> Hello. Nice to meet you. My name is Ilda and I just have a quick question. Is there a maximum amount that you give to companies to float? Like how do you determine that? >> You You're asking about the credit limit? >> Yes. >> Yeah, we can. There's no maximum. You know, we have companies with eight figure credit limits with us. Um, yeah, they're spending tens of millions of dollars a month on card. Uh, actually, our largest, um, spender per month, um, spends $40 million a month. So, there is no limit. The way we determine that is holistically. We just look at your financials. You, you know, if you're on Shopify, Amazon, Tik Tok, we integrate with that. We integrate with your ad accounts. We just try to understand how you're doing as a business and based on that we have our own AI models that predicts how you're going to do in the next 60 days, 90 days and so on. Um and and determine the highest possible limit we can possibly give you. >> Oh wow. Thank you very much. Have a good day. I've seen some people get letters from Meta that um are not allowing them to use credit cards to pay for their ads. I think it's you have to be spending probably over 100K a month. Um does Flex have options where you can get cash back using a debit card or a >> Yeah, so we launched two products um that sort of address that problem. Specifically what he's talking about is uh Meta by the way. How many people are affected by this? Meta sort of send you a notice saying that no more credit cards for your ad spend. >> I heard Amazon is actually going to start doing this too. >> Yeah, Amazon did this yesterday. Google did this uh last year. So it's kind of insane that um you know cash flow sort of issues are arising in this industry because of you know just profit optimization. But to answer your question there sort of two things that we're doing. One we can give you extra float on that invoice payment. So you can send an AC to Meta, we will cover it and you pay us in 60 days. So that's the first thing. The second thing is if you really really care about points and cash back, you can just use the Flex card. We'll send an AC and we'll just give you the cash back on that card. So yeah, thank you. You got two over here. I have two quick questions. First, for payment processing, uh, my product has cava in it and a lot of these payment processors don't want to serve us and it's like so expensive. Do you guys do payment processing for quote unquote higher risk supplements? >> Yeah, we're working on a solution for high-risisk payment processing. We should talk offline separately about it. And then all of these metrics that founders should be looking at. Um I'm trying to build out using AI like dashboards, but they're not consistent and it's hard to rely on them and then try to use triple whale, but it's not good. Like to have the numbers down cold. Does Flex have a system where you can kind of build your own dashboard? And I want to know how much did I lose from canceled subscriptions today and how much I made over 30 days from just this upsell. being nitty-gritty, but having it delivered in a very easy way, so it's just not a million numbers like a Shopify dashboard would. >> We'll make it even better. Um, every Monday you'll get a report from us called Beacon that looks like an Instagram story on your business with all the numbers in text saying that, hey, this is how you did. This is what you need to improve. These are the issues. Even easier than like looking at a bunch of numbers on triple whale. Is there a discount to sign up right now? >> We're free. We don't charge anything. $0. We don't charge for wires, AC, no overdraft fee, no credit card fee, no, you know, annual fee, none of that. We're $0.0. >> Okay, last qu. Yes, go for it. >> I'm coming. >> He's coming. So when you transact um Visa, you know, so for example, let's say you're paying for dinner right now um and the dinner is 100 bucks. Um there's typically a credit card processing fee that Visa, Mastercard, MX take, um we make, you know, roughly 80% of that, right? So if they're charging like, I don't know, uh 3%, you know, we're making a percentage off that. Um we also make revenue from, you know, cash your deposit. So, you know, today the Fed fund rates are 3.8% and so most of that is actually coming back to us. Um, and as you're sort of sending money back and forth, their transaction fees uh that you know the banks sort of charge, we get a percent of of that as well.

>> Amazing. All right. Thank you so much, Zeta. Appreciate it. >> Okay. Okay, we have one more speaker and then we're going to get all of the speakers back on stage. Um, I'm going to call him up. It is Charles from Snap. So, Charles is the lead business development manager for respon for pretty much anything brand side, understanding how to grow on Snap, how comfort is growing on Snap, how are they spending 100K a day. He's the guy that Hudson wanted to bring in to to explain it because there's not so many brands on Snap. everyone thinks it's for teens or for kids or when you were younger, you know, you were on Snap. And so, you know, Charles is incredible. He used to work at Google and and he's here to kind of explain the strategy of it. So, thank you, Charles. Thank you, Jared, for for the warm introduction. Um, so look, first thing I want to say is a huge thank you to the the organizers today and especially to the uh the comfort team for inviting us here. And a major thank you to Hudson for making my job 10 times easier, right? Because he literally just pitched the value of Snap, which is what I'm here to do. But before I jump into all that, I want to kind of set the scene on what I'm here to talk about. I'm not here to tell any of you how to run your business, right? you've got far more experienced people that have been on stage today telling you what you need to do to be successful. But what I do have is 15 years of experience running media platform side and I've uh managed teams that have managed over a billion dollars in ad revenue and that has given me one thing. It's given me proximity to some of the best operators in the industry. and we're talking CPG. We're speaking direct uh direct to client proximity to them and I've had the chance to learn from them and what I want to do is share a few pointers that I've noticed from them and commonalities amongst them that helped them win as businesses. But before I jump into that, I want to tackle some potential misconceptions about Snap as a platform that are in the room today. First things first, Snap is not a social media platform designed for you to scroll and consume information, right? It is first and foremost a messaging app. And that has been built into the design of the app from day one. If you open up your phone right now and open up Snapchat, it opens to the camera. And that was an intentional design decision made by Bobby and Evan, our two founders, to ensure that when you were on Snapchat, you were connecting with people and you are engaging with the people you love and the people that are in your network, right? And why that is important and why I'm telling you this is because that's our moat as a business. That's what makes us sticky. And when I say sticky, I mean sticky. People who use Snap open the app 30 times a day on average, right? We do of course have other parts of the app which mimic more traditional social feeds, right? We've got our spotlight t uh page. We've got our our maps and we've got our stories of course which we're known for. And that's where businesses like like the businesses in the room here can advertise and connect with Snap's audience. And that's the second piece of myth busting I want to do today. And I think Jared set you up nicely for this. So, show of hands to all the business owners in the room. Who here believes that their audience is on Snapchat? Okay, we got a few, right? So, we got a few, but we've also got a few non-believers in here. So, we'll work with this. So, Snapchat has 94 million daily active users in North America, right? And they're opening the app 30 times a day on average, as I've already mentioned. So, your audience is there 100%. The next thing that we need to tackle is who here believes or has heard someone say that only kids are on Snapchat? Nobody. No one's heard that. Okay, a few people. 80% of Snapchat users are over 18 years of age. Right? That means your customers of today and your customers of tomorrow are on our platform. And the last thing, the last myth I want to bust is that no one who uses Snapchat has any disposable income. Right? 25% of our audience is 35 plus. They're the people that grew up on our platform and they're still using it today to connect with friends and family, right? So that's let's move away from Snap for a moment and let's talk about the businesses in the room today because that's why we're all here. On one hand, it's never been easier to run a business or start a business with all these software that we have available, all the AI tools that do a lot of the heavy lifting and administrative burden for you. But on the flip side of that, and I've spoke to many of you today already, it's never been more expensive to acquire customers, right? We're seeing higher CPMs, higher CPCs. That's putting upward pressure on CAC and we're having more people flood into the market. It's very, very competitive and we're reliant on one to two channels to drive our growth. But there is people who are consistently winning in these markets. You see many of them on stage today. Take Comfort for example. They are winning big, right? But they're not the only people in every single category. There's businesses that are winning big. So what is it that they're doing that makes them stand out versus every other person in that category? Well, they do things differently. They test things. They trial things. And they identify opportunities that other people don't. Right? So when we when we take that into account, let's look at Snapchat as a potential opportunity for other businesses. So Snapchat offers unduplicated incremental reach. And what do I mean by that? We have a unique customer behavior on our platform that allows you to incrementally reach people and achieve your goals. Right? And this is what the top 1enters are obsessed with. We've heard people saying that already today. I think Hudson himself mentioned incrementality as key and I can talk to that because I had a front row seat to the DTOC ecom gold rush that occurred right after co right I was leading our growth team in Australia and we worked with the 1enters the businesses in every single category that were consistently winning over and over again and although they operated in very different industries with very different audiences There was a few commonalities between each of these businesses. Number one, I've already mentioned it. They were obsessed with incrementality and they're obsessed with channel diversification. Right? Incrementality. They wanted to know if the next 10 to 15K that I'm putting into Meta, is that going to be the best use of my capital or should I be finding a different channel where I can get better returns and better growth? In terms of channel diversification, they didn't want to be reliant or beholden to any one channel for their long-term growth. They know that you are one suspension away. You're one policy breach away from being off all of these channels. And they didn't want to be beholden to that. So, they were obsessed with attention arbitrage, finding opportunities where other people weren't playing. And then the second thing second thing that they were obsessed with was moving away from last click attribution, right? Last click attribution stifles growth and it does not tell you the full value of your customer of your channels and your full story about your customer journey. And they were obsessed with moving away from it. Every single one of them without fail was using some form of third-party attribution tool that they were ingesting their platform data into to tell them what channel is working best for me and they were making decisions based off that. So that incrementality piece is key as I've said and the reason we are incremental is not because people aren't on the other platforms right our users are on Tik Tok they are on Instagram they are on YouTube but it's their daily habits so we know that 50% of our users are not on YouTube every single day we know that 40% of our users are not on Tik Tok every single day and we know that 30% of our users are not on Instagram every day. So what that means is there's no other platform in which you can reach people at the frequency at which you can reach them on Snapchat and that's the incrementality piece and if you don't believe me believe Hudson and the comfort team right I think that they won't mind me sharing this because it is case study on our website uh but they've been using Snapchat as you heard as a major major part of their diversification strategy and they are getting incredible incremental customers off the back of it. So again, I think we're all here today to hear from these amazing leaders in the space and they're saying that it is a platform we should be paying attention to. So ask yourself the question, is that last 10 to 15% of budget that I'm putting into Meta, is that the best use of my capital or can I find a channel that will help me derisk and find another performative channel that can help me grow in the future? And the last thing I want to touch on is last click attribution because I did talk about it briefly there. It is the standard in the it has been the standard in the industry for so long because it's the easiest thing right it's easy to see that was the last thing that imp impacted a conversion but ultimately it doesn't tell the full story and to bring this to life uh I want to to try and use an analogy to make it a bit simpler to understand so who here watches March Madness or is watching March Madness the basketball okay we got a few hands so for anyone who hasn't been watching it very big basketball competition college teams playing each So, my team has been going crazy about it. They keep talking about their brackets. So, I only moved to the States a year ago, so this is my first time watching it. And on Sunday, Duke played Yukon, and Duke are heavy favorites. They're up by 19 points, and Yukon comes storming back in the fourth, and they hit a game-winning shot to beat Duke. Everyone goes crazy. And the guy who hit the game-winning shot is a guy called Brilen Mullins, right? But what they didn't see in that process of play or what no one was talking about was the person from Duke who stole the ball or sorry the person from Yukon who stole the ball, the other person from Yukon who distracted the defenders and passed it to Brilen Mullins and then Brilen Mullins of course hit the shot and everyone goes crazy. So what I'm saying is Brilen Mullins is last click attribution and the problem with that is Brilen Mullins is actually not a very good three-point shooter this year. So if they continue to optimize towards that for the rest of the competition, Yukon are not going to win the competition, right? And that's what businesses are doing every single day. They're optimizing towards last click, the final conversion, and they're getting suboptimal growth goals or they're getting suboptimal results and suboptimal growth. And there's no excuses anymore because there is a whole host of platforms out there that can enable you to get a fuller picture of your customer journey. We've got triple whale, northbeam, house from an incrementality perspective. You've got work magic, you've got um you've got phospha, and like these are not cheap tools, but ultimately they will give you much more information to enable you to make good decisions about where to put your capital within your business. So, last thing I'm going to say is we would love to have businesses testing and triing Snap. Any of the businesses in the room. So, we do have an offer for you today. So, we will help you derisk your investment. We'll onboard your onboard you onto our platform and we will give you ongoing account management support. So what does that look like? That looks like a onetoone match from your investment. So up to 100K pending approvals and terms and conditions of course. So what that means is if you spend 100k on platform you get 100k. If you spend 50k you get 50k. You choose. We have an onboarding team that will do the heavy lifting for you. That'll get you set up and then you have ongoing account management. We do believe that there's multiple businesses in this room that could really win on Snapchat this year. Win like Comfort are doing, win like thousands and thousands of other businesses are doing. So, myself, Gabe, uh Maddie, and Sophia are all here and we'd love to chat at the break if you're interested. So, thank you for your time.

Okay, we're going to grab all these speakers on stage for one last 15minute Q&A. And this is all for you guys, for you just to ask any questions you want, anything about your business, your brand, anything at all. And they're all just going to come up and uh answer some questions. Just give us like five minutes to set up. Any specific detail question about what you're struggling with, what's not working, ask it now. Sarah, if you want to come on up. >> Yes. Okay. All right, everybody. one >> test one. Okay. All right. We're gonna do this just a 10-minute Q&A. Um I just want to go down the line real quickly here. And um >> by the way, Jared, great job. You're crushing it. Like I don't think you know, round of applause for him. >> Hell yeah, Jared. >> Yeah. >> All right. Um, I would love for each of you to maybe give a piece of feedback about another one of your brands, the person sitting next to you about their brand. So, go down the line essentially. And we're going to start with Danny. And Danny, maybe um I don't know if you've used some of Glow's uh top products in Sephora or not. >> Hong Kong. >> Not yet. >> Is it on? >> In Hong Kong, by the way. Sephora. >> I don't think the mic's on. >> There we go. Okay. >> So, maybe if you could give some feedback on Glow and and Comfort and where they are based on your background and any feedback you'd give, I'd love to hear it. >> Yeah. I mean, unfortunately, I haven't used your product yet. Yeah. But yeah, Hudson, I think um very interesting, right? So, I've gotten to know Hudson over the last month or so. And again, I think our first call, you know, we got along really well was a founder and the founder call. And then I was so inspired by even Hudson. So I rarely get inspired because I actually meet quite amazing people. But I was actually inspired Hudson because after the call, I'm like, [ __ ] you know, if he can sell a billion dollars worth of hoodies, I believe I can sell a billion dollar worth of supplements, right? Because I was thinking my next three years I'll get to 500 million, right? And then now that after that call with us, I'm like, you know what? we gotta rethink what our limit is, right? And think bigger, go after the biggest towns. But now, yeah. And then then I started looking into all the stuff that he was doing with affiliates, Tik Tok, all the different things he was talking to me about. You know, even our call with Vitamin Angels, we got on that already. We're launching with them. >> One sec. One sec, Danny. Everybody be quiet, please, so we could talk. Thank you so much. Just be quiet. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. And so it's inspiring to hear how he's approaching his business. Again, one thing that really impressed me was, hey, he has only 85 people doing a billion dollars. That's like unheard of, right? And again, I thought I was doing good, right? It's like I don't want my good thing I spoke before him, right? Otherwise, no one's going to talk to listen to me, right? So again, and he's so open about sharing his playbook. And then that's key. It's like you have to learn from people that have done it before. As founders, everyone wants to give you some advice. I don't spend any time listening to people that hasn't done it before, right? Why should I listen to them? Why should I even get get a coffee with them? Because at the end of the day, everyone's all can I get coffee with you? Blah blah blah etc. It's like why? There needs to be a reason. So, as early listen to people that have done it before. They'll give you so much better advice than anyone that has not done exactly what you're trying to do. Right. >> Okay. >> Recipe. >> I haven't I haven't used her product, so >> Okay. Okay. Okay. Come on, Jared. >> All right. Well, give it a shot. Maybe he has used it. I don't know. >> What are you trying to insert? >> I want to use some watermelon. >> We have to say nice things about everyone's brand. That's what we're doing. That's what this is going to be. >> All right, Hudson, you're up. Glow recipe. >> I use glow recipe. >> Thank you. That's why your face is so shiny. >> Now Danny's like, "Well, I'm not really your target demo. Meanwhile, I have like seven products at my house." >> Um, >> but you said you like the colors, too, that match. I I love it. No, >> he also said it helps with hair growth. >> All right, let me let me let me give some compliments to my to my to my peers. >> Well, she's a killer. Built unbelievable business. I mean, oh my god. But look at look at the bottle designs. Look at the branding. Look at the color. It even it draws your eyes. Like look at how bland everything looks. And then look at even look at her shirt. Like everything is color. It's like you color equals conversion at comfort. Um and and that's been amazing for us. But like when I look at her brand, I'm like everything was it's not a ready stock product that you get from a manufacturer and you just put a label on and you call it a day. Like everything is developed from the inception of like how the bottle is designed to like all the the topography to the product to how it's used to like making sure that it works because you can't go to Sephora and crush it and then like botch the entire thing by not having a good brand. She [ __ ] killed it. And also like it works. I was a sucker for the watermelon B. Is it BHA or B? >> Yeah, the toner. >> Oh my god. I was using that nioinomide. I was using I don't want to get into my skincare routine. Everyone's going to steal it. But it was really it was amazing. Um and I think that >> you're glowing. >> Yeah. Yeah, I am glow. See, that was good. That was Yeah, no pun intended. So amazing. She's done an incredible job. Danny, I mean like I don't know. I don't [ __ ] know because he did it in 11 months. Like it took me years to figure out anything to even real like my website looked like it was built with a banana. Like it was horrible. And it took me years and years and years and years and years to figure out anything. And he's scaling. He built the relationships. He has David Beckham as Giannis. Like he has under he understands a part of business that I don't believe many people do. And I think that like a lot of the questions that you guys should be asking or wanting to see is like how the [ __ ] did you do it? Because to me it's like I I pulled the card of like I built it with no celebrities but like my that's like kind of a flex but like it's also like I had no other choice. I was broke and also on top of being broke I had no idea how to get in touch with celebrities. So he had he's built this and then yeah like one of the things that he said that I really loved was like David Beckham like he's not going to put his name behind a ship brand. It's his reputation. No one's going to go like yell at Danny. They're going to be like David Beckham your brand sucks. But he believed in Danny and was like dude I know you guys are building like the future of supplements. And I was already um using the products before I knew who he was because somebody gifted it to me and I was like oh my god I love this. And I put it in chat GPT. Swear I did. And I had my multivitamin. And then I had IM8. And I said, "Tell me what's better." And I gave it a bunch. And it was like, "I wins out of every single product you could try." So then I started taking it every single day because when I get sick, I get really sick. It's like six months of sickness. So I'm like, I want to do everything in my life to not be sick again. So I started taking IM8. Jared sends me some moatza ball soup. Life is good. Um, >> true story. >> It's actually a very true story. And then Zade is un unbelievable. I mean, he's built and sold companies before I even started Comfort. Um, the connections. He knows everybody in the world that you could possibly want to meet. He's a [ __ ] genius. Like, if you look at his IQ, if someone did an IQ test, it would be a little bit scary like him compared to me. Um, and you just kind of see like the way that he thinks about life and business and you're like, "Oh my god, like this guy is like an absolute animal." So I think with him like what he's building with Flex like, so we were going to potentially do a panel with him and I talking and I said to him, I don't know enough of what you know to like actually make the impact that I know you can make talking about it. And I know that he spoke and talked about a lot of this with you guys. It's like there is a difference between what he's building, what everyone else is building. He's not the type of guy that's going to go build a new company and have it be like everybody else. And that's what I try to teach you guys is like if you're building a company, don't be like the next company that's like your competitor. Like you have to be different. You have to have a differentiation of your product versus everybody else. That's why people are going to buy from you. That's why people are going to fall like fall in love with the marketing. That's why they're going to really like love the creative aspect. Like you need to build something different. And that's what he's building. I mean, I could go all day about like how impressive I believe he is and like how he's cultivated so many relationships and met so many people to help build his business, but also understand his market. Like there's a lot that goes into building a company of this magnitude. And he's done a great job with that. And Jared, he's he's a good guy. He does a good job.

>> Let me let me let me let me do a little bit. Activate Talent. Unbelievable. Unbelievable company. I'll tell you, if you're not making a lot of money with your business yet and you need great talent and you cannot go pay $200,000 to a VP of product and you want to go hire somebody who's really good and understands things at a significant level, you go to activate talent. They're building. So I don't want to like when I give shoutouts or like I talk about a product or a brand like you may be like oh well that's his friend. So let me give you an example of why I believe that they are doing something revolutionary. Pexclad is the fastest growing cookware brand of all time. They hire with activate talent. Kit is one of the biggest and like I mean they sell [ __ ] everything. I don't even know what I would call their category at this point. They use activate. Comfort also uses activate. Um, a lot of big businesses that I've just recently become friends with that I don't really know too much about the founders, but I know that their growth is significant, they use Activate. So, when you have Jared who is like super excited, always looking forward, always wanting to better himself, beats himself up a lot about the process and wants to be like the best that he possibly can be. you can trust a guy like that because if if like if we don't like an employee which happens no matter if you hire in the US offshore nure whatever Jared like visibly is like [ __ ] fuming and he's like how could I have done a better job to better this part of my business so when you know somebody's there always looking at like just tweaking looking for the dust in the corners of the business cleaning that out making it perfect that's Jared so he does a very good job with that seriously this entire group I mean I've done a few of these now, but like by far like the most impressive individuals I've ever met.

>> I am Me too. We're about to be your customer. Yeah. Okay. I'm so >> I started working with Jared as well. >> Me too. I love you all. Um, no, that was that was really sincere. >> Sorry, I almost choked on my water. We got to get to them. >> Okay. I just want to say thank you. That was very nice. So, thank you. Um, okay. All right. All right, let's get to them.

Sure. Wait. Or unless Sarah, do you want to do I love that?

>> No, let's go to them. Come on, John.

>> All right. All right. All right. Go ahead. All right, let's go ahead. Who has got questions for the group?

>> Right there.

>> I was getting emotional. That was really good.

>> I know. I know. I tried.

>> All right. I was going to ask you this earlier, Hudson, but I think it's perfect for everybody here. What was a decision you made in your business when you didn't have the proof, the numbers weren't there and it ended up compounding the most for your business?

>> You want to go Danny?

>> Um, sure. I mean, I think before we launched IM8, so we took a very scientific approach to it, right? Again, I mentioned earlier too, we went through the hard route with clinical trials, right? We did two clinical trials prior to even launching the product. We had the certification so anyone can actually go into our website and download the results the reports you can download. We even go very transparent. You can actually go to our website and find out who our manufacturer is. I tell you guys you guys is buy the quest in New Jersey right so no one when I told the manufacturer hey we're going to put your company your manufacturer of you know uh on our website they were like are you going to do what it's like it doesn't really matter to me that you guys can go out and copy because and again there's a big difference between view and copy and execution.

>> right? So, but having that transparency on our website, it's like, "Oh, wow. You guys are confident enough to put all your results down your manufacturer." Again, even next week, we're trying something, you know, Hudson just mentioned on our website, we're going to actually create like, hey, uh, identify if IMA is the best supplement against all other products on chat GBT on cloud and perspect perity. So, we just go on because we're confident in that. You just click on it. It'll just give you that prompt and it actually give it to you, right? So again, don't trust my word for it. A trust yourself, trust what others are saying, and trust what you know the reviews are saying, right?

>> Uh same comment, but with just going back to what I shared earlier, we always wanted to align our core values with our audience and our community and being or feeling seen or heard was something that we wanted to really think about. And so on our social, we wanted to make a pledge and say as a beauty brand and for the skincare brand that we are, we wanted to pledge to everybody like officially publicly that we will never use words that are unrealistic like perfect skin, perfect complex complexion, ageless, flawless skin, poreless skin because we all need pores. Everybody has flaws. These are all unrealistic and we wanted to dismantle this traditional norms of beauty. And when we first came up with this idea to make this really public and promise to our audience and we said, "Hey, like other founders, let's let's make this a movement, you know, like let's let's do this together so that our younger generation, especially those that are looking at their social media, comparing themselves with others, always feeling insecure and having imposter syndrome, how can we make sure that they all feel like everyone is going through the same ups and downs of their skincare journeys?" And a lot of people actually pushed back and said, "Well, you know, we have campaigns that are called perfect complexion, perfect whatever." Like product names are called perfect skin, so it's just too much for us to even be part of this conversation. Now, we agree with you that that makes sense for the future, but it's just hard realistically to do that. It was hard for us, too, because we had to audit everything just to make sure in the past we'd never used those unrealistic words. It was a whole undertaking, but we decided to do that. And when we did make the pledge, it was the the over like just the amount of engagement that we saw where everybody was like, we needed to hear this from a brand. Nobody spoke about this. This is why I will always come back to you guys and purchase from you guys. That was definitely a big moment of I I would say a turning point with our community. And I think we really gain a lot of loyalty out of that.

>> That's great. I I I think we needed to create this this feeling and sell the feeling in a way that no one had ever seen before in clothing. So like the ideation around comfort was if it's like a one-stop shop for everything comfortable. So everything that we wanted to do was like affordability with luxury feel and then like have everybody talk about it in a way that you would never hear another brand in the same voice. Like like you would never have another voice on social talking about another product that did what our product did. So we wanted to really make sure that we were different. Now you'll hear brands that literally verbatim copy us and say the same [ __ ] but it's like you know where they're getting that from. Ours was real. Like my manufacturing story, I sent like 12 16 hoodies to my manufacturer and I said, "Build me a hyper hoodie." I said, "Make get the softness from this company, get this from this company, and then build me something incredible." It actually was so good to the point that it was very hard to get other manufacturers to like do it the way that we wanted it done. Um, because when we go to other countries and say, "Hey, we want to develop it just like this." We had a really hard time because the way we brush our fabric, the way that we build our product, it's not just like a random hoodie that you put on and like people like to say like, "Oh, you built like a hoodie brand." It's like there's so much more to the the the way that we develop the product. And a lot of people can say like, "Oh, like I like a multivitam." It's like, dude, no. There's so much behind what he's building or like glow recipe like there's so much more behind the product. like you can't just go take it and duplicate it. Um or if you try to it's just you execution is different, marketing is different, the culture is different, the community is different. So in the beginning like you have all of this is a vision and it just becomes like the process of like how do you execute it and then once somebody is like oh my god light bulb goes off this is the brand that you have to shop at to do and buy XYZ product. Once you become that company, it's just duplication at that point. Like that that's exactly how we were able to take it from like the early days to like the actual vision of like growing the business. What were the hot points and the levers that we needed to have as a business to like make people believe that this could be what we thought it was?

>> I think one one point I want to touch upon with Hudson is that you have to be different, right? I think a lot of people they just try to copy and then expect the results to be great, right? Okay. And if you're not different, no one's going to care because then you'll be like, you know, second or third, right? And giving a really great example because a lot of times people ask me about the celebrities, Beckham, blah blah, etc., right? A great story is actually of what didn't work and because there's a brand actually here launched um you guys know Lion Messi, of course, right? Arguably the most recognizable figure on the in the planet, right? 500 million people follow him on Instagram, blah blah blah, etc. So, he launched a hydration brand last last year, right, called Mass Plus, right? got a lot of attention early on. There were lines all the retail etc etc and you know they're now going they're shutting down right what happened they actually just copy prime exactly prime right but they had Messi and they copy prime they don't do that that's like just not not not smart positioning right and they had backing they had financial capital as well right so you have to be different and that was kind of like the easy route they just thought maybe they just have Messi and this will continue to people will buy the product but once people try your product and if it's not a good differentiated product, they're not going to come back. So I think a lot of times founders are also not realistic with themselves. If this is really a different good product, so you have to be realistic and yeah.

>> I'll just add to what Danny said. I think one way to think about this, uh, so besides running Flex, I also I'm a venture capitalist. One of the things that you see in the companies that succeed is that they're really, really, really good at understanding the problem. What is the freaking painoint you're solving? Because oftentimes there are tons of solutions out there in search of a problem. You don't want to be in that category. You want to be Advil. Like Advil is one of the best products on the planet because when you have a headache, you take Advil, right? The other piece is, you know, if you want to build, you know, a billion dollar plus company, right? Um the reality is that most humans think in very binary simple terms. square peg, square hole, right? When I have a problem, I think of a brand, right? Um, and so if I were to just sort of demonstrate here, anxiety, comfort, better skin, glow, better energy, imate, right? So most people think in those terms and so you need to sort of figure out what that single word like square peg, square hole is of your business. In my case, finance, which sucks, right? And how do you make that better? That's really it. Who else? All the way in the back. Sorry. You were a little late. A little late with the hand. I would have picked it. Um, hey, my name is Benjamin. Thank you for a wonderful day today. This has been amazing. Um, this is a question for everyone on stagevious. All you guys are very busy with your current business. Obviously, it's successful, booming, everything's growing, but at your level, you're probably having a lot of conversations with a lot of people all the time. If you are not working on the business that you're currently working on, what is something that if you could start from scratch right now and see that it could grow really well in the next 5 to 10 years, what would you be doing? What would you be working on?

>> I'll just go first super fast. For us, it's agentic staffing. That's the that's for us where it's agents for a agentic staffing. That's what we're working on.

>> Never have to think about finance ever again. AI CFO.

>> I mean, definitely AI and AI and medicine, right? So, I think there's going to be lots of breakthroughs in AI and medicine that's going to like, yeah, uncover diseases before it happens, like uncover cancers before it happens. So, I think there's a huge opportunity there. I was going to say AI medicine for women and especially related to IVF. There's a lot of untapped um you know knowledge that a lot of women deserve um to be discovered for and I have a lot of myself included close friends that are going through the hardship of IVF and um a lot of malpractice a lot of problems um in the medical space. So I would love to fix that problem. Telea health, AI medicine, [ __ ] that's where it's going. Peptides, the whole thing. That's that's the game. Figuring out that if you put all of these products together, you actually can cure this type of cancer. They're doing it right now. That like that like saving people die of freaking cancer a year is like the saddest thing. Like the owner of Only Fans just passed away and it's like the guy was 41. He was a [ __ ] billionaire. they died. Like imagine how many people we could save by just figuring out like how do you how do you cure this? How do what what do we not know yet? And I think like tella health I'm very bullish on the whole peptide game like healing your body without having to inject things that are going to have so many other side effects. Obviously we're still pretty beta in things, but I'm I just think that that's going to be a norm for people to be on to help them with like certain illnesses. So yeah, I'm I think we're all aligned. Um, who else? Okay. Okay. Right here. And then we'll do you after. No, no, no. Right here. And then we'll go one more.

>> I'm always asking questions, but it literally never gets ner less nerve-wracking every single time. Like, we're still going to do it. So, I wanted to ask about community. Uh, it was one of the biggest things that like bloomed my business at least. I have my brother who I wanted to give a shout out who's right over here. We basically built a business uh up to almost eight figures from literally a community through organic content. So Hudson, I know you've done this incredibly well. Same thing with Sarah. Um and also Danny, of course, you guys have built communities within social media, not even specifically affiliate, but within your own customers. What are some of the best ways to really like build that community and keep people like close and actual fans of the brand? You can go first.

>> Okay, I'll go first. Um, for us it was a a few things. Um, one, we needed to make sure that they felt like they're part of our decision- making. So, everyone feels extra invested not just in the product, but in the business and the company and the future of the business. So, that is a really important unlock that we initially figured out. I think secondly in a more pragmatic way they all want to be heard and seen and so how do we do that? It's through the campaigns that I listed but also physically answering them physically giving them responses. So actually it's it's just a non-negotiable at Glow Recipe that we don't have any comments or DMs or emails unanswered within 24 hours. It is our number one rule and we also start internally. You said Monday morning meetings are really important. Same I totally agree with that. So, Monday 9:00 am our time, um, we always meet the whole company. And how do we kick off the meeting? Our customer care team with the social media team presents first. We don't start with numbers. We actually start with a community team that presents what what some of the highlights were, if there were, you know, pluses, some constructive feedback, whatever it might have been. There's like a whole sort of series of highlights that the team presents and it really grounds us. It gives us purpose of what we're doing, why we're doing this. I still read emails every single day from our customers. And I look at I remember the first time I read an email from a 70 yearear-old woman who said, "Your products actually made my husband look at me differently. I can now finally take selfies." You know, those are the moments that you don't forget and keeps motivating you. But also, it just goes both ways, right? So, it's a constant back and forth, the feedback loop, but then the team being very diligent and focused making sure everyone feels heard. That's how we do it.

>> That was great. That Yeah, I I can double down on that. But like when you said that like customer support starts the meeting, they just looked at me. They're like, "You never let us talk." Um, we I think like you you have to have like you have to show that you care. If you just show them that you care about them because I kind of answered this question throughout like when I was speaking like if you show them that you care and they're not like just like replaceable or they're just like a number um and that you really care and like the decision- making is super important. We don't launch a product without our creators. this. We just don't if they if they do not give us the green light, it doesn't come out. Our customers get to vote on it. We have 40,000 people in a Discord that get to vote on it. We have 500 people that we have hundreds that get sent product that get to vote on it. Like everything that we do involves them. We don't launch a product without them saying, "Hey, Hudson team, this is a great idea." are we have creators that come to the product meetings and they'll literally get on a product call with us and they'll talk through why they like this or why they don't or why they like this color or why they don't or why they like the functionality or why they don't. So when you like bring them into the business in such a way that like they're a part of it, they're a piece of it. Name another business. Does Nike do that? Does Abracro and Fitch do that? Does does [ __ ] Northace do that? You know, so like if you have that and they don't, then you're going to beat them because you're doing things that are better not just for right now, but for for the future. How many businesses had a good run and then they go poof, you never hear from them again because they lost their they lost their Just be quiet in the back, guys. Thank you. Uh they lost their uh they lost their touch with their core audience. They forgot what made them them. We won't ever lose sight of that because we have the right people behind us that are always giving us the vision.

>> Yeah. So I'll talk about of course we have the 100% of our revenue is DTC. Yeah. 90% is actually translated on our own website. Uh but one thing that I think we've been able to do very well from day one is actually build our offline community, right? And that's actually starts with having our doctors and scientists actually on physical events because you know usually every two to three months we're actually physical events where our scientific advisory board members they talk about the science they talk about the background I'm there showcasing the brand so I think that's actually very important because nowadays especially with so much AI on socials you know what are you going to believe right you're very likely going to believe that doctor or scientist that actually stand behind the product and talk behind the product in front of hundreds 200 and 300 people. So that's something that we're actively building out is that offline community element, which I do believe is going to be so much more important, you know, in the days, weeks, and months to come. You know what's funny? Um, Flex, you know, we're doing about 7 billion in payments volume. We're just under a billion in valuation. We've been around for a few years. Uh, we only started running ads six months ago. And even today, we we spend like 200,000 a month, which is nothing for most people in this room. Um, and the way we got to that scale is actually 100% focused on community. We actually modeled this thing called city manager. Kelly, shout out. Uh, Kelly joined us as our Miami city manager. She ran partnerships for Mayor Francis Suarez. And so, we just empower, you know, our city managers to go do events. Valentina here. Round of applause for her and God for doing an incredible job today. We do these types of events and it's just awesome. Like you're meeting each other, you're learning things. You know, this is the most organic way to sort of learn and sort of be part of a movement, right? And so I'd say like community based marketing is actually very underrated. Um, it works in every context. Works in DTOC, works in B2B, and so on and so forth.

>> Jar, we're looking for a city manager in Miami. Yeah. done. Um, we're going to do a quick speed round and um, all you have to do is give a one-word answer. We're going to do two questions super fast. We're going to go right down the line with Zade first. One word answers, two questions. First question is, what is your biggest bottleneck right now?

>> Hiring.

>> Yeah. I mean, I think I mean is part of that hiring and actually unlocking spend further, right? Yeah. So, I think unlocking spend on meta. Yeah.

>> Uh, Inventory management when product is sold out because we manufacture a lot in Korea. So it's a constant bottleneck for us.

>> that happen a lot.

>> Yes. Constantly.

>> inventory.

>> Tell us about your inventory problems.

>> There's a lot of them.

>> Okay.

>> One word. You're right.

>> Okay. One word on the next question. The final question is what has been your biggest success in Q1?

>> Brand awareness.

>> I mean along that lines I mean there's not Giannis yesterday. Yeah.

>> Giannis. That's a great one word answer.

>> Uh new hires two words. We just hired a new creative director who actually comes from Apple and many amazing companies as creative. So, we're really excited for the next chapter.

>> Amazing.

>> I I had something, but what were you guys trying to tell me?

>> Intern Oh, international. 100% international. Killing it. Killing it right now. So, we dropped prices. Oh, wait. This is one word. [ __ ] me.

>> International. Hell yeah.

>> Tell me more about international. Drop prices. Go ahead.

>> We dropped prices. We cultivated relationships with creators in every country. And then we started running a ton of ads from the US in each country. Um, and we just talked about how we're doing so well in the US and now we're launching in these countries and we're really promoting our heaviest like hitters in the US and we went from like 60,000 a day to like we're doing almost 300,000. We did over 300,000.

>> Was there any styles or anything different that hit internationally that didn't hit in the US?

>> Not like the airplane mode hoodie. is just like super viral. So, it's going to work. But like the blankets, we'll we'll be the biggest blanket provider in the US like this year.

>> Danny, you're international, right?

>> Yeah. So, I think on on international, I think that's part of the one of the reasons why we were able to grow so fast. From day one, we went international. We shipped to 31 countries when we launched.

>> And that's super hard for supplements because every single country needs a different type of supplement label and requirements.

>> Correct. It was.

>> that's why no one's doing it like he is because it's [ __ ] hard and everyone wants it to be easy.

>> Thank you Sam for doing that. So Sam's my team.

>> I asked Sam. We need to hire a Sam. Lauren, you need to talk to Sam. We need a Sam.

>> Um.

>> just don't hire Sam. Huh?

>> No, we're not hiring Sam.

>> But yeah, that's that's that's definitely it. International has been the biggest win. Um, all right. What else, Jared? And then I want to wrap up with one more question. Actually, no, we'll wrap up like this. Do one more. Hit me. Hit me. Rapid fire.

>> Okay. The Okay. Q2.

>> Q2.

>> Biggest launch can be anything. Product AI. It doesn't matter what it is. Q2, your biggest launch. Stop looking at your team, Hudson. You got this. Zade, you go first. I actually have two. Um, so Flex historically has only been available in the US. Flex in June, we're launching Flex in 170 countries. Wow.

>> Hell yeah.

>> Danny.

>> And I'll give a second one real quick.

>> Sorry. Go ahead. Yeah.

>> Um, and we're launching a new reward tier uh for our business customers. They can get up to 5% cash back on their personal cards.

>> That's insane. 5%.

>> for any purchase. Yeah. Who How can you compete with that?

>> Do we just use our personal cards for our business?

>> For everything. There are some rules.

>> I figured. Uh.

>> is there a cap?

>> Okay, Danny, how do you compete with that?

>> Don't don't try to h um I think for me, I think in the next at least the next three months is really focusing on product development. Yeah, because I think again to be fair, we we actually have a very simple business. We only have two skills, right? So, we did that on purpose because we actually wanted people to know us for a creating the best all-in-one powder supplement because a lot of pe people ask me, "Hey, why don't you create this and that blah blah blah etc." It's like, you want your customer base to know you for something first before you expand into a wider skill set, right? You want to build that trust and credibility. But to be fair, I haven't really been focused on the product development side too much. But now like this quarter I'm like all in on product development because again I see so much gaps in terms of supplements the lack of regulation a lot of sugars and all these stuff stuff that shouldn't be in. So this is where we want to put science back into this category.

>> Amazing.

>> Uh three things we're launching moisturizer. Moisturizer is the number one category in the entire skincare space. So, we have really key bets on this and it's a truly unique product that I was I actually just came back from Korea from the labs and I was with them producing and making. But, um it's going to be incredible. So, I'm very excited for that. It's going to be within the watermelon line. So, you should try it. Secondly, we are going so we're already in Europe and we're actually in 40 countries right now, but in Europe um we had a distributor. So we're actually pivoting and going direct to Europe. So very exciting. So we have a team dedicated. We just hired somebody in Europe for that. So that's a big launch too. Thirdly, because we're manufacturing a lot and product developing a lot in Korea for skincare, we're expanding our team on the ground in Korea as well um with at least six people. So we can chat more to Jared, but um that's also another Q2 initiative. And last but not least and the most prettiest, let's hear it.

>> Oh, thank you very much. Uh, we have retail working. It won't be Q2, but I want to say retail is so good. Um, we have like net new like really different designs for product launching. Like we have the nurture hoodie for women who can breastfeed while wearing a hoodie. We have uh an a uh a sensory hoodie which going to have like a like we're working with therapists that are going through the designs inside the pockets where there's a pattern inside that will actually help calm you like it's clinically proven patterns. Uh we want to make sure it's perfect so we've kind of delayed it out a little bit. We have like anxiety and like stress relief balls and the kangaroo pockets. We we're doing a lot of really fun stuff. We also have a hoodie coming out that's going to have a neck and back lumbar support when you fly. So you could blow into it. It's actually going to be lumbar and neck. Like that's crazy. So, we actually were somehow able to make that. Um, I'm really excited about a blanket that we have launching which is going to have a aroma scent that is beaded on the coils of the heated blanket that actually like emits like a um is emits the right word? Emits. Omits. Emits. I don't know. Um, it's like going to have this lavender scent that goes up when you heat it up. So, it's going to be a king dreamer blanket that you plug in. It is heated but also then has the coils that give this lavender scent of crushed organic lavender. So we have a lot of really fun stuff that we're bringing in. I I again it just comes down to like the things that I say all the time is like you need to bring utility to product in a way that's never been done. You you all here should be thinking about your brand. Um and you need to have just because I locked eyes with her. You need to have an incredible product team. Like you need to have like a [ __ ] dialed team that like makes because I'm crazy guys. Like I send voice notes at one o'clock in the morning like we got to do this. We got to come out with this and like the team's like May's like awake and she's like okay we'll do this. So it's like we need to have that. You need that on your team. So yeah, your ideas you're the you're the [ __ ] you're the you're the person spearheading. You're the founder. You're the visionary. You need to be the one driving that. You need to have the people around you actually get it done correctly. So, we're super excited about that, too. Um, but guys, listen, I want everyone to mingle for the rest of this. We're almost done. And, uh, I appreciate every single one of you coming out. So, thank you guys. So, so, so, so so so.

>> thank you guys. And thank you, Hudson. Thank you, Sarah. Thank you, Danny. Thank you, Zade. We're extremely grateful for your time and for all of you who donated and and made this as part of your day. We hope you have an incredible rest of your day and thank you so much for spending time with us. You got me feeling something. about I see about through my place. Swamourage. Hi guys.

>> we have some uh food and drink outside.

>> Yes, there is food and drink outside.