Moiz Ali, founder of Native, joins the podcast to discuss his journey from building a successful direct-to-consumer deodorant brand to selling it to P&G for $100 million. He shares insights on his “stealth” growth strategy, the importance of customer feedback, and his unique approach to investing and managing personal finances.
Topics: Entrepreneurship, D2C, Exit Strategy, Investing, Personal Finance, Business Growth
The Origin of Native [00:06]
Sam Parr: All right, so Moiz is here. And so, I guess if people don’t know, so you started, um, you actually started a couple businesses. People mostly know you from Native. So you created Native, which has the popular deodorant brand. You sold it to Procter & Gamble for a reported $100 million, which I think is, uh, one of the better D2C exits because you only raised like $4 million, I want to say, less than that even?
Moiz Ali: We raised $500,000 actually.
Sam Parr: Oh my god. Okay, so you raised $500,000. And by the way, I don’t know if you know this, I remember I was in a mastermind group with your brother, and I was like, and he was like in between, he had already sold his company, so he was kind of floating in between things. It’s like, why do you show up to the mastermind if you don’t really have a business that you’re working on? So I think he was kind of like fishing, and he was like, you know, my brother’s got this interesting business. And I was like, I was like, oh, I didn’t even know you had a brother. He’s like, and I was ready for this like big tech idea. And he’s like, yeah, he’s like selling like this natural deodorant. Like, and he made it sound like you’re like sitting at home packing the deodorant like containers by hand. And he’s like, he kind of was underplaying it. He’s like, it’s really cool, you know, it’s paraben-free. I didn’t know what a paraben was. And he’s like, it’s aluminum-free or whatever. And he’s like, yeah, it’s doing pretty well. And then he started to say the numbers, and I was like, whoa. Um, that’s actually like really good. I was like, so how much did he raise? He’s like, I don’t know if he’s, he’s like, he’s like he’s raised like nothing. And so that’s when you got on my radar. And you, I feel like you operated very quietly. You’re kind of like me, where when you’re doing something that’s working, you shut the hell up. And when when you’re not, when you’re just thinking about ideas, you’re like super loud to bounce them around off people. Is that your strategy?
Moiz Ali: That’s exactly right. In fact, uh, we’d done no PR for Native until uh after we sold the business. I remember we had all these news publications reaching out to us, and I took one interview with, I think it was like Retail Dive or somebody, and they were like, we want to talk about this deodorant company because we haven’t heard of that. And you know, they were like, who are you guys? What are you doing? Um, and we sort of uh talked about the business, and they wrote an article, and after that, I was like, I’m never talking about the business again. Uh, when we went to go fundraise, like we talked to a few people, we talked to um, Simon Equity Partners, which is basically uh the family office of like, you know, the Simon Property Group, which owns a bunch of malls across the United States. And uh we opened up our books to them and we’re like, here’s our business. And they’re like, our job is to find businesses like you, and you know, you’re down the street from us. You’re based in San Francisco, your headquarters is three blocks away from ours. We’ve never heard of this business, and we should have heard of it by now. How come? And we’re like, you know, we’re not talking about our business. Like no one walked around with Native t-shirts until after we made an until after we had made an exit. Then I was like, okay, now the brand can exist and be we can be loud and public about it.
The “Ali Boarding” Technique [02:49]
Sam Parr: Is that what is that? Is that paranoia? Is it just focus? Is it strategy? What what why why do it that way?
Moiz Ali: Yeah, yeah, I think it’s two things. Um, I think one is uh fear, which is like um, fear of embarrassment. Okay, my business failed and I was super public about it, and now it crashed, and everybody’s going to think of me as a failure. So I was like, we’re not going to fail publicly. If we fail, it’ll be really quietly. Um, and then two was like, uh, we failed the we failed the Indian way, silently in personal shame. Yeah, that’s right. Uh, that’s right. No one will be able to Google me and be like, okay, Moiz Ali is a failure. Um, and then the other one was things were working so well, we’re like, okay, we don’t know how this is working so well or why this is working so well, but we better not go around thumping our chest saying this is working really well, because one, I believe it’ll jinx us, and I believe in jinx. And two, other people just start copying us and doing exactly what we’re doing. And like, you know, I sold our I sold Native in November 2017. We had a competitor sell their business in December 2017, a month a month after us. And you know, they in 2018, 2019, 60 competitors in the natural deodorant space popped up. Uh, and every brand that didn’t have a natural deodorant was like, we should create a natural deodorant. Um, and then 60 brands were like, hey, we want to create natural deodorant as our flagship or our hero product. And so by like not thumping our chest and not talking about our business, we were able to keep the category a little bit quieter before we came out and said, hey, this is a massive category and it’s really working.
Investing and Personal Finance [10:36]
Sam Parr: Yeah, I I I I appreciate that about you guys. I’ve actually learned a little bit in that regard in that I don’t I don’t talk about my e-commerce business on here ever. Um, or all reference it but I’ll never say the name or the brand or whatever. Yeah, someone takes you up on that today. Someone takes you up on that. Yeah, I also have a business partner. Yeah, I have a business partner and they don’t want me to talk about it, so I’m also like, okay, cool. Yeah, you know, I’ll honor that wish. But I I kind of came up with this term because you and your brother are the same in that normally, you guys are all the info flows one way. And and this podcast is like the rare exception where I get to ask you questions. Normally, whenever I’ve seen your brother or you in any social setting, it’s a technique I call Ali boarding. And it’s like water boarding, but just with questions where you just dump someone’s head into a vat of your non-stop flow of questions. And by the end, they’re like, wait, so what’s your name and what do you do? And you’re like, by then you’re like, I have your P&L and like I have your whole family’s backstory. And it’s not like in an evil way, it’s like genuine curiosity, I think, is what I’ve come to see. But it’s also very effective. Um, A, is that true? Do you do you believe that? Am I am I characterizing it right? And then B, is that like conscious or un- did you ever like develop that as a skill or was that a choice you made or is it just natural?
Moiz Ali: Yeah, I think um A is it’s partially right. It’s more true with Solomon with my brother than it is with me. And he does that to me as well, where like I’ll tell him about, you know, a meeting I had or a deal that I’m looking at, and he’ll be he’ll ask me ridiculous questions. He’ll be like, what uh what did the lunch what did the founder have for lunch on Saturday three months ago? And I’m like, I didn’t get into that level of detail. You got to stop asking those types of questions. Uh but I do think we have genuine curiosity of like, what are what’s making other businesses work and what isn’t. I remember we went to the Super Bowl um, you know, four years ago or something like that in Atlanta, and we were at the Super Bowl party like the night before the game, and there were these two old Dacy uncles that were there as well, and uh they were there because they had they owned Marriott hotels and Marriott had invited them to the game in like their private suite. And you know, they were probably in their 50s, and we asked them so many I was like, you know, how much do you have to pay Marriott? And they also own like Hilton hotels. I was like, how much do you have to pay Hilton per year, Marriott per year? Do you do you have debt on the building? You do? What’s your debt? Like, you know, how often do you have to renovate? How much do those renovations cost? Uh how much like, you know, what is your average occupancy look like? And they answered all these questions, and they like didn’t seem excited to answer them, but they didn’t seem cautious, like they didn’t seem like they were hesitant either. And at the end of all of these questions where we literally did have their P&L, you know, we’re like, okay, well, you know, they didn’t ask a single question. They were just like, okay, well, uh great meeting you guys. And we’re like, all right, I now understand the hotel business from two operators that have eight businesses around the Dallas Fort Worth area, and they didn’t want to know anything about us. Like, why are we at the Super Bowl party? How did we get here? How did we make our money? They didn’t ask a single question. So I think there is a genuine curiosity that we have that sometimes is lost on other people.
The “Ali Boarding” Technique [12:36]
Sam Parr: That’s that’s that’s exactly how it goes. I’ve seen it. And then also you had like a brunch. I saw you tweet out like, oh, inviting some D2C friends over like, who wants to have a brunch of D2C people? And I was like, oh, what a nice guy, just be social or whatever. I had a friend who went to your brunch and he’s like, yeah, the brunch is basically Moiz sits at the head of the table and he’s like, all right, what’s your CAC? What’s your and you were like asking a bunch of questions. And I was like, that sounds about right. And I learned this from your brother. I was like, because I watched him one time and I was like, if first when I talk to your brother now, I’m like, it’s like a duel. Like he doesn’t know this, but in my head, I’m like, I’m going to ask whatever N number of questions you ask, N plus one will be asked back to you. I love it. Yeah. Um, like, you know, because I will not be out questioned because I know the technique. But I started I started watching him when he talked to other people and I was like, how does he get them to divulge so much information? And again, not in a bad way, but just like, what gets people in the flow of talking? I’m like, okay, so first, he’s genuinely curious. Like he’s super engaged. He’s not looking around, he’s not looking at his phone. He’s actually looking them in the eye, he’s asking them a bunch of questions. And I’ve noticed he does two things. When they’re saying something he uh likes or is like a smart thing, he gives them tons of like, you know, nodding, yep, that makes total sense, got it, love it. And then when they say something really stupid or weird or that makes no sense, I noticed that when somebody does that to me, I’m like, but that makes I like kind of start judging them a little bit and they can tell that I’m judging them and that makes them clam up. Whereas he’ll just go, he’ll just laugh and be like, amazing. And then he says the word amazing and then moves on. And amazing really means like, wow, it’s amazing you’re so stupid or it’s amazing you think that or it’s amazing that you don’t even know that. But like, he never makes them feel bad. He’ll just be like, like, amazing. And then he’ll just go on to the next question. And I realized that that is how he keeps the constant flow going. So I’m studying this Ali boarding technique, and I think I’m going to be pretty good at it. I’m going to be like, you know, a franchisee of your of your question franchisee.
Moiz Ali: I love it. Yeah. First, we have to charge you per question then. Uh but really, he’s like, um, I think the other thing that he does really good, or really well, is that he’s like, how do you think about something? He never asks like, you know, uh what’s your CAC? He’ll be like, how do you think about growth when it comes to social ads? And like, you know, can you spend more there? And the question is really open-ended, but he’s like aiming for something, he really wants a response, and people uh like, you know, subconsciously get to it. And I’ve started asking, how do you think about that all the time now, because it really gets people to open up and tell me about how they’re how they view their business and not just like a standard number. Um, and I really like that question, and I’ve also franchised that from him.
Real Estate Investing [14:06]
Sam Parr: When I started my business, the e-com one, he I told him about it and he had like, you know, some good questions. And then like, you know, the way y’all’s brains work, it’s just like, you know, it non-stop. So, I think at like 2:00 in the morning that same night, he just sent or like, actually it was like five nights later. It was like completely unrelated. It was like five nights later, 2:00 in the morning, I get this email that’s one line from him and he just says, he says like, with our business, I knew we just it was this we just needed to do this one thing and it would work. Like, and he explained like the competitive like the the positioning, like what we were going to do different that was going to cause it to work. It was going to be X, but with Y difference. What’s that going to be for your business? And then I was like, that sent me into like a three-week spiral of being like, oh my god, I need to know this answer. That is the important question as I’m starting this business. I really do need to have like a very strong point of view on what’s going to be the one thing that we’re going to do that’s going to make this business work better than all the others that are out there or better than, you know, how can we compete given that we’re years late to the party and whatever else. But it was such an important question and I was like, man, um, and like I ended up bringing him on as kind of like an advisor, but I was like, man, this is the value of an advisor. It’s not the answer, but the question, the question that’s going to make you like think about your business in a way or like reveal a shortcoming in your own thinking that you then get to go fill in that gap for yourself.
Moiz Ali: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of truth to that. The one thing I would say is that like, um, you know, I’ve started an e-commerce business and if someone asked me that about Native, uh when I launched the business, I’d say, I’ve got no idea. We’re aluminum-free. There are a bunch of aluminum-free deodorants right now. We’re selling online. Is that better? Is that better than selling in store? I’ve got no clue. And so I think those questions are really helpful, but I think the fear that some of those questions can cause in terms of people being like, I need to figure out this answer before I can do X or Y, before I can launch my product, before I can start spending marketing dollars, like, you can figure out that answer uh well after your business is launched. And I think for Native, that really changed. Like, you know, we were an aluminum-free deodorant selling it on the internet, and I was like, that’s going to be our competitive advantage. And then it became a little bit of like sense, uh you know, like fragrances. We have a strategy of launching new fragrances frequently, and those fragrances are different, and people are going to uh pantry load and buy a bunch of deodorants. So it’s not just buying one until you run out, but I’ve got seven because this is going to be your fragrance rather than your perfume perfume or cologne. Uh and then it was like different marketing ideas and bundling products and launching new categories. Like there are very few brands that can expand from deodorant to body wash to uh toothpaste. Like, you know, Old Spice could never make a toothpaste. We’re like, we’re going to create a brand that can do all of those and it stands for better for you ingredients rather than one single thing. And I think that question, the answer to that question evolved and changed, and I think that question is great, and people should think about that in the back of their minds, but it shouldn’t prevent them from actually taking the first step to launching their business.
The “Ali Boarding” Technique [17:06]
Sam Parr: Totally. Totally agree. Also about the like kind of progressive like iteration of that question of the of the answer. But also, um, I also learned what a good answer to that is. A good answer is not we’re doing this magical thing that nobody’s doing because usually that just doesn’t exist, like realistically, like that’s probably a signal that it’s a bad idea, not that it’s a great idea. Um, and also not that like we are going to jump through these 14 really hard to jump through hoops. Like, I’m going to crack, I’m going to be viral all the time. It’s like, oh god, like that seems like a bad strategy to back. Instead, it was like, actually, there’s a category that people want, and what we’re going to do is like, people don’t don’t like this one thing about the main competitor. We’re going to do that one thing, like it’s just common sense, but we’re going to do that one thing differently. And like, I’m just going to obsess over Facebook ads in a way that they’re not. Like, or just in a way that will work. Like, Facebook ads are just working for businesses like these, so I’m going to do Facebook ads. It’s like, almost the stupider the answer, the better, but like the clearer the answer, the better, too. Like, do you even know what you’re betting on? That’s like, what do you think is going to work here? And like, can you back that up as to why you think that’s going to work? But you don’t want it to be a genius, magical, like magical silver bullet solution that like nobody has ever thought of and nobody has ever pulled off, because that’s usually just a sign of like weakness actually in the plan.
Moiz Ali: Especially if you talk about like partnerships or collaborations where people are like, I’m betting my future on the ability to get other people to do X, Y, and Z. Like, that’s never going to work. I couldn’t agree more. It could be, we’re look, we’re going to create a digital-first brand that looks better, uh we’re going to have a better user interface, and we’re going to have more uh better colors and it’s going to look better on your countertop like Native deodorant or your bathroom, you know, shelf like like Native deodorant. And that was it. Like that was the that’s that’s an entire plan. And that’s perfectly fine.
Real Estate Investing [19:06]
Sam Parr: And the one thing I realized here. Yeah, got it. No, got it. Okay, so so the idea is um an example of doing that. So, you know that the so most people who listen to this are probably not not not brown or Dacy, so they don’t know this brand, but like if you’ve ever been to like an Indian grocer, which there’s, you know, all around the country, there’s a bunch of these like, you know, you go buy go buy, you know, the sort of like the ethnic foods. There’s this brand called Haldiram, which is basically they make like just like this like super addictive salty little snack. Um, it’s like fried, it’s like our equivalent of chips. It’s like fried, salty, kind of spicy, and you just buy this thing. It’s like a it’s like a trail mix basically that’s that’s salty. And um and so it’s been around forever. They do like 500 million a year in sales. They’re like a like a juggernaut of a of a of a consumer packaged good brand. They’re like super profitable, don’t do any like advertising, and like they’re just like they’re they’re massive. And so like, I think one idea is like Haldiram, but with like packaging that’s just different. Like different packaging, slightly better for you, like maybe it’s baked and not fried. And like, that’s the whole business plan. Like I don’t need to know more to start than just that. And I think that that’s a plan somebody could take today and go start. Like, okay, so then what are you going to do for this? Like, I don’t know, or the same as everybody else. Like you can do I don’t know or the same as everybody else for all other questions as long as you just have that one thing which is like, these guys do like 500 million in sales and they sell mostly through these like Indian grocers. I’m going to do that, but with better packaging because their packaging looks like my mom’s packaging. I’m just going to make it look like my packaging, like, you know, look the stuff I’m used to buying.
Moiz Ali: Yeah, and I can cater to Caucasians as a result of that. Like, you know, it’s packaging that the entire world is going to understand. It’s not available only at ethnic grocers. There is. That’s our business model is copying their product in a better bag. Or like or like two-thirds of Indians have diabetes, and I’m just going to make mine like better for people with diabetes. And I’m just going to be like, it’s baked, not fried, and like it’s better for you because of that. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, that’s right. No one will be able to Google me and be like, okay, Moiz Ali is a failure. Uh, that’s right. No one will be able to Google me and be like, okay, Moiz Ali is a failure.
Investing in Manscaped [21:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know, at Native you could return a product for 30 days. I had it scheduled to go at day 40 because I was like, you know, it’s going to take five days in shipping. And so day 40, we would email you and be like, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, and uh, you know, we’re going to go and try and fix these things. We once had we invited a bunch of consumers to a location and then started grilling them with questions. Hey, you you know, they were consumers that had purchased from us a bunch. They lived in San Francisco and we’re like, why do you like Native deodorant? Why do you think it works better than other deodorants in the market? Because uh and you know, people would be like, it has probiotics, that’s why it works better than uh than other deodorants. And I was like, what makes you like it does have probiotics, but you have no idea whether that’s effective or not, but I was like, no matter what we do with our formula, we have to keep some level of probiotic in there because people think probiotic means efficacy, whether it does or not. And so those were the types of things that were really interesting and fun and um, you know, non-scalable. You know, I also you were talking about um, Solomon was talking about my business and how I pack boxes. I did pack boxes. I packed boxes until we were probably doing about $80,000 in revenue a month. Like, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go home after working, put on Star Trek and start packing boxes. And you know, I was like, okay, I do I knew how much a box weighed, I knew how much filler paper to put in there. I knew how much a box weighed when like, you know, with deodorant, without deodorant. Um, I knew how to optimize this price. I I I knew when we were creating custom boxes, I was like, I want a box to weigh 1 ounce and not 1.3 ounces, because at 1.3 ounces it tips us over this level and at 1 ounce it doesn’t. Uh I’d go to our contract manufacturer all the time and be like, hey, we’re seeing these types of fuck-ups. What’s going on here? And so I was like intimately familiar with the formula. I knew the steps to how to pour the a formula, what what temperature we poured it out at. And like, Native was being hand poured. We were making 20,000 units of Native a deodorant a day, and we were hand pouring each single bar. So there were there were about 100 people working in Austin, Texas, hand pouring deodorants. And um, you know, the best person could hand pour about 1,000 deodorants a day, and a new person could hand pour about 75 deodorants a day. And we had to train these people to go from 75 to a couple hundred or 500, and that was really interesting as well. And so there was a and I mean, that’s not scalable. Certainly hand pouring deodorants isn’t scalable, but we went from 500 units of deodorant a week to 21,000 a day, still hand pouring. So it was more scalable than I thought it was going to be.
Investing in Manscaped [17:06]
Sam Parr: And you you used to do a bunch of like kind of like hands-on unscalable stuff like this. So I think you know, I don’t know to this day, but like you I showed you what we do as far this morning we were talking and I showed you what we do as far as like every day in Excel, we handwrite, here’s how much we spent, here’s the here’s the new customers we got, here’s the blended ROAS, here’s the CAC, here’s how much from email, and we write that every single day into this like spreadsheet. And I’m sure there’s like more automated ways to do it, but it’s not perfect. And like the practice of doing it by hand makes you think about each of these numbers because you’re like, why is this number always 52? And like, I need to get this number to not be 52. I’m tired of writing effing 52 on this spreadsheet. Like, I just need if this business if this number was 42, we would be making so much more money. Okay, that becomes my daily focus. Um, what are some and I’ve seen you tweet out about like people going and like like they go to Target, they like watch the aisles themselves to see how people are buying their brand or what they’re not, you know, what what they’re doing when they choose the brands. What are some of those unscalable things you’ve done yourself or what are your favorite kind of like give me some scrappy stories of like stuff that I that like you did as an operator or your favorite operators have done.
Moiz Ali: Sure. Um, you know, I I I used to email every single customer at Native and I was like, hey, what um, you know, you bought our deodorant. Uh do you like it or do you not like it? If you like it, leave a review, and if you don’t like it, email me back and tell me why you don’t like this. And you know, we were doing 300,000, $250,000 in revenue before we hired our first customer service for our rep. Like, I was looking at every single one of those emails being like, what’s working here, what is it? And that’s how we got our product better. We listened to consumer feedback. And you know, we sent out, you know, we were doing 500, 600 orders a day, probably more than that. So we were getting a lot of customer service responses to that type of inquiry. But literally every single customer who ever purchased from us, I would wait like, you know, five days until it was too late for you to return the product, because if you emailed us and you’re like, I hate this thing, uh can I return it? I want to be like, no, you’re we’re past the return deadline. You can’t do that anymore. So I literally had it scheduled for like, you know,