In this episode, Danny Austin and her husband share the story of how they built their successful direct-to-consumer hair care brand, Divi, by leveraging their personal brands and authentic content creation. They discuss the challenges of scaling a business, the importance of building a relatable brand, and the strategic decisions that led to their rapid growth.
Topics: Entrepreneurship, DTC Brands, Content Creation, Influencer Marketing, Business Scaling, Personal Branding
The Growth of Divi [00:00]
Sam Parr: Yeah, I mean, like our first like full year, I think you already shared it. Well, you said 20, it was 40, but uh, yeah, we did about $40 million and then, um, you know, this year we’re on track to do 30%, 35% growth. Yeah. Um, it’s it’s crazy.
The Shed Studio [00:23]
Shaan Puri: So we are here in the uh, where are we? The shed. Yeah, the shed. Like this studio, like I’m looking at the video, it looks legit. Yeah. People don’t know what this looks like from the outside. This is definitely like a sketchy, um, like I’ve seen a Netflix documentary about a shed like this.
Danny Austin: Well, you got here five minutes later than we did. It was it was like 100 degrees in here. Right. I was like, this is going to be a sweaty podcast. And this is the uh, you guys are different than, I don’t know, let’s say our normal guests, which are almost always like kind of, I don’t know, business, like tech, software type of entrepreneur. Uh, y’all are entrepreneurs in a different way. And your Instagram famous, so that’s cool. That’s amazing. Um, you tagged me in a story yesterday and I got to say, my wife has never looked at me that way before. She was like, she was like, oh, she’s never listened to one episode of this podcast. No way. We’ve done maybe 400 episodes. She’s not a podcast person in general, like she doesn’t listen to anyone’s podcast. Yeah.
Shaan Puri: But you would think maybe she’ll listen to one. Yeah. We got one of the kids now. There’s just not a lot of like time to like do things like that.
Danny Austin: Hey, I get it.
Shaan Puri: But I think she’ll listen to this one. So I’m excited because uh, she’s a fan of yours and uh, as a we we hung out at dinner last night, got to know each other a little bit. So I’m excited. Maybe we’ll do like you guys give like me like a 60 second intro, who you guys are, what why, introduce yourself to the audience, you know.
Danny Austin: Sure. Um, I’ll go first. So my name is Danny Austin and I started uh creating content online about 10 years ago. I was actually living in Austin. I was at the University of Texas sophomore, like just making videos on YouTube in my in my dorm room. Um, you know, kind of just grew from there really fast, then got on Instagram, all the other platforms. We now run Divi, which is a scalp care, uh hair care product brand. Um, and we do that together. We have a lot of fun doing that. Honestly, online, we just share anything about our lives from like having two kids under two to um, you know, fast or affordable fashion. Um, you know.
Shaan Puri: Yeah. We kind of been doing that together for, you know, five years. So she’s been online for 10 years. You know, we met, we didn’t work together until we got married. I was in like Austin tech scene before we got married. And then, um, you know, I was telling you last night, this just became a lifestyle and it was all consuming. And so she would be in like Turks and Caicos and I would be in a boardroom and I’d be like, oh my gosh, like what what am I doing with my life? And so around 2018, we took the leap to work together, jumped into kind of like the influencer space, which we it didn’t have a name before that. It was just like we created content and then I think the media started covering it a lot more. And then they labeled me an Instagram husband and then they labeled our our industry, you know, the influencer.
Shaan Puri: How do you feel about that label?
Danny Austin: You know, it was fine. Like I’m I’m glad that I did it. Wait, that’s so not true. At first you hated it. Yeah, it’s true. It was it was it was it was like you go to a party and be like, what do you do? And he’s like, um, you never knew. Well, when you’re coming out of college, like, you know, so much of your identity is wrapped up in your title, especially being here in Austin, Texas, like, you know, in the tech scene, it was like, oh, what startup are you part of? Do you all have funding? You know, what’s your title? What employee number were you? And so I was still kind of caught up in that mindset. And then, you know, we jumped in together. It was like, I I remember the first article that came out was by uh a writer named Taylor Lorenz and she wrote an article about what is the Instagram. I got a history with Taylor Lorenz too, yeah. Oh, really? Yeah. Dude, it’s crazy. A lot of people have a history with her now. But uh, you know, she so she she wrote that article and she quoted me in it and then I was like labeled the Instagram husband, but uh, yeah, and so we we did the influencer industry for five years together and just honestly created content together and then COVID hit and and brands started really investing in that space.
The Origin of Divi [01:01]
Shaan Puri: We should also say how this came about. Yeah. You listen to the pod. Yes. And He’s a huge fan. I’m a huge fan. Huge fan. And so we I I didn’t know that. I didn’t know who you were at that time, but uh I did an episode where I was talking about creator businesses. Yes. So content creators who have now spun off businesses that are doing really well that are not called Mr. Beast. It’s like, okay, everybody knows Mr. Beast. So who are the who I want to the other cool cool examples? And we did like maybe five, six, seven examples. And then Danny with with Divi was one of them. And so I guess you heard that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so like a couple nights before I think I saw a tweet that you were doing and you were like, we’re doing a episode on creator led businesses and I I think I like told you. You told me. I like, you know, it’d be so cool if they mentioned Divi one day. It’s like, man, I follow you guys on Twitter and you know, like I I was like, oh man, like that would be cool if they recognized Divi. But we’re in a a niche, right? That is totally not your niche. Like, you know, you had you had no idea who Danny was. I last night Danny was like watching the first couple episodes of y’all’s podcast and I was like, no, this is Sean. It’s cool. Um and uh yeah, I I was on a plane a couple days later listening to that episode and then it was like, oh, have you ever heard of Danny Austin? You asked that to Sam and Sam was like, no. That was funny. And then it was like, uh, yeah, you talked about Divi and I really appreciate that. So I sent a DM and I was like, hey man, would love to come and share our story. It’s very different than most of the business that y’all cover, but And let’s play a little game. Uh, we went to dinner last night, Chinese restaurant. We ordered food. Let’s see how well you know your husband. I don’t I don’t know if he told you this already. He ate alligator. Yeah. Oh, he brought it home. He ordered chicken in the busy order thing. Wait, he ordered alligator. Yeah, I did order it. And and it was just kind of like a spur of the moment thing. There was a couple things that were funny about the dinner. I think he was trying to impress us. No, I I was not trying to impress you. This is funny though. Like so Matthew booked the dinner and it was uh so Sam Ellinger used to play football at UT Austin. That’s one of Matthew’s really good friends. Matthew works for for Danny and I. And I go, hey, find a cool restaurant in in Austin that, you know, we can talk these people. He books this like upstairs room. There’s like a chandelier. It’s a table for 16 and then five of us. And they walk in and I go, Matthew, this is such a power move. And then on top of that, you know, the I’m like, you know, we’re we’re all talking so I don’t know what to order and then he’s like, you should try the alligator. I was like, okay, I’ll take the alligator and then they were like And then he brought it home and woke me up and he was like, you got to try this alligator. I was like, I’m not touching that. Sorry. It really tastes like chicken. You should just try it. Okay, so you didn’t try the alligator. Yeah, that was a crazy move. Uh I got to I got to give you credit. I will never I’ll never forget it. So I guess that’s maybe a lesson to be learned. Yeah. If you go to a dinner with somebody for the first time, order the weirdest thing on the menu. They will never forget it. That’s awesome.
The Early Days of Content Creation [06:38]
Shaan Puri: So you guys, uh you started doing this back in 2012. Uh right around 2012, you’re in college at the time. What was because, you know, Instagram had been out, um, YouTube had been out for maybe five years by that point. But it sounds like when you’re talking about it, it was very early days back then. What was what was working back then? How did like, would you have a tiny following back then? Like how did it kind of what were those early years like?
Danny Austin: So the backstory is my brother, Landon Austin, he’s actually a musician and he started on YouTube. He just started posting covers of different songs. Um, he had one video blow up because people thought that he was John Mayer. It was actually covering Taylor’s like Chocolate Rain song. Anyway, so that popped off. So my brother started to like kind of acquire this audience and he told me about the space, but I thought it was so weird. Like I’d walk by his bedroom and he’d be like talking to all of his imaginary friends and I just was I was like, come on Landon, like you got to make some real friends. And so, um, but he ended up putting me in like a sibling tag because tags were really popular on YouTube back then, you know, like the Chubby Bunny challenge or whatever tag. So he put me in a video and, you know, in all the comments, it’s like, your sister should start a a channel or she should share how she did her makeup or where’d she get her top? And so my brother actually made my channel for me and I didn’t touch it. We went home over winter break and we were so bored because you know, all our friends are in Austin now, everyone’s in college. And um, you know, I was just like, you know what, let’s give this thing a shot. So my brother filmed and edited my first video. It was all like just affordable New Year’s Eve outfits and it popped off. And within like three months, I had 100,000 followers and I just started kind of posting consistently. I knew of like a handful of girls out in Los Angeles that were doing this like full-time and they actually had managers and there were agencies that were just dedicated like specifically to YouTube, which was like a totally different world. So within three months, I signed with a manager, um, and then every summer from then on out, I would just fly out to LA and do collabs because collabs were like That’s how you blow up. Yeah. Oh yeah, collabs were everything. They actually had just opened YouTube space in Playa Vista in Los Angeles as well and they had this thing called the creator program where they only allowed I think like 10 or 11 of us in and creators of all sizes. And we were for it. You had to collab with two other creators in the program in order to be able to use YouTube space. So like when you got to YouTube space, I mean, they had everything from like their, you know, a red camera, they had studios, they had, you know, editing bays, editing suites, they had all these classes you could take. So I would go and work for my manager from like, you know, 9:00 to 5:00 and then from 5:00 to like 9:00, I would go to YouTube space and just collab, make YouTube videos, learn about how to edit and everything. And you’re like 21 at the time. Yeah, I’m 21. No, I was 20. Actually, I was 19, 20. I couldn’t drink. So what were you doing when you were working for your manager? Were just by day like coffee and stuff or what? So that’s how I Yeah, no, I mean, I was like, um, in on like all of the negotiations, like a lot of the creators were moving out to LA and the brands would come to the office and, you know, meet all the creators and I honestly learned everything about like the back end of the business. And so Cuz at that time you weren’t the star, but you were like building up. Exactly. Yes. And then like also being around all these creators, I would meet some of like the girls that I loved and then get their number and then we would collab and everyone was very, it was just very collaborative. Everybody’s helping each other out. Um, so it was awesome. And but then I was able to kind of take all of that back to Austin. And there really weren’t a lot of, you know, YouTubers in Austin, which also kind of helped me because I felt like I was one of the only ones. And so, um, when I was, I did start kind of like pitching myself to brands because like, I also signed with my manager, but she was, you know, managing girls that had over a million followers. I had maybe 150,000 at the time. Um, and so I started pitching myself to all these like startups in Austin. And what I found was what was happening was I was getting these brand deals or these partnerships. I would, you know, get to know them, pull them in and then forward them to my manager. And then I would look on YouTube and like all the other girls that were signed with her would be working with these brands and I wasn’t. So I was basically just like funneling these brands to my manager. So I realized at that time I was like, I’m not big enough for them to care. Right. So I need to get out of this contract and just kind of manage manage myself and build my own team and like have people that actually care about what I’m doing. Um, so as soon as I could, I got out of that contract and ever since then, we’ve always kind of had like an in-house team. Um, which we’ve learned a lot. Oh my gosh. From that. But um, but yeah, it’s just kind of crazy how it’s evolved.
The Evolution of Influencer Marketing [11:04]
Shaan Puri: And so how even when you were, so how big is the audience now?
Danny Austin: So now on Instagram, like total total on all of our platforms, we have like probably over 2 million. 2.5 million. The main one is Instagram now. Main one is Instagram, which is like the perfect platform for us. Um, most of our content is on Instagram stories. And the reason we like that is because it’s kind of like reality TV where I wake up with my audience, like like literally when I wake up in the morning, I get on stories and I carry them throughout the entire day. And so it’s just like the closest, I feel like people really feel like they’re in our homes, you know, it’s it’s very stripped down.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, yeah, it’s a lot more authentic. It’s kind of like follow follow my day. And so you uh you’ve done that and now you also launched Divi. Yes. And it’s because that’s kind of how we when we initially found you guys, I read this thread. I read the a Twitter thread. Somebody else somebody else had written about this. And they named five or six creators I never heard of that had businesses that were really big. I was like, Divi, uh it’s a, you know, this sort of like hair care product, whatever, and it was doing 40 million or something in revenue. I I don’t remember what the exact numbers were. But I remember being like, wow, that’s like really significant and so cool. Like I never really like I never heard of that. You hear the same three or four examples all the time when it comes to like like Logan Paul and Prime and Mr. Beast and whatever. Like especially in the tech world, we kind of hear the same, we’re not like as deep in, so you only hear the hear the same, you know, three or four examples every single time. So how did that come about? How’d you when did you decide to instead of posting for other people, like let’s create our own brand and how’d you pick the product? How did you like how’d you have the confidence to go for it?
Danny Austin: Yeah. So, um, there was definitely an era on Instagram where everything was perfect. You know, it’s like back in the day of like posting the perfect selfie or the perfect like latte art, whatever it was. Um, and so I definitely played that game and it gets very exhausting. After a while, I started actually losing my hair when I was in college, whenever I was at UT. First, it started with like just me being so stressed out because I’m at UT, I’m flying to LA every weekend, I’m posting on these videos, I have like Neutrogena’s like, where is the brand deal? And I have like four exams the next day. So I’m stressed out all the time. Started pulling my hair. Then I get hair extensions to try to like cover that up. That makes it worse. Then I bleach my hair, that makes it worse. When we get married, I think like a year in, I look in the mirror and I’m like, I literally have no more hair. I was like, I didn’t even want to leave the house anymore. So Jordan This is a dumb I mean, are we talking a couple strands of hair? What are we talking about? Yeah, no, I mean like bald spots. Like Patches. Like patches of hair. I mean And it was stress driven? Stress driven and then hair extensions, so that’s probably like more traction alopecia. So what happens when you put hair extensions in, like your hair can’t withstand that weight and instead of just losing hair where the hair extension is, with traction alopecia, you actually lose hair like around that whole surrounding area. I see. So it was like multiple bald spots like all over. So Jordan, of course, my husband, he’s like, wait, I don’t get it. Like why don’t you just get a wig? All the Kardashians wear wigs. What’s what’s wrong with that? So he takes me to a wig shop in Dallas, like the first place he Googles. We walk in, it’s like a Halloween store. Like the most expensive wig is like playing called $40. It’s like bright neon yellow. I’m like, I don’t know if this is going to work. You’re like classic wigs. They’re like the most expensive one is like 15 bucks. So I leave there like so defeated. I’m like, I’m always going to be bald, you know. So we actually um learned about this like wig shop in Los Angeles called the wig shop actually. Yeah. Uh from Jeffrey Star. Yeah, that’s what I was going to say. Jeffrey Star. Jeffrey Star, who is another YouTuber. Anyway, long story short, we fly out there, find my first wig. I’m in wigs for a year and actually when I first got my first wig, I didn’t tell anybody because I was so embarrassed. I was like We actually took a trip to Chicago with my parents and my sister-in-law and my brother and we didn’t tell them the entire time. They go, oh, nice haircut. You know, like they had no idea. I mean, these things can look so real now. It’s it’s insane. So about a month into wearing it, I just felt like a fraud. I was like, I got to tell people. I feel like I’m probably not the only female going through something like this. I think that like people will appreciate it and hopefully they’ll be cool with it. So I shared that I was wearing wigs and it kind of just opened up this door of like all these females that are kind of going through the same thing, like this like hidden epidemic of hair loss. Um, so Yeah, my wife all the time after uh after we had our first baby, I think there’s like a a known kind of like postpartum Yeah. like issue with with hair loss. And so she was talking about it all the time and I was like, I was like, what do you mean? Like it’s nothing, don’t worry about it. She’s like, no, look at this. And these like baby hair, whatever. And it really bothered her and I I didn’t even think really even to to try like what what what a solution look like. So Yeah, I mean it’s it can be very emotional like especially for females. Um, because there just weren’t a lot of people talking about it. So, um, long story short, I took the year and wore wigs and I was like, you know what, I’m just going to focus on my scalp health. I’m going to focus on my wellness. Um, and really like give this thing like 100%. So, meanwhile, there was actually this trend um, or I guess a hack online where a lot of women were using Monistat to grow their hair back, which is so strange. But the reason that was working is because it has a lot of like anti-fungal properties. What’s Monistat? You got to tell Sean, Danny, you got to tell him. You should know about it. No, you shouldn’t know about it, but Is it a good thing that I don’t know what that is? This is good clickbait. Tell him. Okay, so all the guys on the podcast would be like, what the By the way, we always joke, we always joke that we have four female listeners. Hopefully that’ll change after this episode. Four people listeners, we’re all like dying inside laughing right now. They’re like putting their hands on their face right now. So Monistat is what people what females use for yeast infection. Okay, gotcha. Who And so a lot of women were using this on their scalp though and it’s helping their hair grow. And people are taking before and after pictures and it’s like insane. So the reason that’s working is because it has these anti-fungal properties in it, which nowadays, you know, they always tell you don’t wash your hair, it’s not good for you. So a lot of females are using um dry shampoo. And so they’re putting all of this dry shampoo, all this product that’s just like sitting on your scalp, blocking your follicle and so your hair doesn’t really have like a fair chance of growing. So when they were using Monistat, you know, it’s kind of like detoxifying, it’s getting rid of all that product build up and your hair is growing. So the only thing with that is you shouldn’t be using it long-term. It’s just like has a lot of harmful things in it. So my goal was to find a more natural way to essentially accomplish the same thing. So I would like get into my bathroom and I studied bio at the University of Texas. I was going to So did I. They don’t teach you anything. I learned photosynthesis for like seven years. They don’t teach you anything about the human body. Exactly. She can hang with the chemist. I can hang now. She can hang. She’s like, okay, I remember that. I kind of I kind of get it, but It’s amazing how much you learn when you really need to learn versus like my major. Now I wish I really would have paid attention because I think it really would have benefited me, but You would have known. Anyways, so um, so you know, I’m like a little chemist in my in my bathroom and I’m getting all these ingredients from online, whole foods, all over the place and just making my own scalp serums and I would, you know, share on YouTube like this is how I make it, this is where you order this and then mix it this way and and then people started asking, they’re like, hey, can you just like ship it to me? Right. And so I go to Jordan, I’m like, I really think this could be a thing. A lot of people when was this like a couple years ago? This was a 2019 Uh no, they probably yeah, 2019. 2019. Um, and so that’s kind of like where the idea originated from. And it was totally clean. So it’s something that people could use every day and not feel like it’s going to be harmful. So we had a lot of like eucalyptus, uh natural ingredients, jojoba oil. Um, but there were a lot of things I wanted to put in it that I just didn’t have access to. So long story short, found partners, found a great chemist and then came out with our first product, which was a scalp serum and to be honest, I did not think that it would pop off at all. I really was just like, I want to serve my audience. I’ve been very like service driven with all of my content. I’m like, I just really want to serve people because I feel like if I serve them, they’ll come back. So that was really just like the heart behind it. But what happened was a lot of people were buying it for like their day were down the street or their mom or their husband and people started taking like before and after pictures and it’s like insane. We never asked for before and after pictures, but I feel like that’s kind of what made it blow up was people That’s marketing there is, right? A before and after. Yes. People started sending in their before and afters and like, so then I would start sharing them, you know, left and right. And I mean, every day I’m probably tagged in like 15 before and afters, even to this day. So were there not scalp serums before that? Or they were, but they just weren’t You know, I think it was just such a new like a niche like, you know, putting something on your scalp, like a skin care routine, like creating that scalp routine was very new. People weren’t really thinking about it. So I’m sure that there were scalp serums out there, um, but I don’t think people were educated about like how to use them or why they were important. Um, so our biggest thing is just like if you’re taking care of your skin, like you should be taking care of your scalp. It’s kind of like an extension of, you know. And so, um, so I think once people kind of understood how to use it, then they went to Divi first because we’re also one of the only like clean scalp serums out there. Gotcha. So the business launches when? 2020. 2020. Uh, 2021. 2021. October 2021. So we’re not even two full years in, you know, and it’s exploded. So I don’t know how much you guys typically share. Do you guys share revenue stuff or not really? Yeah, I mean, like our first like full year, I think you already shared it. Well, you said 20, it was 40, but uh, yeah, we did about $40 million and then, um, you know, this year we’re on track to do 30%, 35% growth. Yeah. Um, it’s it’s crazy. And that’s mostly from kind of the power of your community or that’s that plus a bunch of other marketing that you have to do or how how does the business grow? I mean, how much do we see? That probably exceeded your expectations. I mean, that would exceed anyone’s expectations. Yeah, I always say like when we launched the product, we thought that we were launching it for like 10% of Danny’s audience. Like we were like, hey, these people need to be served. Danny, you know, acquired this audience, they want a resource and it just grew so far beyond that. And a lot of people think that, you know, Divi, um, is all Danny’s audience that’s buying it and, you know, she’s only made up about 15% of the overall revenue. And so it was just a product that I think took off and worked. It was just right place, right time. It was like during the era of the skinification of the scalp is like what the beauty gurus call it. And so I missed that whole era. Yeah, you missed the era. Well, it’s here. It’s now. I don’t have a skin care routine either. So I I didn’t catch up. I need to start with skin, move to scalp. I gave you two boxes. Yeah, I know. You’re you’re in it now. Um, and so yeah, it’s it’s just been wild. I mean, we we never expected early. And so did you guys look at like other creator led businesses? Like who was an inspiration that you’re like, oh, you know, if we do this well, this could be like, you know, whatever, um, Skims or this could be like the Kylie’s Kylie’s lip thing or whatever. Yeah. I mean, we’ve always admired the Kardashians in a business sense. Like how they’ve how they’ve like used their reality TV to grow all these businesses and like we one thing we love about them is like how they all support each other. It’s like a an ecosystem. Like you’re using, you know, Kylie’s makeup and then you’re wearing Kim’s Skims and so we always love that aspect of what they do. But I mean, in terms of like our inspiration, to be honest, everyone in our space was just launching clothing lines. Um, so it was totally different. Yeah, it was very, very different. Were you tempted to do that too? 100%. Jordan was like, please don’t. Please don’t. The returns are insane. My parents, my dad actually has a showroom at the uh Dallas World uh Trade Center in Dallas. So he, um, you know, sells wholesale to all, you know, Nordstrom, all these boutiques. My dad always told me, he’s like, the one thing I ask you is, please don’t get in the fashion industry. It’s just it’s it’s a lot. And so, um, but one thing I knew that I wanted if I ever did launch a business is that I wanted to have something that could be on subscription. And so a lot of my ideas were mainly tech at first. Um, I never really thought of like Tech like what? Like what would it be? Uh, you know, some service that you could get. I had I honestly didn’t have like a a what Like you We had the Sassy Club. There was like one Yeah, there was one time where she like wanted to launch her own app because she felt like, you know, she could build a better community like through a different platform than Instagram and and and and we tried it. We called it, what did you call it? The Sassy Club. The Sassy Club at the time and it was like we used this uh this third party app system and we drove a large part of our community to it and we tried to do like more the whole concept was like, let’s meet in real life with our audience. And so it was like we do meetups and stuff like that and that was just really hard. It was kind of like a Bumble. Right. Yeah, it was kind of like a Bumble. And so we tried that, you know, it it was pretty difficult and then It was it was difficult to manage like the in-face interactions. Right. Yeah. Now let me ask you a question. I just hired a guy, paid a guy $5,000 to do a couple of like one-on-one like workshops with me. And it was all about this idea of personal branding. Which honestly, a pretty lame phrase in general. Like I cringed that I even did all this, but I’m putting it out there in the spirit of authenticity. So I paid this guy. Why did I pay this guy? Well, this podcast itself has gotten pretty popular. But uh I’ve always had this problem which was just like um you see some people and their brand is so clear. It’s like uh there’s this guy who this guy named Pomp and Pomp is all about Bitcoin. He’s the Bitcoin guy. Like you know him about you know him because of Bitcoin. He talks about Bitcoin. Everything he loves, you know, every fourth word needs to be Bitcoin. Yep. And then you have like um Tim Ferris who’s uh you know, the four-hour work week guy or the four-hour body, four-hour chef. He’s the four-hour guy. He’s all about kind of life hacking your way there. And so you you go down the list and a lot of people who have built good online followings, they have a clear kind of like they’re the blank guy or they’re the blank gal, whatever. Like that that’s what they’re known for. And for me, I’ve always been like, well, I don’t know, the business business guy. I don’t know that sounds very like specific or focused. And I was like, oh, I’ve gotten pretty far without that, but maybe I maybe somebody can help me kind of sharpen this. So this guy who I hired, he works with like, you know, like Jay Shetty and like um a bunch of people who are like that, like uh the guy who did the Quest bar thing, Tom whatever Bill you. Um and he’s like, yeah, you know, like Jay Shetty, his story is he was like kind of like in and out of trouble, then decided to go be a monk and he was a monk and then he like got kicked out of the monastery because a monk came to him and was like, you know, you like something bigger in store for you. So he decided to make his life mission to bring ancient monk wisdom in a modern way to the world or whatever. I I butchered I butchered that, but something like that. Right. He’s consistent, man. Right. He’s doing it every day. I just knew I was like the blue-eyed Indian guy. Like, you know, that’s what stood out to me. Like the guy’s got clear green eyes. Yeah. But I was like, okay, I see how I see the value in if you really kind of like sharpen this like whatever your brand is all about. But then I’ve met people who are maybe like you who um you probably never hired a consultant or like did a brand workshop or like sat down with a piece of paper and like tried to architect it. It seems like it kind of happened organically and naturally for you. So I I have two questions for you. One, do you think you have like a focus like that, like the blank you you are the, you know, just like the Bitcoin guy. Do you have like a thing that’s like our brand is is about this word or these three words or whatever. Do you have something like that? Um, so when I started going through my hair loss, I think it was the first time that I kind of felt like I had that thing. Like I was kind of like the wig influencer for a while and then kind of like the hair loss influencer. I mean, as cliché as it sounds, I feel like like I think our biggest thing is we’ve always just been very authentic and like goofy. Um and we’ve kind of I feel like what we’ve done is figured out how to collide those worlds of like being professional but also getting, you know, taking your heels off, getting back home, just like and being real about what it’s like having two kids. Like you’re in heels changing diapers, kids peeing all over you. Um but like I would say it it took like 10 years for people to kind of I’ve never had, you know, this persona or this video pop off and go viral and then everyone knows who I am. Like I’ve never had that moment. It’s just been like very gradual of but I but I totally feel what you’re saying. Like I I still go through those times where I’m like, okay, who am I? Like what do what’s my identity? Like what do and I I do feel like there are some bloggers out there that are so good at like, okay, when you think of Chick-fil-A, you think of this one person. Or when you think of like this one brand, you think of it. Yeah. Dude, that should have been mine. Chick-fil-A. You’re a genius. You’ve been in front of me the whole time. Yeah, and it’s like and so I do try to find those things that like, okay, when in Dallas, when people go here, like are they going to what brands are they thinking of when they think of Danny? You know, but it it’s it’s challenging because also like I’m very, you know, one day I want to be doing this, one day I like to like kind of shift and be on my toes and so What do you think people get wrong when they try to build a following? Not like the people who are just obviously bad, but let’s say people who have the potential where it could be working out. What do you think are the mistakes that those people make that like They’re trying to be perfect all the time. And it’s so unrelatable. I think like one of the biggest reasons that like people can relate is because we have made so many mistakes and we share them and like there’s times when we get online and we’re like, man, that was bad. We should have done that. Like there was an example, a small example, but I was uh cutting up like fruit for my daughter Stella’s lunch and I’m cutting the grapes wrong, you know, like where they can choke on grapes and like had no idea. Like my mom never cut my grapes. So like I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong, but you know, like the DMs start flooding and the Facebook groups are popping off. Danny’s like cutting the grapes wrong. Are you trying to kill your kid? Yeah. Yeah. Like you’re influencing all these moms to cut grapes wrong and I’m like, oh my gosh, I didn’t know. Like so, you know, you get on and you’re like, guys, I’m so sorry. Like I made a mistake. Let me like teach you the right way to to cut grapes instead of like deleting the content and being embarrassed about it. And so it’s like I think you cut them wrong the second time, too. I did. I did. I did. Um, but yeah, so I just feel like I have a lot of girlfriends like in Dallas that are, you know, trying to do something similar and they’re trying so hard to just be perfect all the time. And it’s not really It’s a sense of about You said the word relatable. I think that’s a key uh key thing. Like we had the comedian Hassan Minhaj, I don’t know if you know him. He’s like uh he’s on Netflix and stuff like that. He came on and um and I was asking him something about because we do this like we’re doing these live podcasts now sometimes. So we’re doing one this Saturday here in Austin. And so I had asked him, I was like, hey, I’m going on stage, kind of like stand-up comedy. There’s going to be whatever like thousand people in the audience. How do I, you know, any what what would you say like first five minutes? How can I set a good tone here? And he goes, um, he gave me two pieces of advice. He goes, first, make it clear that you are there. So he’s like, talk about the room, talk about the person in the front row, talk about, you know, the city that you’re in and like what it’s been like for you to be there. Like just make it clear like give them the fact that you’re there and everybody will be present together when you do that. And he goes, the second thing is uh low status. I go, low status? He goes, yeah, like people make this mistake a lot that they try to be high status. They’re like, Yeah. Uh, I want your approval, so I’m going to present a version of myself that is high status. Mhm. When in actuality, the way people relate to you and like you is doing something low status. So making fun of yourself, showing a weakness, being vulnerable, saying something that’s makes you look bad, not great, or like embarrassing to you. And so he’s like, you know, comedy is actually a low status art form, not like not high status, which is what you’re like if you go to a conference, you go on stage, uh it’s typically going to be all high status stuff. People trying to say things that show how important they are and how smart they are and their resume and all that. He’s like, that’s not how people relate to you. And so what you’re saying kind of reminds me of that is like a uh doing things that are showing the the showing some of the flaws almost not just because they’re there, but like it actually helps. It actually builds that relatability. I know, I I I agree. I mean, I feel like the times that we connect with our audience the most is like in those goofy times when I’m running around with no pants on and like we’re like, oh, I relate. Same thing, you know. I think there’s like a there’s like a pushback on like A-list celebrities even towards influencers because it’s like I don’t understand like this is not relevant to my life at all what the Kardashians are doing in the private jets and all this stuff. And like I think that that’s where people feel at home, you know, it’s it’s very stripped down. Yeah, yeah, it’s a lot more authentic. It’s kind of like follow follow my day. And so you uh you’ve done that and now you also launched Divi. Yes. And it’s because that’s kind of how we when we initially found you guys, I read this thread. I read the a Twitter thread. Somebody else somebody else had written about this. And they named five or six creators I never heard of that had businesses that were really big. I was like, Divi, uh it’s a, you know, this sort of like hair care product, whatever, and it was doing 40 million or something in revenue. I I don’t remember what the exact numbers were. But I remember being like, wow, that’s like really significant and so cool. Like I never really like I never heard of that. You hear the same three or four examples all the time when it comes to like like Logan Paul and Prime and Mr. Beast and whatever. Like especially in the tech world, we kind of hear the same, we’re not like as deep in, so you only hear the hear the same, you know, three or four examples every single time. So how did that come about? How’d you when did you decide to instead of posting for other people, like let’s create our own brand and how’d you pick the product? How did you like how’d you have the confidence to go for it? Yeah. So, um, there was definitely an era on Instagram where everything was perfect. You know, it’s like back in the day of like posting the perfect selfie or the perfect like latte art, whatever it was. Um, and so I definitely played that game and it gets very exhausting. After a while, I started actually losing my hair when I was in college, whenever I was at UT. First, it started with like just me being so stressed out because I’m at UT, I’m flying to LA every weekend, I’m posting on these videos, I have like Neutrogena’s like, where is the brand deal? And I have like four exams the next day. So I’m stressed out all the time. Started pulling my hair. Then I get hair extensions to try to like cover that up. That makes it worse. Then I bleach my hair, that makes it worse. When we get married, I think like a year in, I look in the mirror and I’m like, I literally have no more hair. I was like, I didn’t even want to leave the house anymore. So Jordan This is a dumb I mean, are we talking a couple strands of hair? What are we talking about? Yeah, no, I mean like bald spots. Like Patches. Like patches of hair. I mean And it was stress driven? Stress driven and then hair extensions, so that’s probably like more traction alopecia. So what happens when you put hair extensions in, like your hair can’t withstand that weight and instead of just losing hair where the hair extension is, with traction alopecia, you actually lose hair like around that whole surrounding area. I see. So it was like multiple bald spots like all over. So Jordan, of course, my husband, he’s like, wait, I don’t get it. Like why don’t you just get a wig? All the Kardashians wear wigs. What’s what’s wrong with that? So he takes me to a wig shop in Dallas, like the first place he Googles. We walk in, it’s like a Halloween store. Like the most expensive wig is like playing called $40. It’s like bright neon yellow. I’m like, I don’t know if this is going to work. You’re like classic wigs. They’re like the most expensive one is like 15 bucks. So I leave there like so defeated. I’m like, I’m always going to be bald, you know. So we actually um learned about this like wig shop in Los Angeles called the wig shop actually. Yeah. Uh from Jeffrey Star. Yeah, that’s what I was going to say. Jeffrey Star. Jeffrey Star, who is another YouTuber. Anyway, long story short, we fly out there, find my first wig. I’m in wigs for a year and actually when I first got my first wig, I didn’t tell anybody because I was so embarrassed. I was like We actually took a trip to Chicago with my parents and my sister-in-law and my brother and we didn’t tell them the entire time. They go, oh, nice haircut. You know, like they had no idea. I mean, these things can look so real now. It’s it’s insane. So about a month into wearing it, I just felt like a fraud. I was like, I got to tell people. I feel like I’m probably not the only female going through something like this. I think that like people will appreciate it and hopefully they’ll be cool with it. So I shared that I was wearing wigs and it kind of just opened up this door of like all these females that are kind of going through the same thing, like this like hidden epidemic of hair loss. Um, so Yeah, my wife all the time after uh after we had our first baby, I think there’s like a a known kind of like postpartum Yeah. like issue with with hair loss. And so she was talking about it all the time and I was like, I was like, what do you mean? Like it’s nothing, don’t worry about it. She’s like, no, look at this. And these like baby hair, whatever. And it really bothered her and I I didn’t even think really even to to try like what what what a solution look like. So Yeah, I mean it’s it can be very emotional like especially for females. Um, because there just weren’t a lot of people talking about it. So, um, long story short, I took the year and wore wigs and I was like, you know what, I’m just going to focus on my scalp health. I’m going to focus on my wellness. Um, and really like give this thing like 100%. So, meanwhile, there was actually this trend um, or I guess a hack online where a lot of women were using Monistat to grow their hair back, which is so strange. But the reason that was working is because it has a lot of like anti-fungal properties. What’s Monistat? You got to tell Sean, Danny, you got to tell him. You should know about it. No, you shouldn’t know about it, but Is it a good thing that I don’t know what that is? This is good clickbait. Tell him. Okay, so all the guys on the podcast would be like, what the By the way, we always joke, we always joke that we have four female listeners. Hopefully that’ll change after this episode. Four people listeners, we’re all like dying inside laughing right now. They’re like putting their hands on their face right now. So Monistat is what people what females use for yeast infection. Okay, gotcha. Who And so a lot of women were using this on their scalp though and it’s helping their hair grow. And people are taking before and after pictures and it’s like insane. So the reason that’s working is because it has these anti-fungal properties in it, which nowadays, you know, they always tell you don’t wash your hair, it’s not good for you. So a lot of females are using um dry shampoo. And so they’re putting all of this dry shampoo, all this product that’s just like sitting on your scalp, blocking your follicle and so your hair doesn’t really have like a fair chance of growing. So when they were using Monistat, you know, it’s kind of like detoxifying, it’s getting rid of all that product build up and your hair is growing. So the only thing with that is you shouldn’t be using it long-term. It’s just like has a lot of harmful things in it. So my goal was to find a more natural way to essentially accomplish the same thing. So I would like get into my bathroom and I studied bio at the University of Texas. I was going to So did I. They don’t teach you anything. I learned photosynthesis for like seven years. They don’t teach you anything about the human body. Exactly. She can hang with the chemist. I can hang now. She can hang. She’s like, okay, I remember that. I kind of I kind of get it, but It’s amazing how much you learn when you really need to learn versus like my major. Now I wish I really would have paid attention because I think it really would have benefited me, but You would have known. Anyways, so um, so you know, I’m like a little chemist in my in my bathroom and I’m getting all these ingredients from online, whole foods, all over the place and just making my own scalp serums and I would, you know, share on YouTube like this is how I make it, this is where you order this and then mix it this way and and then people started asking, they’re like, hey, can you just like ship it to me? Right. And so I go to Jordan, I’m like, I really think this could be a thing. A lot of people when was this like a couple years ago? This was a 2019 Uh no, they probably yeah, 2019. 2019. Um, and so that’s kind of like where the idea originated from. And it was totally clean. So it’s something that people could use every day and not feel like it’s going to be harmful. So we had a lot of like eucalyptus, uh natural ingredients, jojoba oil. Um, but there were a lot of things I wanted to put in it that I just didn’t have access to. So long story short, found partners, found a great chemist and then came out with our first product, which was a scalp serum and to be honest, I did not think that it would pop off at all. I really was just like, I want to serve my audience. I’ve been very like service driven with all of my content. I’m like, I just really want to serve people because I feel like if I serve them, they’ll come back. So that was really just like the heart behind it. But what happened was a lot of people were buying it for like their day were down the street or their mom or their husband and people started taking like before and after pictures and it’s like insane. We never asked for before and after pictures, but I feel like that’s kind of what made it blow up was people That’s marketing there is, right? A before and after. Yes. People started sending in their before and afters and like, so then I would start sharing them, you know, left and right. And I mean, every day I’m probably tagged in like 15 before and afters, even to this day. So were there not scalp serums before that? Or they were, but they just weren’t You know, I think it was just such a new like a niche like, you know, putting something on your scalp, like a skin care routine, like creating that scalp routine was very new. People weren’t really thinking about it. So I’m sure that there were scalp serums out there, um, but I don’t think people were educated about like how to use them or why they were important. Um, so our biggest thing is just like if you’re taking care of your skin, like you should be taking care of your scalp. It’s kind of like an extension of, you know. And so, um, so I think once people kind of understood how to use it, then they went to Divi first because we’re also one of the only like clean scalp serums out there. Gotcha. So the business launches when? 2020. 2020. Uh, 2021. 2021. October 2021. So we’re not even two full years in, you know, and it’s exploded. So I don’t know how much you guys typically share. Do you guys share revenue stuff or not really? Yeah, I mean, like our first like full year, I think you already shared it. Well, you said 20, it was 40, but uh, yeah, we did about $40 million and then, um, you know, this year we’re on track to do 30%, 35% growth. Yeah. Um, it’s it’s crazy. And that’s mostly from kind of the power of your community or that’s that plus a bunch of other marketing that you have to do or how how does the business grow? I mean, how much do we see? That probably exceeded your expectations. I mean, that would exceed anyone’s expectations. Yeah, I always say like when we launched the product, we thought that we were launching it for like 10% of Danny’s audience. Like we were like, hey, these people need to be served. Danny, you know, acquired this audience, they want a resource and it just grew so far beyond that. And a lot of people think that, you know, Divi, um, is all Danny’s audience that’s buying it and, you know, she’s only made up about 15% of the overall revenue. And so it was just a product that I think took off and worked. It was just right place, right time. It was like during the era of the skinification of the scalp is like what the beauty gurus call it. And so I missed that whole era. Yeah, you missed the era. Well, it’s here. It’s now. I don’t have a skin care routine either. So I I didn’t catch up. I need to start with skin, move to scalp. I gave you two boxes. Yeah, I know. You’re you’re in it now. Um, and so yeah, it’s it’s just been wild. I mean, we we never expected early. And so did you guys look at like other creator led businesses? Like who was an inspiration that you’re like, oh, you know, if we do this well, this could be like, you know, whatever, um, Skims or this could be like the Kylie’s Kylie’s lip thing or whatever. Yeah. I mean, we’ve always admired the Kardashians in a business sense. Like how they’ve how they’ve like used their reality TV to grow all these businesses and like we one thing we love about them is like how they all support each other. It’s like a an ecosystem. Like you’re using, you know, Kylie’s makeup and then you’re wearing Kim’s Skims and so we always love that aspect of what they do. But I mean, in terms of like our inspiration, to be honest, everyone in our space was just launching clothing lines. Um, so it was totally different. Yeah, it was very, very different. Were you tempted to do that too? 100%. Jordan was like, please don’t. Please don’t. The returns are insane. My parents, my dad actually has a showroom at the uh Dallas World uh Trade Center in Dallas. So he, um, you know, sells wholesale to all, you know, Nordstrom, all these boutiques. My dad always told me, he’s like, the one thing I ask you is, please don’t get in the fashion industry. It’s just it’s it’s a lot. And so, um, but one thing I knew that I wanted if I ever did launch a business is that I wanted to have something that could be on subscription. And so a lot of my ideas were mainly tech at first. Um, I never really thought of like Tech like what? Like what would it be? Uh, you know, some service that you could get. I had I honestly didn’t have like a a what Like you We had the Sassy Club. There was like one Yeah, there was one time where she like wanted to launch her own app because she felt like, you know, she could build a better community like through a different platform than Instagram and and and and we tried it. We called it, what did you call it? The Sassy Club. The Sassy Club at the time and it was like we used this uh this third party app system and we drove a large part of our community to it and we tried to do like more the whole concept was like, let’s meet in real life with our audience. And so it was like we do meetups and stuff like that and that was just really hard. It was kind of like a Bumble. Right. Yeah, it was kind of like a Bumble. And so we tried that, you know, it it was pretty difficult and then It was it was difficult to manage like the in-face interactions. Right. Yeah. Now let me ask you a question. I just hired a guy, paid a guy $5,000 to do a couple of like one-on-one like workshops with me. And it was all about this idea of personal branding. Which honestly, a pretty lame phrase in general. Like I cringed that I even did all this, but I’m putting it out there in the spirit of authenticity. So I paid this guy. Why did I pay this guy? Well, this podcast itself has gotten pretty popular. But uh I’ve always had this problem which was just like um you see some people and their brand is so clear. It’s like uh there’s this guy who this guy named Pomp and Pomp is all about Bitcoin. He’s the Bitcoin guy. Like you know him about you know him because of Bitcoin. He talks about Bitcoin. Everything he loves, you know, every fourth word needs to be Bitcoin. Yep. And then you have like um Tim Ferris who’s uh you know, the four-hour work week guy or the four-hour body, four-hour chef. He’s the four-hour guy. He’s all about kind of life hacking your way there. And so you you go down the list and a lot of people who have built good online followings, they have a clear kind of like they’re the blank guy or they’re the blank gal, whatever. Like that that’s what they’re known for. And for me, I’ve always been like, well, I don’t know, the business business guy. I don’t know that sounds very like specific or focused. And I was like, oh, I’ve gotten pretty far without that, but maybe I maybe somebody can help me kind of sharpen this. So this guy who I hired, he works with like, you know, like Jay Shetty and like um a bunch of people who are like that, like uh the guy who did the Quest bar thing, Tom whatever Bill you. Um and he’s like, yeah, you know, like Jay Shetty, his story is he was like kind of like in and out of trouble, then decided to go be a monk and he was a monk and then he like got kicked out of the monastery because a monk came to him and was like, you know, you like something bigger in store for you. So he decided to make his life mission to bring ancient monk wisdom in a modern way to the world or whatever. I I butchered I butchered that, but something like that. Right. He’s consistent, man. Right. He’s doing it every day. I just knew I was like the blue-eyed Indian guy. Like, you know, that’s what stood out to me. Like the guy’s got clear green eyes. Yeah. But I was like, okay, I see how I see the value in if you really kind of like sharpen this like whatever your brand is all about. But then I’ve met people who are maybe like you who um you probably never hired a consultant or like did a brand workshop or like sat down with a piece of paper and like tried to architect it. It seems like it kind of happened organically and naturally for you. So I I have two questions for you. One, do you think you have like a focus like that, like the blank you you are the, you know, just like the Bitcoin guy. Do you have like a thing that’s like our brand is is about this word or these three words or whatever. Do you have something like that? Um, so when I started going through my hair loss, I think it was the first time that I kind of felt like I had that thing. Like I was kind of like the wig influencer for a while and then kind of like the hair loss influencer. I mean, as cliché as it sounds, I feel like like I think our biggest thing is we’ve always just been very authentic and like goofy. Um and we’ve kind of I feel like what we’ve done is figured out how to collide those worlds of like being professional but also getting, you know, taking your heels off, getting back home, just like and being real about what it’s like having two kids. Like you’re in heels changing diapers, kids peeing all over you. Um but like I would say it it took like 10 years for people to kind of I’ve never had, you know, this persona or this video pop off and go viral and then everyone knows who I am. Like I’ve never had that moment. It’s just been like very gradual of but I but I totally feel what you’re saying. Like I I still go through those times where I’m like, okay, who am I? Like what do what’s my identity? Like what do and I I do feel like there are some bloggers out there that are so good at like, okay, when you think of Chick-fil-A, you think of this one person. Or when you think of like this one brand, you think of it. Yeah. Dude, that should have been mine. Chick-fil-A. You’re a genius. You’ve been in front of me the whole time. Yeah, and it’s like and so I do try to find those things that like, okay, when in Dallas, when people go here, like are they going to what brands are they thinking of when they think of Danny? You know, but it it’s it’s challenging because also like I’m very, you know, one day I want to be doing this, one day I like to like kind of shift and be on my toes and so What do you think people get wrong when they try to build a following? Not like the people who are just obviously bad, but let’s say people who have the potential where it could be working out. What do you think are the mistakes that those people make that like They’re trying to be perfect all the time. And it’s so unrelatable. I think like one of the biggest reasons that like people can relate is because we have made so many mistakes and we share them and like there’s times when we get online and we’re like, man, that was bad. We should have done that. Like there was an example, a small example, but I was uh cutting up like fruit for my daughter Stella’s lunch and I’m cutting the grapes wrong, you know, like where they can choke on grapes and like had no idea. Like my mom never cut my grapes. So like I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong, but you know, like the DMs start flooding and the Facebook groups are popping off. Danny’s like cutting the grapes wrong. Are you trying to kill your kid? Yeah. Yeah. Like you’re influencing all these moms to cut grapes wrong and I’m like, oh my gosh, I didn’t know. Like so, you know, you get on and you’re like, guys, I’m so sorry. Like I made a mistake. Let me like teach you the right way to to cut grapes instead of like deleting the content and being embarrassed about it. And so it’s like I think you cut them wrong the second time, too. I did. I did. I did. Um, but yeah, so I just feel like I have a lot of girlfriends like in Dallas that are, you know, trying to do something similar and they’re trying so hard to just be perfect all the time. And it’s not really It’s a sense of about You said the word relatable. I think that’s a key uh key thing. Like we had the comedian Hassan Minhaj, I don’t know if you know him. He’s like uh he’s on Netflix and stuff like that. He came on and um and I was asking him something about because we do this like we’re doing these live podcasts now sometimes. So we’re doing one this Saturday here in Austin. And so I had asked him, I was like, hey, I’m going on stage, kind of like stand-up comedy. There’s going to be whatever like thousand people in the audience. How do I, you know, any what what would you say like first five minutes? How can I set a good tone here? And he goes, um, he gave me two pieces of advice. He goes, first, make it clear that you are there. So he’s like, talk about the room, talk about the person in the front row, talk about, you know, the city that you’re in and like what it’s been like for you to be there. Like just make it clear like give them the fact that you’re there and everybody will be present together when you do that. And he goes, the second thing is uh low status. I go, low status? He goes, yeah, like people make this mistake a lot that they try to be high status. They’re like, Yeah. Uh, I want your approval, so I’m going to present a version of myself that is high status. Mhm. When in actuality, the way people relate to you and like you is doing something low status. So making fun of yourself, showing a weakness, being vulnerable, saying something that’s makes you look bad, not great, or like embarrassing to you. And so he’s like, you know, comedy is actually a low status art form, not like not high status, which is what you’re like if you go to a conference, you go on stage, uh it’s typically going to be all high status stuff. People trying to say things that show how important they are and how smart they are and their resume and all that. He’s like, that’s not how people relate to you. And so what you’re saying kind of reminds me of that is like a uh doing things that are showing the the showing some of the flaws almost not just because they’re there, but like it actually helps. It actually builds that relatability. I know, I I I agree. I mean, I feel like the times that we connect with our audience the most is like in those goofy times when I’m running around with no pants on and like we’re like, oh, I relate. Same thing, you know. I think there’s like a there’s like a pushback on like A-list celebrities even towards influencers because it’s like I don’t understand like this is not relevant to my life at all what the Kardashians are doing in the private jets and all this stuff. And like I think that that’s where people feel at home, you know, it’s it’s very stripped down. Yeah, yeah, it’s a lot more authentic. It’s kind of like follow follow my day. And so you uh you’ve done that and now you also launched Divi. Yes. And it’s because that’s kind of how we when we initially found you guys, I read this thread. I read the a Twitter thread. Somebody else somebody else had written about this. And they named five or six creators I never heard of that had businesses that were really big. I was like, Divi, uh it’s a, you know, this sort of like hair care product, whatever, and it was doing 40 million or something in revenue. I I don’t remember what the exact numbers were. But I remember being like, wow, that’s like really significant and so cool. Like I never really like I never heard of that. You hear the same three or four examples all the time when it comes to like like Logan Paul and Prime and Mr. Beast and whatever. Like especially in the tech world, we kind hear the same, we’re not like as deep in, so you only hear the hear the same, you know, three or four examples every single time. So how did that come about? How’d you when did you decide to instead of posting for other people, like let’s create our own brand and how’d you pick the product? How did you like how’d you have the confidence to go for it? Yeah. So, um, there was definitely an era on Instagram where everything was perfect. You know, it’s like back in the day of like posting the perfect selfie or the perfect like latte art, whatever it was. Um, and so I definitely played that game and it gets very exhausting. After a while, I started actually losing my hair when I was in college, whenever I was at UT. First, it started with like just me being so stressed out because I’m at UT, I’m flying to LA every weekend, I’m posting on these videos, I have like Neutrogena’s like, where is the brand deal? And I have like four exams the next day. So I’m stressed out all the time. Started pulling my hair. Then I get hair extensions to try to like cover that up. That makes it worse. Then I bleach my hair, that makes it worse. When we get married, I think like a year in, I look in the mirror and I’m like, I literally have no more hair. I was like, I didn’t even want to leave the house anymore. So Jordan This is a dumb I mean, are we talking a couple strands of hair? What are we talking about? Yeah, no, I mean like bald spots. Like Patches. Like patches of hair. I mean And it was stress driven? Stress driven and then hair extensions, so that’s probably like more traction alopecia. So what happens when you put hair extensions in, like your hair can’t withstand that weight and instead of just losing hair where the hair extension is, with traction alopecia, you actually lose hair like around that whole surrounding area. I see. So it was like multiple bald spots like all over. So Jordan, of course, my husband, he’s like, wait, I don’t get it. Like why don’t you just get a wig? All the Kardashians wear wigs. What’s what’s wrong with that? So he takes me to a wig shop in Dallas, like the first place he Googles. We walk in, it’s like a Halloween store. Like the most expensive wig is like playing called $40. It’s like bright neon yellow. I’m like, I don’t know if this is going to work. You’re like classic wigs. They’re like the most expensive one is like 15 bucks. So I leave there like so defeated. I’m like, I’m always going to be bald, you know. So we actually um learned about this like wig shop in Los Angeles called the wig shop actually. Yeah. Uh from Jeffrey Star. Yeah, that’s what I was going to say. Jeffrey Star. Jeffrey Star, who is another YouTuber. Anyway, long story short, we fly out there, find my first wig. I’m in wigs for a year and actually when I first got my first wig, I didn’t tell anybody because I was so embarrassed. I was like We actually took a trip to Chicago with my parents and my sister-in-law and my brother and we didn’t tell them the entire time. They go, oh, nice haircut. You know, like they had no idea. I mean, these things can look so real now. It’s it’s insane. So about a month into wearing it, I just felt like a fraud. I was like, I got to tell people. I feel like I’m probably not the only female going through something like this. I think that like people will appreciate it and hopefully they’ll be cool with it. So I shared that I was wearing wigs and it kind of just opened up this door of like all these females that are kind of going through the same thing, like this like hidden epidemic of hair loss. Um, so Yeah, my wife all the time after uh after we had our first baby, I think there’s like a a known kind of like postpartum Yeah. like issue with with hair loss. And so she was talking about it all the time and I was like, I was like, what do you mean? Like it’s nothing, don’t worry about it. She’s like, no, look at this. And these like baby hair, whatever. And it really bothered her and I I didn’t even think really even to to try like what what what a solution look like. So Yeah, I mean it’s it can be very emotional like especially for females. Um, because there just weren’t a lot of people talking about it. So, um, long story short, I took the year and wore wigs and I was like, you know what, I’m just going to focus on my scalp health. I’m going to focus on my wellness. Um, and really like give this thing like 100%. So, meanwhile, there was actually this trend um, or I guess a hack online where a lot of women were using Monistat to grow their hair back, which is so strange. But the reason that was working is because it has a lot of like anti-fungal properties. What’s Monistat? You got to tell Sean, Danny, you got to tell him. You should know about it. No, you shouldn’t know about it, but Is it a good thing that I don’t know what that is? This is good clickbait. Tell him. Okay, so all the guys on the podcast would be like, what the By the way, we always joke, we always joke that we have four female listeners. Hopefully that’ll change after this episode. Four people listeners, we’re all like dying inside laughing right now. They’re like putting their hands on their face right now. So Monistat is what people what females use for yeast infection. Okay, gotcha. Who And so a lot of women were using this on their scalp though and it’s helping their hair grow. And people are taking before and after pictures and it’s like insane. So the reason that’s working is because it has these anti-fungal properties in it, which nowadays, you know, they always tell you don’t wash your hair, it’s not good for you. So a lot of females are using um dry shampoo. And so they’re putting all of this dry shampoo, all this product that’s just like sitting on your scalp, blocking your follicle and so your hair doesn’t really have like a fair chance of growing. So when they were using Monistat, you know, it’s kind of like detoxifying, it’s getting rid of all that product build up and your hair is growing. So the only thing with that is you shouldn’t be using it long-term. It’s just like has a lot of harmful things in it. So my goal was to find a more natural way to essentially accomplish the same thing. So I would like get into my bathroom and I studied bio at the University of Texas. I was going to So did I. They don’t teach you anything. I learned photosynthesis for like seven years. They don’t teach you anything about the human body. Exactly. She can hang with the chemist. I can hang now. She can hang. She’s like, okay, I remember that. I kind of I kind of get it, but It’s amazing how much you learn when you really need to learn versus like my major. Now I wish I really would have paid attention because I think it really would have benefited me, but You would have known. Anyways, so um, so you know, I’m like a little chemist in my in my bathroom and I’m getting all these ingredients from online, whole foods, all over the place and just making my own scalp serums and I would, you know, share on YouTube like this is how I make it, this is where you order this and then mix it this way and and then people started asking, they’re like, hey, can you just like ship it to me? Right. And so I go to Jordan, I’m like, I really think this could be a thing. A lot of people when was this like a couple years ago? This was a 2019 Uh no, they probably yeah, 2019. 2019. Um, and so that’s kind of like where the idea originated from. And it was totally clean. So it’s something that people could use every day and not feel like it’s going to be harmful. So we had a lot of like eucalyptus, uh natural ingredients, jojoba oil. Um, but there were a lot of things I wanted to put in it that I just didn’t have access to. So long story short, found partners, found a great chemist and then came out with our first product, which was a scalp serum and to be honest, I did not think that it would pop off at all. I really was just like, I want to serve my audience. I’ve been very like service driven with all of my content. I’m like, I just really want to serve people because I feel like if I serve them, they’ll come back. So that was really just like the heart behind it. But what happened was a lot of people were buying it for like their day were down the street or their mom or their husband and people started taking like before and after pictures and it’s like insane. We never asked for before and after pictures, but I feel like that’s kind of what made it blow up was people That’s marketing there is, right? A before and after. Yes. People started sending in their before and afters and like, so then I would start sharing them, you know, left and right. And I mean, every day I’m probably tagged in like 15 before and afters, even to this day. So were there not scalp serums before that? Or they were, but they just weren’t You know, I think it was just such a new like a niche like, you know, putting something on your scalp, like a skin care routine, like creating that scalp routine was very new. People weren’t really thinking about it. So I’m sure that there were scalp serums out there, um, but I don’t think people were educated about like how to use them or why they were important. Um, so our biggest thing is just like if you’re taking care of your skin, like you should be taking care of your scalp. It’s kind of like an extension of, you know. And so, um, so I think once people kind of understood how to use it, then they went to Divi first because we’re also one of the only like clean scalp serums out there. Gotcha. So the business launches when? 2020. 2020. Uh, 2021. 2021. October 2021. So we’re not even two full years in, you know, and it’s exploded. So I don’t know how much you guys typically share. Do you guys share revenue stuff or not really? Yeah, I mean, like our first like full year, I think you already shared it. Well, you said 20, it was 40, but uh, yeah, we did about $40 million and then, um, you know, this year we’re on track to do 30%, 35% growth. Yeah. Um, it’s it’s crazy. And that’s mostly from kind of the power of your community or that’s that plus a bunch of other marketing that you have to do or how how does the business grow? I mean, how much do we see? That probably exceeded your expectations. I mean, that would exceed anyone’s expectations. Yeah, I always say like when we launched the product, we thought that we were launching it for like 10% of Danny’s audience. Like we were like, hey, these people need to be served. Danny, you know, acquired this audience, they want a resource and it just grew so far beyond that. And a lot of people think that, you know, Divi, um, is all Danny’s audience that’s buying it and, you know, she’s only made up about 15% of the overall revenue. And so it was just a product that I think took off and worked. It was just right place, right time. It was like during the era of the skinification of the scalp is like what the beauty gurus call it. And so I missed that whole era. Yeah, you missed the era. Well, it’s here. It’s now. I don’t have a skin care routine either. So I I didn’t catch up. I need to start with skin, move to scalp. I gave you two boxes. Yeah, I know. You’re you’re in it now. Um, and so yeah, it’s it’s just been wild. I mean, we we never expected early. And so did you guys look at like other creator led businesses? Like who was an inspiration that you’re like, oh, you know, if we do this well, this could be like, you know, whatever, um, Skims or this could be like the Kylie’s Kylie’s lip thing or whatever. Yeah. I mean, we’ve always admired the Kardashians in a business sense. Like how they’ve how they’ve like used their reality TV to grow all these businesses and like we one thing we love about them is like how they all support each other. It’s like a an ecosystem. Like you’re using, you know, Kylie’s makeup and then you’re wearing Kim’s Skims and so we always love that aspect of what they do. But I mean, in terms of like our inspiration, to be honest, everyone in our space was just launching clothing lines. Um, so it was totally different. Yeah, it was very, very different. Were you tempted to do that too? 100%. Jordan was like, please don’t. Please don’t. The returns are insane. My parents, my dad actually has a showroom at the uh Dallas World uh Trade Center in Dallas. So he, um, you know, sells wholesale to all, you know, Nordstrom, all these boutiques. My dad always told me, he’s like, the one thing I ask you is, please don’t get in the fashion industry. It’s just it’s it’s a lot. And so, um, but one thing I knew that I wanted if I ever did launch a business is that I wanted to have something that could be on subscription. And so a lot of my ideas were mainly tech at first. Um, I never really thought of like Tech like what? Like what would it be? Uh, you know, some service that you could get. I had I honestly didn’t have like a a what Like you We had the Sassy Club. There was like one Yeah, there was one time where she like wanted to launch her own app because she felt like, you know, she could build a better community like through a different platform than Instagram and and and and we tried it. We called it, what did you call it? The Sassy Club. The Sassy Club at the time and it was like we used this uh this third party app system and we drove a large part of our community to it and we tried to do like more the whole concept was like, let’s meet in real life with our audience. And so it was like we do meetups and stuff like that and that was just really hard. It was kind of like a Bumble. Right. Yeah, it was kind of like a Bumble. And so we tried that, you know, it it was pretty difficult and then It was it was difficult to manage like the in-face interactions. Right. Yeah. Now let me ask you a question. I just hired a guy, paid a guy $5,000 to do a couple of like one-on-one like workshops with me. And it was all about this idea of personal branding. Which honestly, a pretty lame phrase in general. Like I cringed that I even did all this, but I’m putting it out there in the spirit of authenticity. So I paid this guy. Why did I pay this guy? Well, this podcast itself has gotten pretty popular. But uh I’ve always had this problem which was just like um you see some people and their brand is so clear. It’s like uh there’s this guy who this guy named Pomp and Pomp is all about Bitcoin. He’s the Bitcoin guy. Like you know him about you know him because of Bitcoin. He talks about Bitcoin. Everything he loves, you know, every fourth word needs to be Bitcoin. Yep. And then you have like um Tim Ferris who’s uh you know, the four-hour work week guy or the four-hour body, four-hour chef. He’s the four-hour guy. He’s all about kind of life hacking your way there. And so you you go down the list and a lot of people who have built good online followings, they have a clear kind of like they’re the blank guy or they’re the blank gal, whatever. Like that that’s what they’re known for. And for me, I’ve always been like, well, I don’t know, the business business guy. I don’t know that sounds very like specific or focused. And I was like, oh, I’ve gotten pretty far without that, but maybe I maybe somebody can help me kind of sharpen this. So this guy who I hired, he works with like, you know, like Jay Shetty and like um a bunch of people who are like that, like uh the guy who did the Quest bar thing, Tom whatever Bill you. Um and he’s like, yeah, you know, like Jay Shetty, his story is he was like kind of like in and out of trouble, then decided to go be a monk and he was a monk and then he like got kicked out of the monastery because a monk came to him and was like, you know, you like something bigger in store for you. So he decided to make his life mission to bring ancient monk wisdom in a modern way to the world or whatever. I I butchered I butchered that, but something like that. Right. He’s consistent, man. Right. He’s doing it every day. I just knew I was like the blue-eyed Indian guy. Like, you know, that’s what stood out to me. Like the guy’s got clear green eyes. Yeah. But I was like, okay, I see how I see the value in if you really kind of like sharpen this like whatever your brand is all about. But then I’ve met people who are maybe like you who um you probably never hired a consultant or like did a brand workshop or like sat down with a piece of paper and like tried to architect it. It seems like it kind of happened organically and naturally for you. So I I have two questions for you. One, do you think you have like a focus like that, like the blank you you are the, you know, just like the Bitcoin guy. Do you have like a thing that’s like our brand is is about this word or these three words or whatever. Do you have something like that? Um, so when I started going through my hair loss, I think it was the first time that I kind of felt like I had that thing. Like I was kind of like the wig influencer for a while and then kind of like the hair loss influencer. I mean, as cliché as it sounds, I feel like like I think our biggest thing is we’ve always just been very authentic and like goofy. Um and we’ve kind of I feel like what we’ve done is figured out how to collide those worlds of like being professional but also getting, you know, taking your heels off, getting back home, just like and being real about what it’s like having two kids. Like you’re in heels changing diapers, kids peeing all over you. Um but like I would say it it took like 10 years for people to kind of I’ve never had, you know, this persona or this video pop off and go viral and then everyone knows who I am. Like I’ve never had that moment. It’s just been like very gradual of but I but I totally feel what you’re saying. Like I I still go through those times where I’m like, okay, who am I? Like what do what’s my identity? Like what do and I I do feel like there are some bloggers out there that are so good at like, okay, when you think of Chick-fil-A, you think of this one person. Or when you think of like this one brand, you think of it. Yeah. Dude, that should have been mine. Chick-fil-A. You’re a genius. You’ve been in front of me the whole time. Yeah, and it’s like and so I do try to find those things that like, okay, when in Dallas, when people go here, like are they going to what brands are they thinking of when they think of Danny? You know, but it it’s it’s challenging because also like I’m very, you know, one day I want to be doing this, one day I like to like kind of shift and be on my toes and so What do you think people get wrong when they try to build a following? Not like the people who are just obviously bad, but let’s say people who have the potential where it could be working out. What do you think are the mistakes that those people make that like They’re trying to be perfect all the time. And it’s so unrelatable. I think like one of the biggest reasons that like people can relate is because we have made so many mistakes and we share them and like there’s times when we get online and we’re like, man, that was bad. We should have done that. Like there was an example, a small example, but I was uh cutting up like fruit for my daughter Stella’s lunch and I’m cutting the grapes wrong, you know, like where they can choke on grapes and like had no idea. Like my mom never cut my grapes. So like I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong, but you know, like the DMs start flooding and the Facebook groups are popping off. Danny’s like cutting the grapes wrong. Are you trying to kill your kid? Yeah. Yeah. Like you’re influencing all these moms to cut grapes wrong and I’m like, oh my gosh, I didn’t know. Like so, you know, you get on and you’re like, guys, I’m so sorry. Like I made a mistake. Let me like teach you the right way to to cut grapes instead of like deleting the content and being embarrassed about it. And so it’s like I think you cut them wrong the second time, too. I did. I did. I did. Um, but yeah, so I just feel like I have a lot of girlfriends like in Dallas that are, you know, trying to do something similar and they’re trying so hard to just be perfect all the time. And it’s not really It’s a sense of about You said the word relatable. I think that’s a key uh key thing. Like we had the comedian Hassan Minhaj, I don’t know if you know him. He’s like uh he’s on Netflix and stuff like that. He came on and um and I was asking him something about because we do this like we’re doing these live podcasts now sometimes. So we’re doing one this Saturday here in Austin. And so I had asked him, I was like, hey, I’m going on stage, kind of like stand-up comedy. There’s going to be whatever like thousand people in the audience. How do I, you know, any what what would you say like first five minutes? How can I set a good tone here? And he goes, um, he gave me two pieces of advice. He goes, first, make it clear that you are there. So he’s like, talk about the room, talk about the person in the front row, talk about, you know, the city that you’re in and like what it’s been like for you to be there. Like just make it clear like give them the fact that you’re there and everybody will be present together when you do that. And he goes, the second thing is uh low status. I go, low status? He goes, yeah, like people make this mistake a lot that they try to be high status. They’re like, Yeah. Uh, I want your approval, so I’m going to present a version of myself that is high status. Mhm. When in actuality, the way people relate to you and like you is doing something low status. So making fun of yourself, showing a weakness, being vulnerable, saying something that’s makes you look bad, not great, or like embarrassing to you. And so he’s like, you know, comedy is actually a low status art form, not like not high status, which is what you’re like if you go to a conference, you go on stage, uh it’s typically going to be all high status stuff. People trying to say things that show how important they are and how smart they are and their resume and all that. He’s like, that’s not how people relate to you. And so what you’re saying kind of reminds me of that is like a uh doing things that are showing the the showing some of the flaws almost not just because they’re there, but like it actually helps. It actually builds that relatability. I know, I I I agree. I mean, I feel like the times that we connect with our audience the most is like in those goofy times when I’m running around with no pants on and like we’re like, oh, I relate. Same thing, you know. I think there’s like a there’s like a pushback on like A-list celebrities even towards influencers because it’s like I don’t understand like this is not relevant to my life at all what the Kardashians are doing in the private jets and all this stuff. And like I think that that’s where people feel at home, you know, it’s it’s very stripped down. Yeah, yeah, it’s a lot more authentic. It’s kind of like follow follow my day. And so you uh you’ve done that and now you also launched Divi. Yes. And it’s because that’s kind of how we when we initially found you guys, I read this thread. I read the a Twitter thread. Somebody else somebody else had written about this. And they named five or six creators I never heard of that had businesses that were really big. I was like, Divi, uh it’s a, you know, this sort of like hair care product, whatever, and it was doing 40 million or something in revenue. I I don’t remember what the exact numbers were. But I remember being like, wow, that’s like really significant and so cool. Like I never really like I never heard of that. You hear the same three or four examples all the time when it comes to like like Logan Paul and Prime and Mr. Beast and whatever. Like especially in the tech world, we kind hear the same, we’re not like as deep in, so you only hear the hear the same, you know, three or four examples every single time. So how did that come about? How’d you when did you decide to instead of posting for other people, like let’s create our own brand and how’d you pick the product? How did you like how’d you have the confidence to go for it? Yeah. So, um, there was definitely an era on Instagram where everything was perfect. You know, it’s like back in the day of like posting the perfect selfie or the perfect like latte art, whatever it was. Um, and so I definitely played that game and it gets very exhausting. After a while, I started actually losing my hair when I was in college, whenever I was at UT. First, it started with like just me being so stressed out because I’m at UT, I’m flying to LA every weekend, I’m posting on these videos, I have like Neutrogena’s like, where is the brand deal? And I have like four exams the next day. So I’m stressed out all the time. Started pulling my hair. Then I get hair extensions to try to like cover that up. That makes it worse. Then I bleach my hair, that makes it worse. When we get married, I think like a year in, I look in the mirror and I’m like, I literally have no more hair. I was like, I didn’t even want to leave the house anymore. So Jordan This is a dumb I mean, are we talking a couple strands of hair? What are we talking about? Yeah, no, I mean like bald spots. Like Patches. Like patches of hair. I mean And it was stress driven? Stress driven and then hair extensions, so that’s probably like more traction alopecia. So what happens when you put hair extensions in, like your hair can’t withstand that weight and instead of just losing hair where the hair extension is, with traction alopecia, you actually lose hair like around that whole surrounding area. I see. So it was like multiple bald spots like all over. So Jordan, of course, my husband, he’s like, wait, I don’t get it. Like why don’t you just get a wig? All the Kardashians wear wigs. What’s what’s wrong with that? So he takes me to a wig shop in Dallas, like the first place he Googles. We walk in, it’s like a Halloween store. Like the most expensive wig is like playing called $40. It’s like bright neon yellow. I’m like, I don’t know if this is going to work. You’re like classic wigs. They’re like the most expensive one is like 15 bucks. So I leave there like so defeated. I’m like, I’m always going to be bald, you know. So we actually um learned about this like wig shop in Los Angeles called the wig shop actually. Yeah. Uh from Jeffrey Star. Yeah, that’s what I was going to say. Jeffrey Star. Jeffrey Star, who is another YouTuber. Anyway, long story short, we fly out there, find my first wig. I’m in wigs for a year and actually when I first got my first wig, I didn’t tell anybody because I was so embarrassed. I was like We actually took a trip to Chicago with my parents and my sister-in-law and my brother and we didn’t tell them the entire time. They go, oh, nice haircut. You know, like they had no idea. I mean, these things can look so real now. It’s it’s insane. So about a month into wearing it, I just felt like a fraud. I was like, I got to tell people. I feel like I’m probably not the only female going through something like this. I think that like people will appreciate it and hopefully they’ll be cool with it. So I shared that I was wearing wigs and it kind of just opened up this door of like all these females that are kind of going through the same thing, like this like hidden epidemic of hair loss. Um, so Yeah, my wife all the time after uh after we had our first baby, I think there’s like a a known kind of like postpartum Yeah. like issue with with hair loss. And so she was talking about it all the time and I was like, I was like, what do you mean? Like it’s nothing, don’t worry about it. She’s like, no, look at this. And these like baby hair, whatever. And it really bothered her and I I didn’t even think really even to to try like what what what a solution look like. So Yeah, I mean it’s it can be very emotional like especially for females. Um, because there just weren’t a lot of people talking about it. So, um, long story short, I took the year and wore wigs and I was like, you know what, I’m just going to focus on my scalp health. I’m going to focus on my wellness. Um, and really like give this thing like 100%. So, meanwhile, there was actually this trend um, or I guess a hack online where a lot of women were using Monistat to grow their hair back, which is so strange. But the reason that was working is because it has a lot of like anti-fungal properties. What’s Monistat? You got to tell Sean, Danny, you got to tell him. You should know about it. No, you shouldn’t know about it, but Is it a good thing that I don’t know what that is? This is good clickbait. Tell him. Okay, so all the guys on the podcast would be like, what the By the way, we always joke, we always joke that we have four female listeners. Hopefully that’ll change after this episode. Four people listeners, we’re all like dying inside laughing right now. They’re like putting their hands on their face right now. So Monistat is what people what females use for yeast infection. Okay, gotcha. Who And so a lot of women were using this on their scalp though and it’s helping their hair grow. And people are taking before and after pictures and it’s like insane. So the reason that’s working is because it has these anti-fungal properties in it, which nowadays, you know, they always tell you don’t wash your hair, it’s not good for you. So a lot of females are using um dry shampoo. And so they’re putting all of this dry shampoo, all this product that’s just like sitting on your scalp, blocking your follicle and so your hair doesn’t really have like a fair chance of growing. So when they were using Monistat, you know, it’s kind of like detoxifying, it’s getting rid of all that product build up and your hair is growing. So the only thing with that is you shouldn’t be using it long-term. It’s just like has a lot of harmful things in it. So my goal was to find a more natural way to essentially accomplish the same thing. So I would like get into my bathroom and I studied bio at the University of Texas. I was going to So did I. They don’t teach you anything. I learned photosynthesis for like seven years. They don’t teach you anything about the human body. Exactly. She can hang with the chemist. I can hang now. She can hang. She’s like, okay, I remember that. I kind of I kind of get it, but It’s amazing how much you learn when you really need to learn versus like my major. Now I wish I really would have paid attention because I think it really would have benefited me, but You would have known. Anyways, so um, so you know, I’m like a little chemist in my in my bathroom and I’m getting all these ingredients from online, whole foods, all over the place and just making my own scalp serums and I would, you know, share on YouTube like this is how I make it, this is where you order this and then mix it this way and and then people started asking, they’re like, hey, can you just like ship it to me? Right. And so I go to Jordan, I’m like, I really think this could be a thing. A lot of people when was this like a couple years ago? This was a 2019 Uh no, they probably yeah, 2019. 2019. Um, and so that’s kind of like where the idea originated from. And it was totally clean. So it’s something that people could use every day and not feel like it’s going to be harmful. So we had a lot of like eucalyptus, uh natural ingredients, jojoba oil. Um, but there were a lot of things I wanted to put in it that I just didn’t have access to. So long story short, found partners, found a great chemist and then came out with our first product, which was a scalp serum and to be honest, I did not think that it would pop off at all. I really was just like, I want to serve my audience. I’ve been very like service driven with all of my content. I’m like, I just really want to serve people because I feel like if I serve them, they’ll come back. So that was really just like the heart behind it. But what happened was a lot of people were buying it for like their day were down the street or their mom or their husband and people started taking like before and after pictures and it’s like insane. We never asked for before and after pictures, but I feel like that’s kind of what made it blow up was people That’s marketing there is, right? A before and after. Yes. People started sending in their before and afters and like, so then I would start sharing them, you know, left and right. And I mean, every day I’m probably tagged in like 15 before and afters, even to this day. So were there not scalp serums before that? Or they were, but they just weren’t You know, I think it was just such a new like a niche like, you know, putting something on your scalp, like a skin care routine, like creating that scalp routine was very new. People weren’t really thinking about it. So I’m sure that there were scalp serums out there, um, but I don’t think people were educated about like how to use them or why they were important. Um, so our biggest thing is just like if you’re taking care of your skin, like you should be taking care of your scalp. It’s kind of like an extension of, you know. And so, um, so I think once people kind of understood how to use it, then they went to Divi first because we’re also one of the only like clean scalp serums out there. Gotcha. So the business launches when? 2020. 2020. Uh, 2021. 2021. October 2021. So we’re not even two full years in, you know, and it’s exploded. So I don’t know how much you guys typically share. Do you guys share revenue stuff or not really? Yeah, I mean, like our first like full year, I think you already shared it. Well, you said 20, it was 40, but uh, yeah, we did about $40 million and then, um, you know, this year we’re on track to do 30%, 35% growth. Yeah. Um, it’s it’s crazy. And that’s mostly from kind of the power of your community or that’s that plus a bunch of other marketing that you have to do or how how does the business grow? I mean, how much do we see? That probably exceeded your expectations. I mean, that would exceed anyone’s expectations. Yeah, I always say like when we launched the product, we thought that we were launching it for like 10% of Danny’s audience. Like we were like, hey, these people need to be served. Danny, you know, acquired this audience, they want a resource and it just grew so far beyond that. And a lot of people think that, you know, Divi, um, is all Danny’s audience that’s buying it and, you know, she’s only made up about 15% of the overall revenue. And so it was just a product that I think took off and worked. It was just right place, right time. It was like during the era of the skinification of the scalp is like what the beauty gurus call it. And so I missed that whole era. Yeah, you missed the era. Well, it’s here. It’s now. I don’t have a skin care routine either. So I I didn’t catch up. I need to start with skin, move to scalp. I gave you two boxes. Yeah, I know. You’re you’re in it now. Um, and so yeah, it’s it’s just been wild. I mean, we we never expected early. And so did you guys look at like other creator led businesses? Like who was an inspiration that you’re like, oh, you know, if we do this well, this could be like, you know, whatever, um, Skims or this could be like the Kylie’s Kylie’s lip thing or whatever. Yeah. I mean, we’ve always admired the Kardashians in a business sense. Like how they’ve how they’ve like used their reality TV to grow all these businesses and like we one thing we love about them is like how they all support each other. It’s like a an ecosystem. Like you’re using, you know, Kylie’s makeup and then you’re wearing Kim’s Skims and so we always love that aspect of what they do. But I mean, in terms of like our inspiration, to be honest, everyone in our space was just launching clothing lines. Um, so it was totally different. Yeah, it was very, very different. Were you tempted to do that too? 100%. Jordan was like, please don’t. Please don’t. The returns are insane. My parents, my dad actually has a showroom at the uh Dallas World uh Trade Center in Dallas. So he, um, you know, sells wholesale to all, you know, Nordstrom, all these boutiques. My dad always told me, he’s like, the one thing I ask you is, please don’t get in the fashion industry. It’s just it’s it’s a lot. And so, um, but one thing I knew that I wanted if I ever did launch a business is that I wanted to have something that could be on subscription. And so a lot of my ideas were mainly tech at first. Um, I never really thought of like Tech like what? Like what would it be? Uh, you know, some service that you could get. I had I honestly didn’t have like a a what Like you We had the Sassy Club. There was like one Yeah, there was one time where she like wanted to launch her own app because she felt like, you know, she could build a better community like through a different platform than Instagram and and and and we tried it. We called it, what did you call it? The Sassy Club. The Sassy Club at the time and it was like we used this uh this third party app system and we drove a large part of our community to it and we tried to do like more the whole concept was like, let’s meet in real life with our audience. And so it was like we do meetups and stuff like that and that was just really hard. It was kind of like a Bumble. Right. Yeah, it was kind of like a Bumble. And so we tried that, you know, it it was pretty difficult and then It was it was difficult to manage like the in-face interactions. Right. Yeah. Now let me ask you a question. I just hired a guy, paid a guy $5,000 to do a couple of like one-on-one like workshops with me. And it was all about this idea of personal branding. Which honestly, a pretty lame phrase in general. Like I cringed that I even did all this, but I’m putting it out there in the spirit of authenticity. So I paid this guy. Why did I pay this guy? Well, this podcast itself has gotten pretty popular. But uh I’ve always had this problem which was just like um you see some people and their brand is so clear. It’s like uh there’s this guy who this guy named Pomp and Pomp is all about Bitcoin. He’s the Bitcoin guy. Like you know him about you know him because of Bitcoin. He talks about Bitcoin. Everything he loves, you know, every fourth word needs to be Bitcoin. Yep. And then you have like um Tim Ferris who’s uh you know, the four-hour work week guy or the four-hour body, four-hour chef. He’s the four-hour guy. He’s all about kind of life hacking your way there. And so you you go down the list and a lot of people who have built good online followings, they have a clear kind of like they’re the blank guy or they’re the blank gal, whatever. Like that that’s what they’re known for. And for me, I’ve always been like, well, I don’t know, the business business guy. I don’t know that sounds very like specific or focused. And I was like, oh, I’ve gotten pretty far without that, but maybe I maybe somebody can help me kind of sharpen this. So this guy who I hired, he works with like, you know, like Jay Shetty and like um a bunch of people who are like that, like uh the guy who did the Quest bar thing, Tom whatever Bill you. Um and he’s like, yeah, you know, like Jay Shetty, his story is he was like kind of like in and out of trouble, then decided to go be a monk and he was a monk and then he like got kicked out of the monastery because a monk came to him and was like, you know, you like something bigger in store for you. So he decided to make his life mission to bring ancient monk wisdom in a modern way to the world or whatever. I I butchered I butchered that, but something like that. Right. He’s consistent, man. Right. He’s doing it every day. I just knew I was like the blue-eyed Indian guy. Like, you know, that’s what stood out to me. Like the guy’s got clear green eyes. Yeah. But I was like, okay, I see how I see the value in if you really kind of like sharpen this like whatever your brand is all about. But then I’ve met people who are maybe like you who um you probably never hired a consultant or like did a brand workshop or like sat down with a piece of paper and like tried to architect it. It seems like it kind of happened organically and naturally for you. So I I have two questions for you. One, do you think you have like a focus like that, like the blank you you are the, you know, just like the Bitcoin guy. Do you have like a thing that’s like our brand is is about this word or these three words or whatever. Do you have something like that? Um, so when I started going through my hair loss, I think it was the first time that I kind of felt like I had that thing. Like I was kind of like the wig influencer for a while and then kind of like the hair loss influencer. I mean, as cliché as it sounds, I feel like like I think our biggest thing is we’ve always just been very authentic and like goofy. Um and we’ve kind of I feel like what we’ve done is figured out how to collide those worlds of like being professional but also getting, you know, taking your heels off, getting back home, just like and being real about what it’s like having two kids. Like you’re in heels changing diapers, kids peeing all over you. Um but like I would say it it took like 10 years for people to kind of I’ve never had, you know, this persona or this video pop off and go viral and then everyone knows who I am. Like I’ve never had that moment. It’s just been like very gradual of but I but I totally feel what you’re saying. Like I I still go through those times where I’m like, okay, who am I? Like what do what’s my identity? Like what do and I I do feel like there are some bloggers out there that are so good at like, okay, when you think of Chick-fil-A, you think of this one person. Or when you think of like this one brand, you think of it. Yeah. Dude, that should have been mine. Chick-fil-A. You’re a genius. You’ve been in front of me the whole time. Yeah, and it’s like and so I do try to find those things that like, okay, when in Dallas, when people go here, like are they going to what brands are they thinking of when they think of Danny? You know, but it it’s it’s challenging because also like I’m very, you know, one day I want to be doing this, one day I like to like kind of shift and be on my toes and so What do you think people get wrong when they try to build a following? Not like the people who are just obviously bad, but let’s say people who have the potential where it could be working out. What do you think are the mistakes that those people make that like They’re trying to be perfect all the time. And it’s so unrelatable. I think like one of the biggest reasons that like people can relate is because we have made so many mistakes and we share them and like there’s times when we get online and we’re like, man, that was bad. We should have done that. Like there was an example, a small example, but I was uh cutting up like fruit for my daughter Stella’s lunch and I’m cutting the grapes wrong, you know, like where they can choke on grapes and like had no idea. Like my mom never cut my grapes. So like I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong, but you know, like the DMs start flooding and the Facebook groups are popping off. Danny’s like cutting the grapes wrong. Are you trying to kill your kid? Yeah. Yeah. Like you’re influencing all these moms to cut grapes wrong and I’m like, oh my gosh, I didn’t know. Like so, you know, you get on and you’re like, guys, I’m so sorry. Like I made a mistake. Let me like teach you the right way to to cut grapes instead of like deleting the content and being embarrassed about it. And so it’s like I think you cut them wrong the second time, too. I did. I did. I did. Um, but yeah, so I just feel like I have a lot of girlfriends like in Dallas that are, you know, trying to do something similar and they’re trying so hard to just be perfect all the time. And it’s not really It’s a sense of about You said the word relatable. I think that’s a key uh key thing. Like we had the comedian Hassan Minhaj, I don’t know if you know him. He’s like uh he’s on Netflix and stuff like that. He came on and um and I was asking him something about because we do this like we’re doing these live podcasts now sometimes. So we’re doing one this Saturday here in Austin. And so I had asked him, I was like, hey, I’m going on stage, kind of like stand-up comedy. There’s going to be whatever like thousand people in the audience. How do I, you know, any what what would you say like first five minutes? How can I set a good tone here? And he goes, um, he gave me two pieces of advice. He goes, first, make it clear that you are there. So he’s like, talk about the room, talk about the person in the front row, talk about, you know, the city that you’re in and like what it’s been like for you to be there. Like just make it clear like give them the fact that you’re there and everybody will be present together when you do that. And he goes, the second thing is uh low status. I go, low status? He goes, yeah, like people make this mistake a lot that they try to be high status. They’re like, Yeah. Uh, I want your approval, so I’m going to present a version of myself that is high status. Mhm. When in actuality, the way people relate to you and like you is doing something low status. So making fun of yourself, showing a weakness, being vulnerable, saying something that’s makes you look bad, not great, or like embarrassing to you. And so he’s like, you know, comedy is actually a low status art form, not like not high status, which is what you’re like if you go to a conference, you go on stage, uh it’s typically going to be all high status stuff. People trying to say things that show how important they are and how smart they are and their resume and all that. He’s like, that’s not how people relate to you. And so what you’re saying kind of reminds me of that is like a uh doing things that are showing the the showing some of the flaws almost not just because they’re there, but like it actually helps. It actually builds that relatability. I know, I I I agree. I mean, I feel like the times that we connect with our audience the most is like in those goofy times when I’m running around with no pants on and like we’re like, oh, I relate. Same thing, you know. I think there’s like a there’s like a pushback on like A-list celebrities even towards influencers because it’s like I don’t understand like this is not relevant to my life at all what the Kardashians are doing in the private jets and all this stuff. And like I think that that’s where people feel at home, you know, it’s it’s very stripped down. Yeah, yeah, it’s a lot more authentic. It’s kind of like follow follow my day. And so you uh you’ve done that and now you also launched Divi. Yes. And it’s because that’s kind of how we when we initially found you guys, I read this thread. I read the a Twitter thread. Somebody else somebody else had written about this. And they named five or six creators I never heard of that had businesses that were really big. I was like, Divi, uh it’s a, you know, this sort of like hair care product, whatever, and it was doing 40 million or something in revenue. I I don’t remember what the exact numbers were. But I remember being like, wow, that’s like really significant and so cool. Like I never really like I never heard of that. You hear the same three or four examples all the time when it comes to like like Logan Paul and Prime and Mr. Beast and whatever. Like especially in the tech world, we kind hear the same, we’re not like as deep in, so you only hear the hear the same, you know, three or four examples every single time. So how did that come about? How’d you when did you decide to instead of posting for other people, like let’s create our own brand and how’d you pick the product? How did you like how’d you have the confidence to go for it? Yeah. So, um, there was definitely an era on Instagram where everything was perfect. You know, it’s like back in the day of like posting the perfect selfie or the perfect like latte art, whatever it was. Um, and so I definitely played that game and it gets very exhausting. After a while, I started actually losing my hair when I was in college, whenever I was at UT. First, it started with like just me being so stressed out because I’m at UT, I’m flying to LA every weekend, I’m posting on these videos, I have like Neutrogena’s like, where is the brand deal? And I have like four exams the next day. So I’m stressed out all the time. Started pulling my hair. Then I get hair extensions to try to like cover that up. That makes it worse. Then I bleach my hair, that makes it worse. When we get married, I think like a year in, I look in the mirror and I’m like, I literally have no more hair. I was like, I didn’t even want to leave the house anymore. So Jordan This is a dumb I mean, are we talking a couple strands of hair? What are we talking about? Yeah, no, I mean like bald spots. Like Patches. Like patches of hair. I mean And it was stress driven? Stress driven and then hair extensions, so that’s probably like more traction alopecia. So what happens when you put hair extensions in, like your hair can’t withstand that weight and instead of just losing hair where the hair extension is, with traction alopecia, you actually lose hair like around that whole surrounding area. I see. So it was like multiple bald spots like all over. So Jordan, of course, my husband, he’s like, wait, I don’t get it. Like why don’t you just get a wig? All the Kardashians wear wigs. What’s what’s wrong with that? So he takes me to a wig shop in Dallas, like the first place he Googles. We walk in, it’s like a Halloween store. Like the most expensive wig is like playing called $40. It’s like bright neon yellow. I’m like, I don’t know if this is going to work. You’re like classic wigs. They’re like the most expensive one is like 15 bucks. So I leave there like so defeated. I’m like, I’m always going to be bald, you know. So we actually um learned about this like wig shop in Los Angeles called the wig shop actually. Yeah. Uh from Jeffrey Star. Yeah, that’s what I was going to say. Jeffrey Star. Jeffrey Star, who is another YouTuber. Anyway, long story short, we fly out there, find my first wig. I’m in wigs for a year and actually when I first got my first wig, I didn’t tell anybody because I was so embarrassed. I was like We actually took a trip to Chicago with my parents and my sister-in-law and my brother and we didn’t tell them the entire time. They go, oh, nice haircut. You know, like they had no idea. I mean, these things can look so real now. It’s it’s insane. So about a month into wearing it, I just felt like a fraud. I was like, I got to tell people. I feel like I’m probably not the only female going through something like this. I think that like people will appreciate it and hopefully they’ll be cool with it. So I shared that I was wearing wigs and it kind of just opened up this door of like all these females that are kind of going through the same thing, like this like hidden epidemic of hair loss. Um, so Yeah, my wife all the time after uh after we had our first baby, I think there’s like a a known kind of like postpartum Yeah. like issue with with hair loss. And so she was talking about it all the time and I was like, I was like, what do you mean? Like it’s nothing, don’t worry about it. She’s like, no, look at this. And these like baby hair, whatever. And it really bothered her and I I didn’t even think really even to to try like what what what a solution look like. So Yeah, I mean it’s it can be very emotional like especially for females. Um, because there just weren’t a lot of people talking about it. So, um, long story short, I took the year and wore wigs and I was like, you know what, I’m just going to focus on my scalp health. I’m going to focus on my wellness. Um, and really like give this thing like 100%. So, meanwhile, there was actually this trend um, or I guess a hack online where a lot of women were using Monistat to grow their hair back, which is so strange. But the reason that was working is because it has a lot of like anti-fungal properties. What’s Monistat? You got to tell Sean, Danny, you got to tell him. You should know about it. No, you shouldn’t know about it, but Is it a good thing that I don’t know what that is? This is good clickbait. Tell him. Okay, so all the guys on the podcast would be like, what the By the way, we always joke, we always joke that we have four female listeners. Hopefully that’ll change after this episode. Four people listeners, we’re all like dying inside laughing right now. They’re like putting their hands on their face right now. So Monistat is what people what females use for yeast infection. Okay, gotcha. Who And so a lot of women were using this on their scalp though and it’s helping their hair grow. And people are taking before and after pictures and it’s like insane. So the reason that’s working is because it has these anti-fungal properties in it, which nowadays, you know, they always tell you don’t wash your hair, it’s not good for you. So a lot of females are using um dry shampoo. And so they’re putting all of this dry shampoo, all this product that’s just like sitting on your scalp, blocking your follicle and so your hair doesn’t really have like a fair chance of growing. So when they were using Monistat, you know, it’s kind of like detoxifying, it’s getting rid of all that product build up and your hair is growing. So the only thing with that is you shouldn’t be using it long-term. It’s just like has a lot of harmful things in it. So my goal was to find a more natural way to essentially accomplish the same thing. So I would like get into my bathroom and I studied bio at the University of Texas. I was going to So did I. They don’t teach you anything. I learned photosynthesis for like seven years. They don’t teach you anything about the human body. Exactly. She can hang with the chemist. I can hang now. She can hang. She’s like, okay, I remember that. I kind of I kind of get it, but It’s amazing how much you learn when you really need to learn versus like my major. Now I wish I really would have paid attention because I think it really would have benefited me, but You would have known. Anyways, so um, so you know, I’m like a little chemist in my in my bathroom and I’m getting all these ingredients from online, whole foods, all over the place and just making my own scalp serums and I would, you know, share on YouTube like this is how I make it, this is where you order this and then mix it this way and and then people started asking, they’re like, hey, can you just like ship it to me? Right. And so I go to Jordan, I’m like, I really think this could be a thing. A lot of people when was this like a couple years ago? This was a 2019 Uh no, they probably yeah, 2019. 2019. Um, and so that’s kind of like where the idea originated from. And it was totally clean. So it’s something that people could use every day and not feel like it’s going to be harmful. So we had a lot of like eucalyptus, uh natural ingredients, jojoba oil. Um, but there were a lot of things I wanted to put in it that I just didn’t have access to. So long story short, found partners, found a great chemist and then came out with our first product, which was a scalp serum and to be honest, I did not think that it would pop off at all. I really was just like, I want to serve my audience. I’ve been very like service driven with all of my content. I’m like, I just really want to serve people because I feel like if I serve them, they’ll come back. So that was really just like the heart behind it. But what happened was a lot of people were buying it for like their day were down the street or their mom or their husband and people started taking like before and after pictures and it’s like insane. We never asked for before and after pictures, but I feel like that’s kind of what made it blow up was people That’s marketing there is, right? A before and after. Yes. People started sending in their before and afters and like, so then I would start sharing them, you know, left and right. And I mean, every day I’m probably tagged in like 15 before and afters, even to this day. So were there not scalp serums before that? Or they were, but they just weren’t You know, I think it was just such a new like a niche like, you know, putting something on your scalp, like a skin care routine, like creating that scalp routine was very new. People weren’t really thinking about it. So I’m sure that there were scalp serums out there, um, but I don’t think people were educated about like how to use them or why they were important. Um, so our biggest thing is just like if you’re taking care of your skin, like you should be taking care of your scalp. It’s kind of like an extension of, you know. And so, um, so I think once people kind of understood how to use it, then they went to Divi first because we’re also one of the only like clean scalp serums out there. Gotcha. So the business launches when? 2020. 2020. Uh, 2021. 2021. October 2021. So we’re not even two full years in, you know, and it’s exploded. So I don’t know how much you guys typically share. Do you guys share revenue stuff or not really? Yeah, I mean, like our first like full year, I think you already shared it. Well, you said 20, it was 40, but uh, yeah, we did about $40 million and then, um, you know, this year we’re on track to do 30%, 35% growth. Yeah. Um, it’s it’s crazy. And that’s mostly from kind of the power of your community or that’s that plus a bunch of other marketing that you have to do or how how does the business grow? I mean, how much do we see? That probably exceeded your expectations. I mean, that would exceed anyone’s expectations. Yeah, I always say like when we launched the product, we thought that we were launching it for like 10% of Danny’s audience. Like we were like, hey, these people need to be served. Danny, you know, acquired this audience, they want a resource and it just grew so far beyond that. And a lot of people think that, you know, Divi, um, is all Danny’s audience that’s buying it and, you know, she’s only made up about 15% of the overall revenue. And so it was just a product that I think took off and worked. It was just right place, right time. It was like during the era of the skinification of the scalp is like what the beauty gurus call it. And so I missed that whole era. Yeah, you missed the era. Well, it’s here. It’s now. I don’t have a skin care routine either. So I I didn’t catch up. I need to start with skin, move to scalp. I gave you two boxes. Yeah, I know. You’re you’re in it now. Um, and so yeah, it’s it’s just been wild. I mean, we we never expected early. And so did you guys look at like other creator led businesses? Like who was an inspiration that you’re like, oh, you know, if we do this well, this could be like, you know, whatever, um, Skims or this could be like the Kylie’s Kylie’s lip thing or whatever. Yeah. I mean, we’ve always admired the Kardashians in a business sense. Like how they’ve how they’ve like used their reality TV to grow all these businesses and like we one thing we love about them is like how they all support each other. It’s like a an ecosystem. Like you’re using, you know, Kylie’s makeup and then you’re wearing Kim’s Skims and so we always love that aspect of what they do. But I mean, in terms of like our inspiration, to be honest, everyone in our space was just launching clothing lines. Um, so it was totally different. Yeah, it was very, very different. Were you tempted to do that too? 100%. Jordan was like, please don’t. Please don’t. The returns are insane. My parents, my dad actually has a showroom at the uh Dallas World uh Trade Center in Dallas. So he, um, you know, sells wholesale to all, you know, Nordstrom, all these boutiques. My dad always told me, he’s like, the one thing I ask you is, please don’t get in the fashion industry. It’s just it’s it’s a lot. And so, um, but one thing I knew that I wanted if I ever did launch a business is that I wanted to have something that could be on subscription. And so a lot of my ideas were mainly tech at first. Um, I never really thought of like Tech like what? Like what would it be? Uh, you know, some service that you could get. I had I honestly didn’t have like a a what Like you We had the Sassy Club. There was like one Yeah, there was one time where she like wanted to launch her own app because she felt like, you know, she could build a better community like through a different platform than Instagram and and and and we tried it. We called it, what did you call it? The Sassy Club. The Sassy Club at the time and it was like we used this uh this third party app system and we drove a large part of our community to it and we tried to do like more the whole concept was like, let’s meet in real life with our audience. And so it was like we do meetups and stuff like that and that was just really hard. It was kind of like a Bumble. Right. Yeah, it was kind of like a Bumble. And so we tried that, you know, it it was pretty difficult and then It was it was difficult to manage like the in-face interactions. Right. Yeah. Now let me ask you a question. I just hired a guy, paid a guy $5,000 to do a couple of like one-on-one like workshops with me. And it was all about this idea of personal branding. Which honestly, a pretty lame phrase in general. Like I cringed that I even did all this, but I’m putting it out there in the spirit of authenticity. So I paid this guy. Why did I pay this guy? Well, this podcast itself has gotten pretty popular. But uh I’ve always had this problem which was just like um you see some people and their brand is so clear. It’s like uh there’s this guy who this guy named Pomp and Pomp is all about Bitcoin. He’s the Bitcoin guy. Like you know him about you know him because of Bitcoin. He talks about Bitcoin. Everything he loves, you know, every fourth word needs to be Bitcoin. Yep. And then you have like um Tim Ferris who’s uh you know, the four-hour work week guy or the four-hour body, four-hour chef. He’s the four-hour guy. He’s all about kind of life hacking your way there. And so you you go down the list and a lot of people who have built good online followings, they have a clear kind of like they’re the blank guy or they’re the blank gal, whatever. Like that that’s what they’re known for. And for me, I’ve always been like, well, I don’t know, the business business guy. I don’t know that sounds very like specific or focused. And I was like, oh, I’ve gotten pretty far without that, but maybe I maybe somebody can help me kind of sharpen this. So this guy who I hired, he works with like, you know, like Jay Shetty and like um a bunch of people who are like that, like uh the guy who did the Quest bar thing, Tom whatever Bill you. Um and he’s like, yeah, you know, like Jay Shetty, his story is he was like kind of like in and out of trouble, then decided to go be a monk and he was a monk and then he like got kicked out of the monastery because a monk came to him and was like, you know, you like something bigger in store for you. So he decided to make his life mission to bring ancient monk wisdom in a modern way to the world or whatever. I I butchered I butchered that, but something like that. Right. He’s consistent, man. Right. He’s doing it every day. I just knew I was like the blue-eyed Indian guy. Like, you know, that’s what stood out to me. Like the guy’s got clear green eyes. Yeah. But I was like, okay, I see how I see the value in if you really kind of like sharpen this like whatever your brand is all about. But then I’ve met people who are maybe like you who um you probably never hired a consultant or like did a brand workshop or like sat down with a piece of paper and like tried to architect it. It seems like it kind of happened organically and naturally for you. So I I have two questions for you. One, do you think you have like a focus like that, like the blank you you are the, you know, just like the Bitcoin guy. Do you have like a thing that’s like our brand is is about this word or these three words or whatever. Do you have something like that? Um, so when I started going through my hair loss, I think it was the first time that I kind of felt like I had that thing. Like I was kind of like the wig influencer for a while and then kind of like the hair loss influencer. I mean, as cliché as it sounds, I feel like like I think our biggest thing is we’ve always just been very authentic and like goofy. Um and we’ve kind of I feel like what we’ve done is figured out how to collide those worlds of like being professional but also getting, you know, taking your heels off, getting back home, just like and being real about what it’s like having two kids. Like you’re in heels changing diapers, kids peeing all over you. Um but like I would say it it took like 10 years for people to kind of I’ve never had, you know, this persona or this video pop off and go viral and then everyone knows who I am. Like I’ve never had that moment. It’s just been like very gradual of but I but I totally feel what you’re saying. Like I I still go through those times where I’m like, okay, who am I? Like what do what’s my identity? Like what do and I I do feel like there are some bloggers out there that are so good at like, okay, when you think of Chick-fil-A, you think of this one person. Or when you think of like this one brand, you think of it. Yeah. Dude, that should have been mine. Chick-fil-A. You’re a genius. You’ve been in front of me the whole time. Yeah, and it’s like and so I do try to find those things that like, okay, when in Dallas, when people go here, like are they going to what brands are they thinking of when they think of Danny? You know, but it it’s it’s challenging because also like I’m very, you know, one day I want to be doing this, one day I like to like kind of shift and be on my toes and so What do you think people get wrong when they try to build a following? Not like the people who are just obviously bad, but let’s say people who have the potential where it could be working out. What do you think are the mistakes that those people make that like They’re trying to be perfect all the time. And it’s so unrelatable. I think like one of the biggest reasons that like people can relate is because we have made so many mistakes and we share them and like there’s times when we get online and we’re like, man, that was bad. We should have done that. Like there was an example, a small example, but I was uh cutting up like fruit for my daughter Stella’s lunch and I’m cutting the grapes wrong, you know, like where they can choke on grapes and like had no idea. Like my mom never cut my grapes. So like I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong, but you know, like the DMs start flooding and the Facebook groups are popping off. Danny’s like cutting the grapes wrong. Are you trying to kill your kid? Yeah. Yeah. Like you’re influencing all these moms to cut grapes wrong and I’m like, oh my gosh, I didn’t know. Like so, you know, you get on and you’re like, guys, I’m so sorry. Like I made a mistake. Let me like teach you the right way to to cut grapes instead of like deleting the content and being embarrassed about it. And so it’s like I think you cut them wrong the second time, too. I did. I did. I did. Um, but yeah, so I just feel like I have a lot of girlfriends like in Dallas that are, you know, trying to do something similar and they’re trying so hard to just be perfect all the time. And it’s not really It’s a sense of about You said the word relatable. I think that’s a key uh key thing. Like we had the comedian Hassan Minhaj, I don’t know if you know him. He’s like uh he’s on Netflix and stuff like that. He came on and um and I was asking him something about because we do this like we’re doing these live podcasts now sometimes. So we’re doing one this Saturday here in Austin. And so I had asked him, I was like, hey, I’m going on stage, kind of like stand-up comedy. There’s going to be whatever like thousand people in the audience. How do I, you know, any what what would you say like first five minutes? How can I set a good tone here? And he goes, um, he gave me two pieces of advice. He goes, first, make it clear that you are there. So he’s like, talk about the room, talk about the person in the front row, talk about, you know, the city that you’re in and like what it’s been like for you to be there. Like just make it clear like give them the fact that you’re there and everybody will be present together when you do that. And he goes, the second thing is uh low status. I go, low status? He goes, yeah, like people make this mistake a lot that they try to be high status. They’re like, Yeah. Uh, I want your approval, so I’m going to present a version of myself that is high status. Mhm. When in actuality, the way people relate to you and like you is doing something low status. So making fun of yourself, showing a weakness, being vulnerable, saying something that’s makes you look bad, not great, or like embarrassing to you. And so he’s like, you know, comedy is actually a low status art form, not like not high status, which is what you’re like if you go to a conference, you go on stage, uh it’s typically going to be all high status stuff. People trying to say things that show how important they are and how smart they are and their resume and all that. He’s like, that’s not how people relate to you. And so what you’re saying kind of reminds me of that is like a uh doing things that are showing the the showing some of the flaws almost not just because they’re there, but like it actually helps. It actually builds that relatability. I know, I I I agree. I mean, I feel like the times that we connect with our audience the most is like in those goofy times when I’m running around with no pants on and like we’re like, oh, I relate. Same thing, you know. I think there’s like a there’s like a pushback on like A-list celebrities even towards influencers because it’s like I don’t understand like this is not relevant to my life at all what the Kardashians are doing in the private jets and all this stuff. And like I think that that’s where people feel at home, you know, it’s it’s very stripped down. Yeah, yeah, it’s a lot more authentic. It’s kind of like follow follow my day. And so you uh you’ve done that and now you also launched Divi. Yes. And it’s because that’s kind of how we when we initially found you guys, I read this thread. I read the a Twitter thread. Somebody else somebody else had written about this. And they named five or six creators I never heard of that had businesses that were really big. I was like, Divi, uh it’s a, you know, this sort of like hair care product, whatever, and it was doing 40 million or something in revenue. I I don’t remember what the exact numbers were. But I remember being like, wow, that’s like really significant and so cool. Like I never really like I never heard of that. You hear the same three or four examples all the time when it comes to like like Logan Paul and Prime and Mr. Beast and whatever. Like especially in the tech world, we kind hear the same, we’re not like as deep in, so you only hear the hear the same, you know, three or four examples every single time. So how did that come about? How’d you when did you decide to instead of posting for other people, like let’s create our own brand and how’d you pick the product? How did you like how’d you have the confidence to go for it? Yeah. So, um, there was definitely an era on Instagram where everything was perfect. You know, it’s like back in the day of like posting the perfect selfie or the perfect like latte art, whatever it was. Um, and so I definitely played that game and it gets very exhausting. After a while, I started actually losing my hair when I was in college, whenever I was at UT. First, it started with like just me being so stressed out because I’m at UT, I’m flying to LA every weekend, I’m posting on these videos, I have like Neutrogena’s like, where is the brand deal? And I have like four exams the next day. So I’m stressed out all the time. Started pulling my hair. Then I get hair extensions to try to like cover that up. That makes it worse. Then I bleach my hair, that makes it worse. When we get married, I think like a year in, I look in the mirror and I’m like, I literally have no more hair. I was like, I didn’t even want to leave the house anymore. So Jordan This is a dumb I mean, are we talking a couple strands of hair? What are we talking about? Yeah, no, I mean like bald spots. Like Patches. Like patches of hair. I mean And it was stress driven? Stress driven and then hair extensions, so that’s probably like more traction alopecia. So what happens when you put hair extensions in, like your hair can’t withstand that weight and instead of just losing hair where the hair extension is, with traction alopecia, you actually lose hair like around that whole surrounding area. I see. So it was like multiple bald spots like all over. So Jordan, of course, my husband, he’s like, wait, I don’t get it. Like why don’t you just get a wig? All the Kardashians wear wigs. What’s what’s wrong with that? So he takes me to a wig shop in Dallas, like the first place he Googles. We walk in, it’s like a Halloween store. Like the most expensive wig is like playing called $40. It’s like bright neon yellow. I’m like, I don’t know if this is going to work. You’re like classic wigs. They’re like the most expensive one is like 15 bucks. So I leave there like so defeated. I’m like, I’m always going to be bald, you know. So we actually um learned about this like wig shop in Los Angeles called the wig shop actually. Yeah. Uh from Jeffrey Star. Yeah, that’s what I was going to say. Jeffrey Star. Jeffrey Star, who is another YouTuber. Anyway, long story short, we fly out there, find my first wig. I’m in wigs for a year and actually when I first got my first wig, I didn’t tell anybody because I was so embarrassed. I was like We actually took a trip to Chicago with my parents and my sister-in-law and my brother and we didn’t tell them the entire time. They go, oh, nice haircut. You know, like they had no idea. I mean, these things can look so real now. It’s it’s insane. So about a month into wearing it, I just felt like a fraud. I was like, I got to tell people. I feel like I’m probably not the only female going through something like this. I think that like people will appreciate it and hopefully they’ll be cool with it. So I shared that I was wearing wigs and it kind of just opened up this door of like all these females that are kind of going through the same thing, like this like hidden epidemic of hair loss. Um, so Yeah, my wife all the time after uh after we had our first baby, I think there’s like a a known kind of like postpartum Yeah. like issue with with hair loss. And so she was talking about it all the time and I was like, I was like, what do you mean? Like it’s nothing, don’t worry about it. She’s like, no, look at this. And these like baby hair, whatever. And it really bothered her and I I didn’t even think really even to to try like what what what a solution look like. So Yeah, I mean it’s it can be very emotional like especially for females. Um, because there just weren’t a lot of people talking about it. So, um, long story short, I took the year and wore wigs and I was like, you know what, I’m just going to focus on my scalp health. I’m going to focus on my wellness. Um, and really like give this thing like 100%. So, meanwhile, there was actually this trend um, or I guess a hack online where a lot of women were using Monistat to grow their hair back, which is so strange. But the reason that was working is because it has a lot of like anti-fungal properties. What’s Monistat? You got to tell Sean, Danny, you got to tell him. You should know about it. No, you shouldn’t know about it, but Is it a good thing that I don’t know what that is? This is good clickbait. Tell him. Okay, so all the guys on the podcast would be like, what the By the way, we always joke, we always joke that we have four female listeners. Hopefully that’ll change after this episode. Four people listeners, we’re all like dying inside laughing right now. They’re like putting their hands on their face right now. So Monistat is what people what females use for yeast infection. Okay, gotcha. Who And so a lot of women were using this on their scalp though and it’s helping their hair grow. And people are taking before and after pictures and it’s like insane. So the reason that’s working is because it has these anti-fungal properties in it, which nowadays, you know, they always tell you don’t wash your hair, it’s not good for you. So a lot of females are using um dry shampoo. And so they’re putting all of this dry shampoo, all this product that’s just like sitting on your scalp, blocking your follicle and so your hair doesn’t really have like a fair chance of growing. So when they were using Monistat, you know, it’s kind of like detoxifying, it’s getting rid of all that product build up and your hair is growing. So the only thing with that is you shouldn’t be using it long-term. It’s just like has a lot of harmful things in it. So my goal was to find a more natural way to essentially accomplish the same thing. So I would like get into my bathroom and I studied bio at the University of Texas. I was going to So did I. They don’t teach you anything. I learned photosynthesis for like seven years. They don’t teach you anything about the human body. Exactly. She can hang with the chemist. I can hang now. She can hang. She’s like, okay, I remember that. I kind of I kind of get it, but It’s amazing how much you learn when you really need to learn versus like my major. Now I wish I really would have paid attention because I think it really would have benefited me, but You would have known. Anyways, so um, so you know, I’m like a little chemist in my in my bathroom and I’m getting all these ingredients from online, whole foods, all over the place and just making my own scalp serums and I would, you know, share on YouTube like this is how I make it, this is where you order this and then mix it this way and and then people started asking, they’re like, hey, can you just like ship it to me? Right. And so I go to Jordan, I’m like, I really think this could be a thing. A lot of people when was this like a couple years ago? This was a 2019 Uh no, they probably yeah, 2019. 2019. Um, and so that’s kind of like where the idea originated from. And it was totally clean. So it’s something that people could use every day and not feel like it’s going to be harmful. So we had a lot of like eucalyptus, uh natural ingredients, jojoba oil. Um, but there were a lot of things I wanted to put in it that I just didn’t have access to. So long story short, found partners, found a great chemist and then came out with our first product, which was a scalp serum and to be honest, I did not think that it would pop off at all. I really was just like, I want to serve my audience. I’ve been very like service driven with all of my content. I’m like, I just really want to serve people because I feel like if I serve them, they’ll come back. So that was really just like the heart behind it. But what happened was a lot of people were buying it for like their day were down the street or their mom or their husband and people started taking like before and after pictures and it’s like insane. We never asked for before and after pictures, but I feel like that’s kind of what made it blow up was people That’s marketing there is, right? A before and after. Yes. People started sending in their before and afters and like, so then I would start sharing them, you know, left and right. And I mean, every day I’m probably tagged in like 15 before and afters, even to this day. So were there not scalp serums before that? Or they were, but they just weren’t You know, I think it was just such a new like a niche like, you know, putting something on your scalp, like a skin care routine, like creating that scalp routine was very new. People weren’t really thinking about it. So I’m sure that there were scalp serums out there, um, but I don’t think people were educated about like how to use them or why they were important. Um, so our biggest thing is just like if you’re taking care of your skin, like you should be taking care of your scalp. It’s kind of like an extension of, you know. And so, um, so I think once people kind of understood how to use it, then they went to Divi first because we’re also one of the only like clean scalp serums out there. Gotcha. So the business launches when? 2020. 2020. Uh, 2021. 2021. October 2021. So we’re not even two full years in, you know, and it’s exploded. So I don’t know how much you guys typically share. Do you guys share revenue stuff or not really? Yeah, I mean, like our first like full year, I think you already shared it. Well, you said 20, it was 40, but uh, yeah, we did about $40 million and then, um, you know, this year we’re on track to do 30%, 35% growth. Yeah. Um, it’s it’s crazy. And that’s mostly from kind of the power of your community or that’s that plus a bunch of other marketing that you have to do or how how does the business grow? I mean, how much do we see? That probably exceeded your expectations. I mean, that would exceed anyone’s expectations. Yeah, I always say like when we launched the product, we thought that we were launching it for like 10% of Danny’s audience. Like we were like, hey, these people need to be served. Danny, you know, acquired this audience, they want a resource and it just grew so far beyond that. And a lot of people think that, you know, Divi, um, is all Danny’s audience that’s buying it and, you know, she’s only made up about 15% of the overall revenue. And so it was just a product that I think took off and worked. It was just right place, right time. It was like during the era of the skinification of the scalp is like what the beauty gurus call it. And so I missed that whole era. Yeah, you missed the era. Well, it’s here. It’s now. I don’t have a skin care routine either. So I I didn’t catch up. I need to start with skin, move to scalp. I gave you two boxes. Yeah, I know. You’re you’re in it now. Um, and so yeah, it’s it’s just been wild. I mean, we we never expected early. And so did you guys look at like other creator led businesses? Like who was an inspiration that you’re like, oh, you know, if we do this well, this could be like, you know, whatever, um, Skims or this could be like the Kylie’s Kylie’s lip thing or whatever. Yeah. I mean, we’ve always admired the Kardashians in a business sense. Like how they’ve how they’ve like used their reality TV to grow all these businesses and like we one thing we love about them is like how they all support each other. It’s like a an ecosystem. Like you’re using, you know, Kylie’s makeup and then you’re wearing Kim’s Skims and so we always love that aspect of what they do. But I mean, in terms of like our inspiration, to be honest, everyone in our space was just launching clothing lines. Um, so it was totally different. Yeah, it was very, very different. Were you tempted to do that too? 100%. Jordan was like, please don’t. Please don’t. The returns are insane. My parents, my dad actually has a showroom at the uh Dallas World uh Trade Center in Dallas. So he, um, you know, sells wholesale to all, you know, Nordstrom, all these boutiques. My dad always told me, he’s like, the one thing I ask you is, please don’t get in the fashion industry. It’s just it’s it’s a lot. And so, um, but one thing I knew that I wanted if I ever did launch a business is that I wanted to have something that could be on subscription. And so a lot of my ideas were mainly tech at first. Um, I never really thought of like Tech like what? Like what would it be? Uh, you know, some service that you could get. I had I honestly didn’t have like a a what Like you We had the Sassy Club. There was like one Yeah, there was one time where she like wanted to launch her own app because she felt like, you know, she could build a better community like through a different platform than Instagram and and and and we tried it. We called it, what did you call it? The Sassy Club. The Sassy Club at the time and it was like we used this uh this third party app system and we drove a large part of our community to it and we tried to do like more the whole concept was like, let’s meet in real life with our audience. And so it was like we do meetups and stuff like that and that was just really hard. It was kind of like a Bumble. Right. Yeah, it was kind of like a Bumble. And so we tried that, you know, it it was pretty difficult and then It was it was difficult to manage like the in-face interactions. Right. Yeah. Now let me ask you a question. I just hired a guy, paid a guy $5,000 to do a couple of like one-on-one like workshops with me. And it was all about this idea of personal branding. Which honestly, a pretty lame phrase in general. Like I cringed that I even did all this, but I’m putting it out there in the spirit of authenticity. So I paid this guy. Why did I pay this guy? Well, this podcast itself has gotten pretty popular. But uh I’ve always had this problem which was just like um you see some people and their brand is so clear. It’s like uh there’s this guy who this guy named Pomp and Pomp is all about Bitcoin. He’s the Bitcoin guy. Like you know him about you know him because of Bitcoin. He talks about Bitcoin. Everything he loves, you know, every fourth word needs to be Bitcoin. Yep. And then you have like um Tim Ferris who’s uh you know, the four-hour work week guy or the four-hour body, four-hour chef. He’s the four-hour guy. He’s all about kind of life hacking your way there. And so you you go down the list and a lot of people who have built good online followings, they have a clear kind of like they’re the blank guy or they’re the blank gal, whatever. Like that that’s what they’re known for. And for me, I’ve always been like, well, I don’t know, the business business guy. I don’t know that sounds very like specific or focused. And I was like, oh, I’ve gotten pretty far without that, but maybe I maybe somebody can help me kind of sharpen this. So this guy who I hired, he works with like, you know, like Jay Shetty and like um a bunch of people who are like that, like uh the guy who did the Quest bar thing, Tom whatever Bill you. Um and he’s like, yeah, you know, like Jay Shetty, his story is he was like kind of like in and out of trouble, then decided to go be a monk and he was a monk and then he like got kicked out of the monastery because a monk came to him and was like, you know, you like something bigger in store for you. So he decided to make his life mission to bring ancient monk wisdom in a modern way to the world or whatever. I I butchered I butchered that, but something like that. Right. He’s consistent, man. Right. He’s doing it every day. I just knew I was like the blue-eyed Indian guy. Like, you know, that’s what stood out to me. Like the guy’s got clear green eyes. Yeah. But I was like, okay, I see how I see the value in if you really kind of like sharpen this like whatever your brand is all about. But then I’ve met people who are maybe like you who um you probably never hired a consultant or like did a brand workshop or like sat down with a piece of paper and like tried to architect it. It seems like it kind of happened organically and naturally for you. So I I have two questions for you. One, do you think you have like a focus like that, like the blank you you are the, you know, just like the Bitcoin guy. Do you have like a thing that’s like our brand is is about this word or these three words or whatever. Do you have something like that? Um, so when I started going through my hair loss, I think it was the first time that I kind of felt like I had that thing. Like I was kind of like the wig influencer for a while and then kind of like the hair loss influencer. I mean, as cliché as it sounds, I feel like like I think our biggest thing is we’ve always just been very authentic and like goofy. Um and we’ve kind of I feel like what we’ve done is figured out how to collide those worlds of like being professional but also getting, you know, taking your heels off, getting back home, just like and being real about what it’s like having two kids. Like you’re in heels changing diapers, kids peeing all over you. Um but like I would say it it took like 10 years for people to kind of I’ve never had, you know, this persona or this video pop off and go viral and then everyone knows who I am. Like I’ve never had that moment. It’s just been like very gradual of but I but I totally feel what you’re saying. Like I I still go through those times where I’m like, okay, who am I? Like what do what’s my identity? Like what do and I I do feel like there are some bloggers out there that are so good at like, okay, when you think of Chick-fil-A, you think of this one person. Or when you think of like this one brand, you think of it. Yeah. Dude, that should have been mine. Chick-fil-A. You’re a genius. You’ve been in front of me the whole time. Yeah, and it’s like and so I do try to find those things that like, okay, when in Dallas, when people go here, like are they going to what brands are they thinking of when they think of Danny? You know, but it it’s it’s challenging because also like I’m very, you know, one day I want to be doing this, one day I like to like kind of shift and be on my toes and so What do you think people get wrong when they try to build a following? Not like the people who are just obviously bad, but let’s say people who have the potential where it could be working out. What do you think are the mistakes that those people make that like They’re trying to be perfect all the time. And it’s so unrelatable. I think like one of the biggest reasons that like people can relate is because we have made so many mistakes and we share them and like there’s times when we get online and we’re like, man, that was bad. We should have done that. Like there was an example, a small example, but I was uh cutting up like fruit for my daughter Stella’s lunch and I’m cutting the grapes wrong, you know, like where they can choke on grapes and like had no idea. Like my mom never cut my grapes. So like I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong, but you know, like the DMs start flooding and the Facebook groups are popping off. Danny’s like cutting the grapes wrong. Are you trying to kill your kid? Yeah. Yeah. Like you’re influencing all these moms to cut grapes wrong and I’m like, oh my gosh, I didn’t know. Like so, you know, you get on and you’re like, guys, I’m so sorry. Like I made a mistake. Let me like teach you the right way to to cut grapes instead of like deleting the content and being embarrassed about it. And so it’s like I think you cut them wrong the second time, too. I did. I did. I did. Um, but yeah, so I just feel like I have a lot of girlfriends like in Dallas that are, you know, trying to do something similar and they’re trying so hard to just be perfect all the time. And it’s not really It’s a sense of about You said the word relatable. I think that’s a key uh key thing. Like we had the comedian Hassan Minhaj, I don’t know if you know him. He’s like uh he’s on Netflix and stuff like that. He came on and um and I was asking him something about because we do this like we’re doing these live podcasts now sometimes. So we’re doing one this Saturday here in Austin. And so I had asked him, I was like, hey, I’m going on stage, kind of like stand-up comedy. There’s going to be whatever like thousand people in the audience. How do I, you know, any what what would you say like first five minutes? How can I set a good tone here? And he goes, um, he gave me two pieces of advice. He goes, first, make it clear that you are there. So he’s like, talk about the room, talk about the person in the front row, talk about, you know, the city that you’re in and like what it’s been like for you to be there. Like just make it clear like give them the fact that you’re there and everybody will be present together when you do that. And he goes, the second thing is uh low status. I go, low status? He goes, yeah, like people make this mistake a lot that they try to be high status. They’re like, Yeah. Uh, I want your approval, so I’m going to present a version of myself that is high status. Mhm. When in actuality, the way people relate to you and like you is doing something low status. So making fun of yourself, showing a weakness, being vulnerable, saying something that’s makes you look bad, not great, or like embarrassing to you. And so he’s like, you know, comedy is actually a low status art form, not like not high status, which is what you’re like if you go to a conference, you go on stage, uh it’s typically going to be all high status stuff. People trying to say things that show how important they are and how smart they are and their resume and all that. He’s like, that’s not how people relate to you. And so what you’re saying kind of reminds me of that is like a uh doing things that are showing the the showing some of the flaws almost not just because they’re there, but like it actually helps. It actually builds that relatability. I know, I I I agree. I mean, I feel like the times that we connect with our audience the most is like in those goofy times when I’m running around with no pants on and like we’re like, oh, I relate. Same thing, you know. I think there’s like a there’s like a pushback on like A-list celebrities even towards influencers because it’s like I don’t understand like this is not relevant to my life at all what the Kardashians are doing in the private jets and all this stuff. And like I think that that’s where people feel at home, you know, it’s it’s very stripped down. Yeah, yeah, it’s a lot more authentic. It’s kind of like follow follow my day. And so you uh you’ve done that and now you also launched Divi. Yes. And it’s because that’s kind of how we when we initially found you guys, I read this thread. I read the a Twitter thread. Somebody else somebody else had written about this. And they named five or six creators I never heard of that had businesses that were really big. I was like, Divi, uh it’s a, you know, this sort of like hair care product, whatever, and it was doing 40 million or something in revenue. I I don’t remember what the exact numbers were. But I remember being like, wow, that’s like really significant and so cool. Like I never really like I never heard of that. You hear the same three or four examples all the time when it comes to like like Logan Paul and Prime and Mr. Beast and whatever. Like especially in the tech world, we kind hear the same, we’re not like as deep in, so you only hear the hear the same, you know, three or four examples every single time. So how did that come about? How’d you when did you decide to instead of posting for other people, like let’s create our own brand and how’d you pick the product? How did you like how’d you have the confidence to go for it? Yeah. So, um, there was definitely an era on Instagram where everything was perfect. You know, it’s like back in the day of like posting the perfect selfie or the perfect like latte art, whatever it was. Um, and so I definitely played that game and it gets very exhausting. After a while, I started actually losing my hair when I was in college, whenever I was at UT. First, it started with like just me being so stressed out because I’m at UT, I’m flying to LA every weekend, I’m posting on these videos, I have like Neutrogena’s like, where is the brand deal? And I have like four exams the next day. So I’m stressed out all the time. Started pulling my hair. Then I get hair extensions to try to like cover that up. That makes it worse. Then I bleach my hair, that makes it worse. When we get married, I think like a year in, I look in the mirror and I’m like, I literally have no more hair. I was like, I didn’t even want to leave the house anymore. So Jordan This is a dumb I mean, are we talking a couple strands of hair? What are we talking about? Yeah, no, I mean like bald spots. Like Patches. Like patches of hair. I mean And it was stress driven? Stress driven and then hair extensions, so that’s probably like more traction alopecia. So what happens when you put hair extensions in, like your hair can’t withstand that weight and instead of just losing hair where the hair extension is, with traction alopecia, you actually lose hair like around that whole surrounding area. I see. So it was like multiple bald spots like all over. So Jordan, of course, my husband, he’s like, wait, I don’t get it. Like why don’t you just get a wig? All the Kardashians wear wigs. What’s what’s wrong with that? So he takes me to a wig shop in Dallas, like the first place he Googles. We walk in, it’s like a Halloween store. Like the most expensive wig is like playing called $40. It’s like bright neon yellow. I’m like, I don’t know if this is going to work. You’re like classic wigs. They’re like the most expensive one is like 15 bucks. So I leave there like so defeated. I’m like, I’m always going to be bald, you know. So we actually um learned about this like wig shop in Los Angeles called the wig shop actually. Yeah. Uh from Jeffrey Star. Yeah, that’s what I was going to say. Jeffrey Star. Jeffrey Star, who is another YouTuber. Anyway, long story short, we fly out there, find my first wig. I’m in wigs for a year and actually when I first got my first wig, I didn’t tell anybody because I was so embarrassed. I was like We actually took a trip to Chicago with my parents and my sister-in-law and my brother and we didn’t tell them the entire time. They go, oh, nice haircut. You know, like they had no idea. I mean, these things can look so real now. It’s it’s insane. So about a month into wearing it, I just felt like a fraud. I was like, I got to tell people. I feel like I’m probably not the only female going through something like this. I think that like people will appreciate it and hopefully they’ll be cool with it. So I shared that I was wearing wigs and it kind of just opened up this door of like all these females that are kind of going through the same thing, like this like hidden epidemic of hair loss. Um, so Yeah, my wife all the time after uh after we had our first baby, I think there’s like a a known kind of like postpartum Yeah. like issue with with hair loss. And so she was talking about it all the time and I was like, I was like, what do you mean? Like it’s nothing, don’t worry about it. She’s like, no, look at this. And these like baby hair, whatever. And it really bothered her and I I didn’t even think really even to to try like what what what a solution look like. So Yeah, I mean it’s it can be very emotional like especially for females. Um, because there just weren’t a lot of people talking about it. So, um, long story short, I took the year and wore wigs and I was like, you know what, I’m just going to focus on my scalp health. I’m going to focus on my wellness. Um, and really like give this thing like 100%. So, meanwhile, there was actually this trend um, or I guess a hack online where a lot of women were using Monistat to grow their hair back, which is so strange. But the reason that was working is because it has a lot of like anti-fungal properties. What’s Monistat? You got to tell Sean, Danny, you got to tell him. You should know about it. No, you shouldn’t know about it, but Is it a good thing that I don’t know what that is? This is good clickbait. Tell him. Okay, so all the guys on the podcast would be like, what the By the way, we always joke, we always joke that we have four female listeners. Hopefully that’ll change after this episode. Four people listeners, we’re all like dying inside laughing right now. They’re like putting their hands on their face right now. So Monistat is what people what females use for yeast infection. Okay, gotcha. Who And so a lot of women were using this on their scalp though and it’s helping their hair grow. And people are taking before and after pictures and it’s like insane. So the reason that’s working is because it has these anti-fungal properties in it, which nowadays, you know, they always tell you don’t wash your hair, it’s not good for you. So a lot of females are using um dry shampoo. And so they’re putting all of this dry shampoo, all this product that’s just like sitting on your scalp, blocking your follicle and so your hair doesn’t really have like a fair chance of growing. So when they were using Monistat, you know, it’s kind of like detoxifying, it’s getting rid of all that product build up and your hair is growing. So the only thing with that is you shouldn’t be using it long-term. It’s just like has a lot of harmful things in it. So my goal was to find a more natural way to essentially accomplish the same thing. So I would like get into my bathroom and I studied bio at the University of Texas. I was going to So did I. They don’t teach you anything. I learned photosynthesis for like seven years. They don’t teach you anything about the human body. Exactly. She can hang with the chemist. I can hang now. She can hang. She’s like, okay, I remember that. I kind of I kind of get it, but It’s amazing how much you learn when you really need to learn versus like my major. Now I wish I really would have paid attention because I think it really would have benefited me, but You would have known. Anyways, so um, so you know, I’m like a little chemist in my in my bathroom and I’m getting all these ingredients from online, whole foods, all over the place and just making my own scalp serums and I would, you know, share on YouTube like this is how I make it, this is where you order this and then mix it this way and and then people started asking, they’re like, hey, can you just like ship it to me? Right. And so I go to Jordan, I’m like, I really think this could be a thing. A lot of people when was this like a couple years ago? This was a 2019 Uh no, they probably yeah, 2019. 2019. Um, and so that’s kind of like where the idea originated from. And it was totally clean. So it’s something that people could use every day and not feel like it’s going to be harmful. So we had a lot of like eucalyptus, uh natural ingredients, jojoba oil. Um, but there were a lot of things I wanted to put in it that I just didn’t have access to. So long story short, found partners, found a great chemist and then came out with our first product, which was a scalp serum and to be honest, I did not think that it would pop off at all. I really was just like, I want to serve my audience. I’ve been very like service driven with all of my content. I’m like, I just really want to serve people because I feel like if I serve them, they’ll come back. So that was really just like the heart behind it. But what happened was a lot of people were buying it for like their day were down the street or their mom or their husband and people started taking like before and after pictures and it’s like insane. We never asked for before and after pictures, but I feel like that’s kind of what made it blow up was people That’s marketing there is, right? A before and after. Yes. People started sending in their before and afters and like, so then I would start sharing them, you know, left and right. And I mean, every day I’m probably tagged in like 15 before and afters, even to this day. So were there not scalp serums before that? Or they were, but they just weren’t You know, I think it was just such a new like a niche like, you know, putting something on your scalp, like a skin care routine, like creating that scalp routine was very new. People weren’t really thinking about it. So I’m sure that there were scalp serums out there, um, but I don’t think people were educated about like how to use them or why they were important. Um, so our biggest thing is just like if you’re taking care of your skin, like you should be taking care of your scalp. It’s kind of like an extension of, you know. And so, um, so I think once people kind of understood how to use it, then they went to Divi first because we’re also one of the only like clean scalp serums out there. Gotcha. So the business launches when? 2020. 2020. Uh, 2021. 2021. October 2021. So we’re not even two full years in, you know, and it’s exploded. So I don’t know how much you guys typically share. Do you guys share revenue stuff or not really? Yeah, I mean, like our first like full year, I think you already shared it. Well, you said 20, it was 40, but uh, yeah, we did about $40 million and then, um, you know, this year we’re on track to do 30%, 35% growth. Yeah. Um, it’s it’s crazy. And that’s mostly from kind of the power of your community or that’s that plus a bunch of other marketing that you have to do or how how does the business grow? I mean, how much do we see? That probably exceeded your expectations. I mean, that would exceed anyone’s expectations. Yeah, I always say like when we launched the product, we thought that we were launching it for like 10% of Danny’s audience. Like we were like, hey, these people need to be served. Danny, you know, acquired this audience, they want a resource and it just grew so far beyond that. And a lot of people think that, you know, Divi, um, is all Danny’s audience that’s buying it and, you know, she’s only made up about 15% of the overall revenue. And so it was just a product that I think took off and worked. It was just right place, right time. It was like during the era of the skinification of the scalp is like what the beauty gurus call it. And so I missed that whole era. Yeah, you missed the era. Well, it’s here. It’s now. I don’t have a skin care routine either. So I I didn’t catch up. I need to start with skin, move to scalp. I gave you two boxes. Yeah, I know. You’re you’re in it now. Um, and so yeah, it’s it’s just been wild. I mean, we we never expected early. And so did you guys look at like other creator led businesses? Like who was an inspiration that you’re like, oh, you know, if we do this well, this could be like, you know, whatever, um, Skims or this could be like the Kylie’s Kylie’s lip thing or whatever. Yeah. I mean, we’ve always admired the Kardashians in a business sense. Like how they’ve how they’ve like used their reality TV to grow all these businesses and like we one thing we love about them is like how they all support each other. It’s like a an ecosystem. Like you’re using, you know, Kylie’s makeup and then you’re wearing Kim’s Skims and so we always love that aspect of what they do. But I mean, in terms of like our inspiration, to be honest, everyone in our space was just launching clothing lines. Um, so it was totally different. Yeah, it was very, very different. Were you tempted to do that too? 100%. Jordan was like, please don’t. Please don’t. The returns are insane. My parents, my dad actually has a showroom at the uh Dallas World uh Trade Center in Dallas. So he, um, you know, sells wholesale to all, you know, Nordstrom, all these boutiques. My dad always told me, he’s like, the one thing I ask you is, please don’t get in the fashion industry. It’s just it’s it’s a lot. And so, um, but one thing I knew that I wanted if I ever did launch a business is that I wanted to have something that could be on subscription. And so a lot of my ideas were mainly tech at first. Um, I never really thought of like Tech like what? Like what would it be? Uh, you know, some service that you could get. I had I honestly didn’t have like a a what Like you We had the Sassy Club. There was like one Yeah, there was one time where she like wanted to launch her own app because she felt like, you know, she could build a better community like through a different platform than Instagram and and and and we tried it. We called it, what did you call it? The Sassy Club. The Sassy Club at the time and it was like we used this uh this third party app system and we drove a large part of our community to it and we tried to do like more the whole concept was like, let’s meet in real life with our audience. And so it was like we do meetups and stuff like that and that was just really hard. It was kind of like a Bumble. Right. Yeah, it was kind of like a Bumble. And so we tried that, you know, it it was pretty difficult and then It was it was difficult to manage like the in-face interactions. Right. Yeah. Now let me ask you a question. I just hired a guy, paid a guy $5,000 to do a couple of like one-on-one like workshops with me. And it was all about this idea of personal branding. Which honestly, a pretty lame phrase in general. Like I cringed that I even did all this, but I’m putting it out there in the spirit of authenticity. So I paid this guy. Why did I pay this guy? Well, this podcast itself has gotten pretty popular. But uh I’ve always had this problem which was just like um you see some people and their brand is so clear. It’s like uh there’s this guy who this guy named Pomp and Pomp is all about Bitcoin. He’s the Bitcoin guy. Like you know him about you know him because of Bitcoin. He talks about Bitcoin. Everything he loves, you know, every fourth word needs to be Bitcoin. Yep. And then you have like um Tim Ferris who’s uh you know, the four-hour work week guy or the four-hour body, four-hour chef. He’s the four-hour guy. He’s all about kind of life hacking your way there. And so you you go down the list and a lot of people who have built good online followings, they have a clear kind of like they’re the blank guy or they’re the blank gal, whatever. Like that that’s what they’re known for. And for me, I’ve always been like, well, I don’t know, the business business guy. I don’t know that sounds very like specific or focused. And I was like, oh, I’ve gotten pretty far without that, but maybe I maybe somebody can help me kind of sharpen this. So this guy who I hired, he works with like, you know, like Jay Shetty and like um a bunch of people who are like that, like uh the guy who did the Quest bar thing, Tom whatever Bill you. Um and he’s like, yeah, you know, like Jay Shetty, his story is he was like kind of like in and out of trouble, then decided to go be a monk and he was a monk and then he like got kicked out of the monastery because a monk came to him and was like, you know, you like something bigger in store for you. So he decided to make his life mission to bring ancient monk wisdom in a modern way to the world or whatever. I I butchered I butchered that, but something like that. Right. He’s consistent, man. Right. He’s doing it every day. I just knew I was like the blue-eyed Indian guy. Like, you know, that’s what stood out to me. Like the guy’s got clear green eyes. Yeah. But I was like, okay, I see how I see the value in if you really kind of like sharpen this like whatever your brand is all about. But then I’ve met people who are maybe like you who um you probably never hired a consultant or like did a brand workshop or like sat down with a piece of paper and like tried to architect it. It seems like it kind of happened organically and naturally for you. So I I have two questions for you. One, do you think you have like a focus like that, like the blank you you are the, you know, just like the Bitcoin guy. Do you have like a thing that’s like our brand is is about this word or these three words or whatever. Do you have something like that? Um, so when I started going through my hair loss, I think it was the first time that I kind of felt like I had that thing. Like I was kind of like the wig influencer for a while and then kind of like the hair loss influencer. I mean, as cliché as it sounds, I feel like like I think our biggest thing is we’ve always just been very authentic and like goofy. Um and we’ve kind of I feel like what we’ve done is figured out how to collide those worlds of like being professional but also getting, you know, taking your heels off, getting back home, just like and being real about what it’s like having two kids. Like you’re in heels changing diapers, kids peeing all over you. Um but like I would say it it took like 10 years for people to kind of I’ve never had, you know, this persona or this video pop off and go viral and then everyone knows who I am. Like I’ve never had that moment. It’s just been like very gradual of but I but I totally feel what you’re saying. Like I I still go through those times where I’m like, okay, who am I? Like what do what’s my identity? Like what do and I I do feel like there are some bloggers out there that are so good at like, okay, when you think of Chick-fil-A, you think of this one person. Or when you think of like this one brand, you think of it. Yeah. Dude, that should have been mine. Chick-fil-A. You’re a genius. You’ve been in front of me the whole time. Yeah, and it’s like and so I do try to find those things that like, okay, when in Dallas, when people go here, like are they going to what brands are they thinking of when they think of Danny? You know, but it it’s it’s challenging because also like I’m very, you know, one day I want to be doing this, one day I like to like kind of shift and be on my toes and so What do you think people get wrong when they try to build a following? Not like the people who are just obviously bad, but let’s say people who have the potential where it could be working out. What do you think are the mistakes that those people make that like They’re trying to be perfect all the time. And it’s so unrelatable. I think like one of the biggest reasons that like people can relate is because we have made so many mistakes and we share them and like there’s times when we get online and we’re like, man, that was bad. We should have done that. Like there was an example, a small example, but I was uh cutting up like fruit for my daughter Stella’s lunch and I’m cutting the grapes wrong, you know, like where they can choke on grapes and like had no idea. Like my mom never cut my grapes. So like I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong, but you know, like the DMs start flooding and the Facebook groups are popping off. Danny’s like cutting the grapes wrong. Are you trying to kill your kid? Yeah. Yeah. Like you’re influencing all these moms to cut grapes wrong and I’m like, oh my gosh, I didn’t know. Like so, you know, you get on and you’re like, guys, I’m so sorry. Like I made a mistake. Let me like teach you the right way to to cut grapes instead of like deleting the content and being embarrassed about it. And so it’s like I think you cut them wrong the second time, too. I did. I did. I did. Um, but yeah, so I just feel like I have a lot of girlfriends like in Dallas that are, you know, trying to do something similar and they’re trying so hard to just be perfect all the time. And it’s not really It’s a sense of about You said the word relatable. I think that’s a key uh key thing. Like we had the comedian Hassan Minhaj, I don’t know if you know him. He’s like uh he’s on Netflix and stuff like that. He came on and um and I was asking him something about because we do this like we’re doing these live podcasts now sometimes. So we’re doing one this Saturday here in Austin. And so I had asked him, I was like, hey, I’m going on stage, kind of like stand-up comedy. There’s going to be whatever like thousand people in the audience. How do I, you know, any what what would you say like first five minutes? How can I set a good tone here? And he goes, um, he gave me two pieces of advice. He goes, first, make it clear that you are there. So he’s like, talk about the room, talk about the person in the front row, talk about, you know, the city that you’re in and like what it’s been like for you to be there. Like just make it clear like give them the fact that you’re there and everybody will be present together when you do that. And he goes, the second thing is uh low status. I go, low status? He goes, yeah, like people make this mistake a lot that they try to be high status. They’re like, Yeah. Uh, I want your approval, so I’m going to present a version of myself that is high status. Mhm. When in actuality, the way people relate to you and like you is doing something low status. So making fun of yourself, showing a weakness, being vulnerable, saying something that’s makes you look bad, not great, or like embarrassing to you. And so he’s like, you know, comedy is actually a low status art form, not like not high status, which is what you’re like if you go to a conference, you go on stage, uh it’s typically going to be all high status stuff. People trying to say things that show how important they are and how smart they are and their resume and all that. He’s like, that’s not how people relate to you. And so what you’re saying kind of reminds me of that is like a uh doing things that are showing the the showing some of the flaws almost not just because they’re there, but like it actually helps. It actually builds that relatability. I know, I I I agree. I mean, I feel like the times that we connect with our audience the most is like in those goofy times when I’m running around with no pants on and like we’re like, oh, I relate. Same thing, you know. I think there’s like a there’s like a pushback on like A-list celebrities even towards influencers because it’s like I don’t understand like this is not relevant to my life at all what the Kardashians are doing in the private jets and all this stuff. And like I think that that’s where people feel at home, you know, it’s it’s very stripped down. Yeah, yeah, it’s a lot more authentic. It’s kind of like follow follow my day. And so you uh you’ve done that and now you also launched Divi. Yes. And it’s because that’s kind of how we when we initially found you guys, I read this thread. I read the a Twitter thread. Somebody else somebody else had written about this. And they named five or six creators I never heard of that had businesses that were really big. I was like, Divi, uh it’s a, you know, this sort of like hair care product, whatever, and it was doing 40 million or something in revenue. I I don’t remember what the exact numbers were. But I remember being like, wow, that’s like really significant and so cool. Like I never really like I never heard of that. You hear the same three or four examples all the time when it comes to like like Logan Paul and Prime and Mr. Beast and whatever. Like especially in the tech world, we kind hear the same, we’re not like as deep in, so you only hear the hear the same, you know, three or four examples every single time. So how did that come about? How’d you when did you decide to instead of posting for other people, like let’s create our own brand and how’d you pick the product? How did you like how’d you have the confidence to go for it? Yeah. So, um, there was definitely an era on Instagram where everything was perfect. You know, it’s like back in the day of like posting the perfect selfie or the perfect like latte art, whatever it was. Um, and so I definitely played that game and it gets very exhausting. After a while, I started actually losing my hair when I was in college, whenever I was at UT. First, it started with like just me being so stressed out because I’m at UT, I’m flying to LA every weekend, I’m posting on these videos, I have like Neutrogena’s like, where is the brand deal? And I have like four exams the next day. So I’m stressed out all the time. Started pulling my hair. Then I get hair extensions to try to like cover that up. That makes it worse. Then I bleach my hair, that makes it worse. When we get married, I think like a year in, I look in the mirror and I’m like, I literally have no more hair. I was like, I didn’t even want to leave the house anymore. So Jordan This is a dumb I mean, are we talking a couple strands of hair? What are we talking about? Yeah, no, I mean like bald spots. Like Patches. Like patches of hair. I mean And it was stress driven? Stress driven and then hair extensions, so that’s probably like more traction alopecia. So what happens when you put hair extensions in, like your hair can’t withstand that weight and instead of just losing hair where the hair extension is, with traction alopecia, you actually lose hair like around that whole surrounding area. I see. So it was like multiple bald spots like all over. So Jordan, of course, my husband, he’s like, wait, I don’t get it. Like why don’t you just get a wig? All the Kardashians wear wigs. What’s what’s wrong with that? So he takes me to a wig shop in Dallas, like the first place he Googles. We walk in, it’s like a Halloween store. Like the most expensive wig is like playing called $40. It’s like bright neon yellow. I’m like, I don’t know if this is going to work. You’re like classic wigs. They’re like the most expensive one is like 15 bucks. So I leave there like so defeated. I’m like, I’m always going to be bald, you know. So we actually um learned about this like wig shop in Los Angeles called the wig shop actually. Yeah. Uh from Jeffrey Star. Yeah, that’s what I was going to say. Jeffrey Star. Jeffrey Star, who is another YouTuber. Anyway, long story short, we fly out there, find my first wig. I’m in wigs for a year and actually when I first got my first wig, I didn’t tell anybody because I was so embarrassed. I was like We actually took a trip to Chicago with my parents and my sister-in-law and my brother and we didn’t tell them the entire time. They go, oh, nice haircut. You know, like they had no idea. I mean, these things can look so real now. It’s it’s insane. So about a month into wearing it, I just felt like a fraud. I was like, I got to tell people. I feel like I’m probably not the only female going through something like this. I think that like people will appreciate it and hopefully they’ll be cool with it. So I shared that I was wearing wigs and it kind of just opened up this door of like all these females that are kind of going through the same thing, like this like hidden epidemic of hair loss. Um, so Yeah, my wife all the time after uh after we had our first baby, I think there’s like a a known kind of like postpartum Yeah. like issue with with hair loss. And so she was talking about it all the time and I was like, I was like, what do you mean? Like it’s nothing, don’t worry about it. She’s like, no, look at this. And these like baby hair, whatever. And it really bothered her and I I didn’t even think really even to to try like what what what a solution look like. So Yeah, I mean it’s it can be very emotional like especially for females. Um, because there just weren’t a lot of people talking about it. So, um, long story short, I took the year and wore wigs and I was like, you know what, I’m just going to focus on my scalp health. I’m going to focus on my wellness. Um, and really like give this thing like 100%. So, meanwhile, there was actually this trend um, or I guess a hack online where a lot of women were using Monistat to grow their hair back, which is so strange. But the reason that was working is because it has a lot of like anti-fungal properties. What’s Monistat? You got to tell Sean, Danny, you got to tell him. You should know about it. No, you shouldn’t know about it, but Is it a good thing that I don’t know what that is? This is good clickbait. Tell him. Okay, so all the guys on the podcast would be like, what the By the way, we always joke, we always joke that we have four female listeners. Hopefully that’ll change after this episode. Four people listeners, we’re all like dying inside laughing right now. They’re like putting their hands on their face right now. So Monistat is what people what females use for yeast infection. Okay, gotcha. Who And so a lot of women were using this on their scalp though and it’s helping their hair grow. And people are taking before and after pictures and it’s like insane. So the reason that’s working is because it has these anti-fungal properties in it, which nowadays, you know, they always tell you don’t wash your hair, it’s not good for you. So a lot of females are using um dry shampoo. And so they’re putting all of this dry shampoo, all this product that’s just like sitting on your scalp, blocking your follicle and so your hair doesn’t really have like a fair chance of growing. So when they were using Monistat, you know, it’s kind of like detoxifying, it’s getting rid of all that product build up and your hair is growing. So the only thing with that is you shouldn’t be using it long-term. It’s just like has a lot of harmful things in it. So my goal was to find a more natural way to essentially accomplish the same thing. So I would like get into my bathroom and I studied bio at the University of Texas. I was going to So did I. They don’t teach you anything. I learned photosynthesis for like seven years. They don’t teach you anything about the human body. Exactly. She can hang with the chemist. I can hang now. She can hang. She’s like, okay, I remember that. I kind of I kind of get it, but It’s amazing how much you learn when you really need to learn versus like my major. Now I wish I really would have paid attention because I think it really would have benefited me, but You would have known. Anyways, so um, so you know, I’m like a little chemist in my in my bathroom and I’m getting all these ingredients from online, whole foods, all over the place and just making my own scalp serums and I would, you know, share on YouTube like this is how I make it, this is where you order this and then mix it this way and and then people started asking, they’re like, hey, can you just like ship it to me? Right. And so I go to Jordan, I’m like, I really think this could be a thing. A lot of people when was this like a couple years ago? This was a 2019 Uh no, they probably yeah, 2019. 2019. Um, and so that’s kind of like where the idea originated from. And it was totally clean. So it’s something that people could use every day and not feel like it’s going to be harmful. So we had a lot of like eucalyptus, uh natural ingredients, jojoba oil. Um, but there were a lot of things I wanted to put in it that I just didn’t have access to. So long story short, found partners, found a great chemist and then came out with our first product, which was a scalp serum and to be honest, I did not think that it would pop off at all. I really was just like, I want to serve my audience. I’ve been very like service driven with all of my content. I’m like, I just really want to serve people because I feel like if I serve them, they’ll come back. So that was really just like the heart behind it. But what happened was a lot of people were buying it for like their day were down the street or their mom or their husband and people started taking like before and after pictures and it’s like insane. We never asked for before and after pictures, but I feel like that’s kind of what made it blow up was people That’s marketing there is, right? A before and after. Yes. People started sending in their before and afters and like, so then I would start sharing them, you know, left and right. And I mean, every day I’m probably tagged in like 15 before and afters, even to this day. So were there not scalp serums before that? Or they were, but they just weren’t You know, I think it was just such a new like a niche like, you know, putting something on your scalp, like a skin care routine, like creating that scalp routine was very new. People weren’t really thinking about it. So I’m sure that there were scalp serums out there, um, but I don’t think people were educated about like how to use them or why they were important. Um, so our biggest thing is just like if you’re taking care of your skin, like you should be taking care of your scalp. It’s kind of like an extension of, you know. And so, um, so I think once people kind of understood how to use it, then they went to Divi first because we’re also one of the only like clean scalp serums out there. Gotcha. So the business launches when? 2020. 2020. Uh, 2021. 2021. October 2021. So we’re not even two full years in, you know, and it’s exploded. So I don’t know how much you guys typically share. Do you guys share revenue stuff or not really? Yeah, I mean, like our first like full year, I think you already shared it. Well, you said 20, it was 40, but uh, yeah, we did about $40 million and then, um, you know, this year we’re on track to do 30%, 35% growth. Yeah. Um, it’s it’s crazy. And that’s mostly from kind of the power of your community or that’s that plus a bunch of other marketing that you have to do or how how does the business grow? I mean, how much do we see? That probably exceeded your expectations. I mean, that would exceed anyone’s expectations. Yeah, I always say like when we launched the product, we thought that we were launching it for like 10% of Danny’s audience. Like we were like, hey, these people need to be served. Danny, you know, acquired this audience, they want a resource and it just grew so far beyond that. And a lot of people think that, you know, Divi, um, is all Danny’s audience that’s buying it and, you know, she’s only made up about 15% of the overall revenue. And so it was just a product that I think took off and worked. It was just right place, right time. It was like during the era of the skinification of the scalp is like what the beauty gurus call it. And so I missed that whole era. Yeah, you missed the era. Well, it’s here. It’s now. I don’t have a skin care routine either. So I I didn’t catch up. I need to start with skin, move to scalp. I gave you two boxes. Yeah, I know. You’re you’re in it now. Um, and so yeah, it’s it’s just been wild. I mean, we we never expected early. And so did you guys look at like other creator led businesses? Like who was an inspiration that you’re like, oh, you know, if we do this well, this could be like, you know, whatever, um, Skims or this could be like the Kylie’s Kylie’s lip thing or whatever. Yeah. I mean, we’ve always admired the Kardashians in a business sense. Like how they’ve how they’ve like used their reality TV to grow all these businesses and like we one thing we love about them is like how they all support each other. It’s like a an ecosystem. Like you’re using, you know, Kylie’s makeup and then you’re wearing Kim’s Skims and so we always love that aspect of what they do. But I mean, in terms of like our inspiration, to be honest, everyone in our space was just launching clothing lines. Um, so it was totally different. Yeah, it was very, very different. Were you tempted to do that too? 100%. Jordan was like, please don’t. Please don’t. The returns are insane. My parents, my dad actually has a showroom at the uh Dallas World uh Trade Center in Dallas. So he, um, you know, sells wholesale to all, you know, Nordstrom, all these boutiques. My dad always told me, he’s like, the one thing I ask you is, please don’t get in the fashion industry. It’s just it’s it’s a lot. And so, um, but one thing I knew that I wanted if I ever did launch a business is that I wanted to have something that could be on subscription. And so a lot of my ideas were mainly tech at first. Um, I never really thought of like Tech like what? Like what would it be? Uh, you know, some service that you could get. I had I honestly didn’t have like a a what Like you We had the Sassy Club. There was like one Yeah, there was one time where she like wanted to launch her own app because she felt like, you know, she could build a better community like through a different platform than Instagram and and and and we tried it. We called it, what did you call it? The Sassy Club. The Sassy Club at the time and it was like we used this uh this third party app system and we drove a large part of our community to it and we tried to do like more the whole concept was like, let’s meet in real life with our audience. And so it was like we do meetups and stuff like that and that was just really hard. It was kind of like a Bumble. Right. Yeah, it was kind of like a Bumble. And so we tried that, you know, it it was pretty difficult and then It was it was difficult to manage like the in-face interactions. Right. Yeah. Now let me ask you a question. I just hired a guy, paid a guy $5,000 to do a couple of like one-on-one like workshops with me. And it was all about this idea of personal branding. Which honestly, a pretty lame phrase in general. Like I cringed that I even did all this, but I’m putting it out there in the spirit of authenticity. So I paid this guy. Why did I pay this guy? Well, this podcast itself has gotten pretty popular. But uh I’ve always had this problem which was just like um you see some people and their brand is so clear. It’s like uh there’s this guy who this guy named Pomp and Pomp is all about Bitcoin. He’s the Bitcoin guy. Like you know him about you know him because of Bitcoin. He talks about Bitcoin. Everything he loves, you know, every fourth word needs to be Bitcoin. Yep. And then you have like um Tim Ferris who’s uh you know, the four-hour work week guy or the four-hour body, four-hour chef. He’s the four-hour guy. He’s all about kind of life hacking your way there. And so you you go down the list and a lot of people who have built good online followings, they have a clear kind of like they’re the blank guy or they’re the blank gal, whatever. Like that that’s what they’re known for. And for me, I’ve always been like, well, I don’t know, the business business guy. I don’t know that sounds very like specific or focused. And I was like, oh, I’ve gotten pretty far without that, but maybe I maybe somebody can help me kind of sharpen this. So this guy who I hired, he works with like, you know, like Jay Shetty and like um a bunch of people who are like that, like uh the guy who did the Quest bar thing, Tom whatever Bill you. Um and he’s like, yeah, you know, like Jay Shetty, his story is he was like kind of like in and out of trouble, then decided to go be a monk and he was a monk and then he like got kicked out of the monastery because a monk came to him and was like, you know, you like something bigger in store for you. So he decided to make his life mission to bring ancient monk wisdom in a modern way to the world or whatever. I I butchered I butchered that, but something like that. Right. He’s consistent, man. Right. He’s doing it every day. I just knew I was like the blue-eyed Indian guy. Like, you know, that’s what stood out to me. Like the guy’s got clear green eyes. Yeah. But I was like, okay, I see how I see the value in if you really kind of like sharpen this like whatever your brand is all about. But then I’ve met people who are maybe like you who um you probably never hired a consultant or like did a brand workshop or like sat down with a piece of paper and like tried to architect it. It seems like it kind of happened organically and naturally for you. So I I have two questions for you. One, do you think you have like a focus like that, like the blank you you are the, you know, just like the Bitcoin guy. Do you have like a thing that’s like our brand is is about this word or these three words or whatever. Do you have something like that? Um, so when I started going through my hair loss, I think it was the first time that I kind of felt like I had that thing. Like I was kind of like the wig influencer for a while and then kind of like the hair loss influencer. I mean, as cliché as it sounds, I feel like like I think our biggest thing is we’ve always just been very authentic and like goofy. Um and we’ve kind of I feel like what we’ve done is figured out how to collide those worlds of like being professional but also getting, you know, taking your heels off, getting back home, just like and being real about what it’s like having two kids. Like you’re in heels changing diapers, kids peeing all over you. Um but like I would say it it took like 10 years for people to kind of I’ve never had, you know, this persona or this video pop off and go viral and then everyone knows who I am. Like I’ve never had that moment. It’s just been like very gradual of but I but I totally feel what you’re saying. Like I I still go through those times where I’m like, okay, who am I? Like what do what’s my identity? Like what do and I I do feel like there are some bloggers out there that are so good at like, okay, when you think of Chick-fil-A, you think of this one person. Or when you think of like this one brand, you think of it. Yeah. Dude, that should have been mine. Chick-fil-A. You’re a genius. You’ve been in front of me the whole time. Yeah, and it’s like and so I do try to find those things that like, okay, when in Dallas, when people go here, like are they going to what brands are they thinking of when they think of Danny? You know, but it it’s it’s challenging because also like I’m very, you know, one day I want to be doing this, one day I like to like kind of shift and be on my toes and so What do you think people get wrong when they try to build a following? Not like the people who are just obviously bad, but let’s say people who have the potential where it could be working out. What do you think are the mistakes that those people make that like They’re trying to be perfect all the time. And it’s so unrelatable. I think like one of the biggest reasons that like people can relate is because we have made so many mistakes and we share them and like there’s times when we get online and we’re like, man, that was bad. We should have done that. Like there was an example, a small example, but I was uh cutting up like fruit for my daughter Stella’s lunch and I’m cutting the grapes wrong, you know, like where they can choke on grapes and like had no idea. Like my mom never cut my grapes. So like I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong, but you know, like the DMs start flooding and the Facebook groups are popping off. Danny’s like cutting the grapes wrong. Are you trying to kill your kid? Yeah. Yeah. Like you’re influencing all these moms to cut grapes wrong and I’m like, oh my gosh, I didn’t know. Like so, you know, you get on and you’re like, guys, I’m so sorry. Like I made a mistake. Let me like teach you the right way to to cut grapes instead of like deleting the content and being embarrassed about it. And so it’s like I think you cut them wrong the second time, too. I did. I did. I did. Um, but yeah, so I just feel like I have a lot of girlfriends like in Dallas that are, you know, trying to do something similar and they’re trying so hard to just be perfect all the time. And it’s not really It’s a sense of about You said the word relatable. I think that’s a key uh key thing. Like we had the comedian Hassan Minhaj, I don’t know if you know him. He’s like uh he’s on Netflix and stuff like that. He came on and um and I was asking him something about because we do this like we’re doing these live podcasts now sometimes. So we’re doing one this Saturday here in Austin. And so I had asked him, I was like, hey, I’m going on stage, kind of like stand-up comedy. There’s going to be whatever like thousand people in the audience. How do I, you know, any what what would you say like first five minutes? How can I set a good tone here? And he goes, um, he gave me two pieces of advice. He goes, first, make it clear that you are there. So he’s like, talk about the room, talk about the person in the front row, talk about, you know, the city that you’re in and like what it’s been like for you to be there. Like just make it clear like give them the fact that you’re there and everybody will be present together when you do that. And he goes, the second thing is uh low status. I go, low status? He goes, yeah, like people make this mistake a lot that they try to be high status. They’re like, Yeah. Uh, I want your approval, so I’m going to present a version of myself that is high status. Mhm. When in actuality, the way people relate to you and like you is doing something low status. So making fun of yourself, showing a weakness, being vulnerable, saying something that’s makes you look bad, not great, or like embarrassing to you. And so he’s like, you know, comedy is actually a low status art form, not like not high status, which is what you’re like if you go to a conference, you go on stage, uh it’s typically going to be all high status stuff. People trying to say things that show how important they are and how smart they are and their resume and all that. He’s like, that’s not how people relate to you. And so what you’re saying kind of reminds me of that is like a uh doing things that are showing the the showing some of the flaws almost not just because they’re there, but like it actually helps. It actually builds that relatability. I know, I I I agree. I mean, I feel like the times that we connect with our audience the most is like in those goofy times when I’m running around with no pants on and like we’re like, oh, I relate. Same thing, you know. I think there’s like a there’s like a pushback on like A-list celebrities even towards influencers because it’s like I don’t understand like this is not relevant to my life at all what the Kardashians are doing in the private jets and all this stuff. And like I think that that’s where people feel at home, you know, it’s it’s very stripped down. Yeah, yeah, it’s a lot more authentic. It’s kind of like follow follow my day. And so you uh you’ve done that and now you also launched Divi. Yes. And it’s because that’s kind of how we when we initially found you guys, I read this thread. I read the a Twitter thread. Somebody else somebody else had written about this. And they named five or six creators I never heard of that had businesses that were really big. I was like, Divi, uh it’s a, you know, this sort of like hair care product, whatever, and it was doing 40 million or something in revenue. I I don’t remember what the exact numbers were. But I remember being like, wow, that’s like really significant and so cool. Like I never really like I never heard of that. You hear the same three or four examples all the time when it comes to like like Logan Paul and Prime and Mr. Beast and whatever. Like especially in the tech world, we kind hear the same, we’re not like as deep in, so you only hear the hear the same, you know, three or four examples every single time. So how did that come about? How’d you when did you decide to instead of posting for other people, like let’s create our own brand and how’d you pick the product? How did you like how’d you have the confidence to go for it? Yeah. So, um, there was definitely an era on Instagram where everything was perfect. You know, it’s like back in the day of like posting the perfect selfie or the perfect like latte art, whatever it was. Um, and so I definitely played that game and it gets very exhausting. After a while, I started actually losing my hair when I was in college, whenever I was at UT. First, it started with like just me being so stressed out because I’m at UT, I’m flying to LA every weekend, I’m posting on these videos, I have like Neutrogena’s like, where is the brand deal? And I have like four exams the next day. So I’m stressed out all the time. Started pulling my hair. Then I get hair extensions to try to like cover that up. That makes it worse. Then I bleach my hair, that makes it worse. When we get married, I think like a year in, I look in the mirror and I’m like, I literally have no more hair. I was like, I didn’t even want to leave the house anymore. So Jordan This is a dumb I mean, are we talking a couple strands of hair? What are we talking about? Yeah, no, I mean like bald spots. Like Patches. Like patches of hair. I mean And it was stress driven? Stress driven and then hair extensions, so that’s probably like more traction alopecia. So what happens when you put hair extensions in, like your hair can’t withstand that weight and instead of just losing hair where the hair extension is, with traction alopecia, you actually lose hair like around that whole surrounding area. I see. So it was like multiple bald spots like all over. So Jordan, of course, my husband, he’s like, wait, I don’t get it. Like why don’t you just get a wig? All the Kardashians wear wigs. What’s what’s wrong with that? So he takes me to a wig shop in Dallas, like the first place he Googles. We walk in, it’s like a Halloween store. Like the most expensive wig is like playing called $40. It’s like bright neon yellow. I’m like, I don’t know if this is going to work. You’re like classic wigs. They’re like the most expensive one is like 15 bucks. So I leave there like so defeated. I’m like, I’m always going to be bald, you know. So we actually um learned about this like wig shop in Los Angeles called the wig shop actually. Yeah. Uh from Jeffrey Star. Yeah, that’s what I was going to say. Jeffrey Star. Jeffrey Star, who is another YouTuber. Anyway, long story short, we fly out there, find my first wig. I’m in wigs for a year and actually when I first got my first wig, I didn’t tell anybody because I was so embarrassed. I was like We actually took a trip to Chicago with my parents and my sister-in-law and my brother and we didn’t tell them the entire time. They go, oh, nice haircut. You know, like they had no idea. I mean, these things can look so real now. It’s it’s insane. So about a month into wearing it, I just felt like a fraud. I was like, I got to tell people. I feel like I’m probably not the only female going through something like this. I think that like people will appreciate it and hopefully they’ll be cool with it. So I shared that I was wearing wigs and it kind of just opened up this door of like all these females that are kind of going through the same thing, like this like hidden epidemic of hair loss. Um, so Yeah, my wife all the time after uh after we had our first baby, I think there’s like a a known kind of like postpartum Yeah. like issue with with hair loss. And so she was talking about it all the time and I was like, I was like, what do you mean? Like it’s nothing, don’t worry about it. She’s like, no, look at this. And these like baby hair, whatever. And it really bothered her and I I didn’t even think really even to to try like what what what a solution look like. So Yeah, I mean it’s it can be very emotional like especially for females. Um, because there just weren’t a lot of people talking about it. So, um, long story short, I took the year and wore wigs and I was like, you know what, I’m just going to focus on my scalp health. I’m going to focus on my wellness. Um, and really like give this thing like 100%. So, meanwhile, there was actually this trend um, or I guess a hack online where a lot of women were using Monistat to grow their hair back, which is so strange. But the reason that was working is because it has a lot of like anti-fungal properties. What’s Monistat? You got to tell Sean, Danny, you got to tell him. You should know about it. No, you shouldn’t know about it, but Is it a good thing that I don’t know what that is? This is good clickbait. Tell him. Okay, so all the guys on the podcast would be like, what the By the way, we always joke, we always joke that we have four female listeners. Hopefully that’ll change after this episode. Four people listeners, we’re all like dying inside laughing right now. They’re like putting their hands on their face right now. So Monistat is what people what females use for yeast infection. Okay, gotcha. Who And so a lot of women were using this on their scalp though and it’s helping their hair grow. And people are taking before and after pictures and it’s like insane. So the reason that’s working is because it has these anti-fungal properties in it, which nowadays, you know, they always tell you don’t wash your hair, it’s not good for you. So a lot of females are using um dry shampoo. And so they’re putting all of this dry shampoo, all this product that’s just like sitting on your scalp, blocking your follicle and so your hair doesn’t really have like a fair chance of growing. So when they were using Monistat, you know, it’s kind of like detoxifying, it’s getting rid of all that product build up and your hair is growing. So the only thing with that is you shouldn’t be using it long-term. It’s just like has a lot of harmful things in it. So my goal was to find a more natural way to essentially accomplish the same thing. So I would like get into my bathroom and I studied bio at the University of Texas. I was going to So did I. They don’t teach you anything. I learned photosynthesis for like seven years. They don’t teach you anything about the human body. Exactly. She can hang with the chemist. I can hang now. She can hang. She’s like, okay, I remember that. I kind of I kind of get it, but It’s amazing how much you learn when you really need to learn versus like my major. Now I wish I really would have paid attention because I think it really would have benefited me, but You would have known. Anyways, so um, so you know, I’m like a little chemist in my in my bathroom and I’m getting all these ingredients from online, whole foods, all over the place and just making my own scalp serums and I would, you know, share on YouTube like this is how I make it, this is where you order this and then mix it this way and and then people started asking, they’re like, hey, can you just like ship it to me? Right. And so I go to Jordan, I’m like, I really think this could be a thing. A lot of people when was this like a couple years ago? This was a 2019 Uh no, they probably yeah, 2019. 2019. Um, and so that’s kind of like where the idea originated from. And it was totally clean. So it’s something that people could use every day and not feel like it’s going to be harmful. So we had a lot of like eucalyptus, uh natural ingredients, jojoba oil. Um, but there were a lot of things I wanted to put in it that I just didn’t have access to. So long story short, found partners, found a great chemist and then came out with our first product, which was a scalp serum and to be honest, I did not think that it would pop off at all. I really was just like, I want to serve my audience. I’ve been very like service driven with all of my content. I’m like, I just really want to serve people because I feel like if I serve them, they’ll come back. So that was really just like the heart behind it. But what happened was a lot of people were buying it for like their day were down the street or their mom or their husband and people started taking like before and after pictures and it’s like insane. We never asked for before and after pictures, but I feel like that’s kind of what made it blow up was people That’s marketing there is, right? A before and after. Yes. People started sending in their before and afters and like, so then I would start sharing them, you know, left and right. And I mean, every day I’m probably tagged in like 15 before and afters, even to this day. So were there not scalp serums before that? Or they were, but they just weren’t You know, I think it was just such a new like a niche like, you know, putting something on your scalp, like a skin care routine, like creating that scalp routine was very new. People weren’t really thinking about it. So I’m sure that there were scalp serums out there, um, but I don’t think people were educated about like how to use them or why they were important. Um, so our biggest thing is just like if you’re taking care of your skin, like you should be taking care of your scalp. It’s kind of like an extension of, you know. And so, um, so I think once people kind of understood how to use it, then they went to Divi first because we’re also one of the only like clean scalp serums out there. Gotcha. So the business launches when? 2020. 2020. Uh, 2021. 2021. October 2021. So we’re not even two full years in, you know, and it’s exploded. So I don’t know how much you guys typically share. Do you guys share revenue stuff or not really? Yeah, I mean, like our first like full year, I think you already shared it. Well, you said 20, it was 40, but uh, yeah, we did about $40 million and then, um, you know, this year we’re on track to do 30%, 35% growth. Yeah. Um, it’s it’s crazy. And that’s mostly from kind of the power of your community or that’s that plus a bunch of other marketing that you have to do or how how does the business grow? I mean, how much do we see? That probably exceeded your expectations. I mean, that would exceed anyone’s expectations. Yeah, I always say like when we launched the product, we thought that we were launching it for like 10% of Danny’s audience. Like we were like, hey, these people need to be served. Danny, you know, acquired this audience, they want a resource and it just grew so far beyond that. And a lot of people think that, you know, Divi, um, is all Danny’s audience that’s buying it and, you know, she’s only made up about 15% of the overall revenue. And so it was just a product that I think took off and worked. It was just right place, right time. It was like during the era of the skinification of the scalp is like what the beauty gurus call it. And so I missed that whole era. Yeah, you missed the era. Well, it’s here. It’s now. I don’t have a skin care routine either. So I I didn’t catch up. I need to start with skin, move to scalp. I gave you two boxes. Yeah, I know. You’re you’re in it now. Um, and so yeah, it’s it’s just been wild. I mean, we we never expected early. And so did you guys look at like other creator led businesses? Like who was an inspiration that you’re like, oh, you know, if we do this well, this could be like, you know, whatever, um, Skims or this could be like the Kylie’s Kylie’s lip thing or whatever. Yeah. I mean, we’ve always admired the Kardashians in a business sense. Like how they’ve how they’ve like used their reality TV to grow all these businesses and like we one thing we love about them is like how they all support each other. It’s like a an ecosystem. Like you’re using, you know, Kylie’s makeup and then you’re wearing Kim’s Skims and so we always love that aspect of what they do. But I mean, in terms of like our inspiration, to be honest, everyone in our space was just launching clothing lines. Um, so it was totally different. Yeah, it was very, very different. Were you tempted to do that too? 100%. Jordan was like, please don’t. Please don’t. The returns are insane. My parents, my dad actually has a showroom at the uh Dallas World uh Trade Center in Dallas. So he, um, you know, sells wholesale to all, you know, Nordstrom, all these boutiques. My dad always told me, he’s like, the one thing I ask you is, please don’t get in the fashion industry. It’s just it’s it’s a lot. And so, um, but one thing I knew that I wanted if I ever did launch a business is that I wanted to have something that could be on subscription. And so a lot of my ideas were mainly tech at first. Um, I never really thought of like Tech like what? Like what would it be? Uh, you know, some service that you could get. I had I honestly didn’t have like a a what Like you We had the Sassy Club. There was like one Yeah, there was one time where she like wanted to launch her own app because she felt like, you know, she could build a better community like through a different platform than Instagram and and and and we tried it. We called it, what did you call it? The Sassy Club. The Sassy Club at the time and it was like we used this uh this third party app system and we drove a large part of our community to it and we tried to do like more the whole concept was like, let’s meet in real life with our audience. And so it was like we do meetups and stuff like that and that was just really hard. It was kind of like a Bumble. Right. Yeah, it was kind of like a Bumble. And so we tried that, you know, it it was pretty difficult and then It was it was difficult to manage like the in-face interactions. Right. Yeah. Now let me ask you a question. I just hired a guy, paid a guy $5,000 to do a couple of like one-on-one like workshops with me. And it was all about this idea of personal branding. Which honestly, a pretty lame phrase in general. Like I cringed that I even did all this, but I’m putting it out there in the spirit of authenticity. So I paid this guy. Why did I pay this guy? Well, this podcast itself has gotten pretty popular. But uh I’ve always had this problem which was just like um you see some people and their brand is so clear. It’s like uh there’s this guy who this guy named Pomp and Pomp is all about Bitcoin. He’s the Bitcoin guy. Like you know him about you know him because of Bitcoin. He talks about Bitcoin. Everything he loves, you know, every fourth word needs to be Bitcoin. Yep. And then you have like um Tim Ferris who’s uh you know, the four-hour work week guy or the four-hour body, four-hour chef. He’s the four-hour guy. He’s all about kind of life hacking your way there. And so you you go down the list and a lot of people who have built good online followings, they have a clear kind of like they’re the blank guy or they’re the blank gal, whatever. Like that that’s what they’re known for. And for me, I’ve always been like, well, I don’t know, the business business guy. I don’t know that sounds very like specific or focused. And I was like, oh, I’ve gotten pretty far without that, but maybe I maybe somebody can help me kind of sharpen this. So this guy who I hired, he works with like, you know, like Jay Shetty and like um a bunch of people who are like that, like uh the guy who did the Quest bar thing, Tom whatever Bill you. Um and he’s like, yeah, you know, like Jay Shetty, his story is he was like kind of like in and out of trouble, then decided to go be a monk and he was a monk and then he like got kicked out of the monastery because a monk came to him and was like, you know, you like something bigger in store for you. So he decided to make his life mission to bring ancient monk wisdom in a modern way to the world or whatever. I I butchered I butchered that, but something like that. Right. He’s consistent, man. Right. He’s doing it every day. I just knew I was like the blue-eyed Indian guy. Like, you know, that’s what stood out to me. Like the guy’s got clear green eyes. Yeah. But I was like, okay, I see how I see the value in if you really kind of like sharpen this like whatever your brand is all about. But then I’ve met people who are maybe like you who um you probably never hired a consultant or like did a brand workshop or like sat down with a piece of paper and like tried to architect it. It seems like it kind of happened organically and naturally for you. So I I have two questions for you. One, do you think you have like a focus like that, like the blank you you are the, you know, just like the Bitcoin guy. Do you have like a thing that’s like our brand is is about this word or these three words or whatever. Do you have something like that? Um, so when I started going through my hair loss, I think it was the first time that I kind of felt like I had that thing. Like I was kind of like the wig influencer for a while and then kind of like the hair loss influencer. I mean, as cliché as it sounds, I feel like like I think our biggest thing is we’ve always just been very authentic and like goofy. Um and we’ve kind of I feel like what we’ve done is figured out how to collide those worlds of like being professional but also getting, you know, taking your heels off, getting back home, just like and being real about what it’s like having two kids. Like you’re in heels changing diapers, kids peeing all over you. Um but like I would say it it took like 10 years for people to kind of I’ve never had, you know, this persona or this video pop off and go viral and then everyone knows who I am. Like I’ve never had that moment. It’s just been like very gradual of but I but I totally feel what you’re saying. Like I I still go through those times where I’m like, okay, who am I? Like what do what’s my identity? Like what do and I I do feel like there are some bloggers out there that are so good at like, okay, when you think of Chick-fil-A, you think of this one person. Or when you think of like this one brand, you think of it. Yeah. Dude, that should have been mine. Chick-fil-A. You’re a genius. You’ve been in front of me the whole time. Yeah, and it’s like and so I do try to find those things that like, okay, when in Dallas, when people go here, like are they going to what brands are they thinking of when they think of Danny? You know, but it it’s it’s challenging because also like I’m very, you know, one day I want to be doing this, one day I like to like kind of shift and be on my toes and so What do you think people get wrong when they try to build a following? Not like the people who are just obviously bad, but let’s say people who have the potential where it could be working out. What do you think are the mistakes that those people make that like They’re trying to be perfect all the time. And it’s so unrelatable. I think like one of the biggest reasons that like people can relate is because we have made so many mistakes and we share them and like there’s times when we get online and we’re like, man, that was bad. We should have done that. Like there was an example, a small example, but I was uh cutting up like fruit for my daughter Stella’s lunch and I’m cutting the grapes wrong, you know, like where they can choke on grapes and like had no idea. Like my mom never cut my grapes. So like I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong, but you know, like the DMs start flooding and the Facebook groups are popping off. Danny’s like cutting the grapes wrong. Are you trying to kill your kid? Yeah. Yeah. Like you’re influencing all these moms to cut grapes wrong and I’m like, oh my gosh, I didn’t know. Like so, you know, you get on and you’re like, guys, I’m so sorry. Like I made a mistake. Let me like teach you the right way to to cut grapes instead of like deleting the content and being embarrassed about it. And so it’s like I think you cut them wrong the second time, too. I did. I did. I did. Um, but yeah, so I just feel like I have a lot of girlfriends like in Dallas that are, you know, trying to do something similar and they’re trying so hard to just be perfect all the time. And it’s not really It’s a sense of about You said the word relatable. I think that’s a key uh key thing. Like we had the comedian Hassan Minhaj, I don’t know if you know him. He’s like uh he’s on Netflix and stuff like that. He came on and um and I was asking him something about because we do this like we’re doing these live podcasts now sometimes. So we’re doing one this Saturday here in Austin. And so I had asked him, I was like, hey, I’m going on stage, kind of like stand-up comedy. There’s going to be whatever like thousand people in the audience. How do I, you know, any what what would you say like first five minutes? How can I set a good tone here? And he goes, um, he gave me two pieces of advice. He goes, first, make it clear that you are there. So he’s like, talk about the room, talk about the person in the front row, talk about, you know, the city that you’re in and like what it’s been like for you to be there. Like just make it clear like give them the fact that you’re there and everybody will be present together when you do that. And he goes, the second thing is uh low status. I go, low status? He goes, yeah, like people make this mistake a lot that they try to be high status. They’re like, Yeah. Uh, I want your approval, so I’m going to present a version of myself that is high status. Mhm. When in actuality, the way people relate to you and like you is doing something low status. So making fun of yourself, showing a weakness, being vulnerable, saying something that’s makes you look bad, not great, or like embarrassing to you. And so he’s like, you know, comedy is actually a low status art form, not like not high status, which is what you’re like if you go to a conference, you go on stage, uh it’s typically going to be all high status stuff. People trying to say things that show how important they are and how smart they are and their resume and all that. He’s like, that’s not how people relate to you. And so what you’re saying kind of reminds me of that is like a uh doing things that are showing the the showing some of the flaws almost not just because they’re there, but like it actually helps. It actually builds that relatability. I know, I I I agree. I mean, I feel like the times that we connect with our audience the most is like in those goofy times when I’m running around with no pants on and like we’re like, oh, I relate. Same thing, you know. I think there’s like a there’s like a pushback on like A-list celebrities even towards influencers because it’s like I don’t understand like this is not relevant to my life at all what the Kardashians are doing in the private jets and all this stuff. And like I think that that’s where people feel at home, you know, it’s it’s very stripped down. Yeah, yeah, it’s a lot more authentic. It’s kind of like follow follow my day. And so you uh you’ve done that and now you also launched Divi. Yes. And it’s because that’s kind of how we when we initially found you guys, I read this thread. I read the a Twitter thread. Somebody else somebody else had written about this. And they named five or six creators I never heard of that had businesses that were really big. I was like, Divi, uh it’s a, you know, this sort of like hair care product, whatever, and it was doing 40 million or something in revenue. I I don’t remember what the exact numbers were. But I remember being like, wow, that’s like really significant and so cool. Like I never really like I never heard of that. You hear the same three or four examples all the time when it comes to like like Logan Paul and Prime and Mr. Beast and whatever. Like especially in the tech world, we kind hear the same, we’re not like as deep in, so you only hear the hear the same, you know, three or four examples every single time. So how did that come about? How’d you when did you decide to instead of posting for other people, like let’s create our own brand and how’d you pick the product? How did you like how’d you have the confidence to go for it? Yeah. So, um, there was definitely an era on Instagram where everything was perfect. You know, it’s like back in the day of like posting the perfect selfie or the perfect like latte art, whatever it was. Um, and so I definitely played that game and it gets very exhausting. After a while, I started actually losing my hair when I was in college, whenever I was at UT. First, it started with like just me being so stressed out because I’m at UT, I’m flying to LA every weekend, I’m posting on these videos, I have like Neutrogena’s like, where is the brand deal? And I have like four exams the next day. So I’m stressed out all the time. Started pulling my hair. Then I get hair extensions to try to like cover that up. That makes it worse. Then I bleach my hair, that makes it worse. When we get married, I think like a year in, I look in the mirror and I’m like, I literally have no more hair. I was like, I didn’t even want to leave the house anymore. So Jordan This is a dumb I mean, are we talking a couple strands of hair? What are we talking about? Yeah, no, I mean like bald spots. Like Patches. Like patches of hair. I mean And it was stress driven? Stress driven and then hair extensions, so that’s probably like more traction alopecia. So what happens when you put hair extensions in, like your hair can’t withstand that weight and instead of just losing hair where the hair extension is, with traction alopecia, you actually lose hair like around that whole surrounding area. I see. So it was like multiple bald spots like all over. So Jordan, of course, my husband, he’s like, wait, I don’t get it. Like why don’t you just get a wig? All the Kardashians wear wigs. What’s what’s wrong with that? So he takes me to a wig shop in Dallas, like the first place he Googles. We walk in, it’s like a Halloween store. Like the most expensive wig is like playing called $40. It’s like bright neon yellow. I’m like, I don’t know if this is going to work. You’re like classic wigs. They’re like the most expensive one is like 15 bucks. So I leave there like so defeated. I’m like, I’m always going to be bald, you know. So we actually um learned about this like wig shop in Los Angeles called the wig shop actually. Yeah. Uh from Jeffrey Star. Yeah, that’s what I was going to say. Jeffrey Star. Jeffrey Star, who is another YouTuber. Anyway, long story short, we fly out there, find my first wig. I’m in wigs for a year and actually when I first got my first wig, I didn’t tell anybody because I was so embarrassed. I was like We actually took a trip to Chicago with my parents and my sister-in-law and my brother and we didn’t tell them the entire time. They go, oh, nice haircut. You know, like they had no idea. I mean, these things can look so real now. It’s it’s insane. So about a month into wearing it, I just felt like a fraud. I was like, I got to tell people. I feel like I’m probably not the only female going through something like this. I think that like people will appreciate it and hopefully they’ll be cool with it. So I shared that I was wearing wigs and it kind of just opened up this door of like all these females that are kind of going through the same thing, like this like hidden epidemic of hair loss. Um, so Yeah, my wife all the time after uh after we had our first baby, I think there’s like a a known kind of like postpartum Yeah. like issue with with hair loss. And so she was talking about it all the time and I was like, I was like, what do you mean? Like it’s nothing, don’t worry about it. She’s like, no, look at this. And these like baby hair, whatever. And it really bothered her and I I didn’t even think really even to to try like what what what a solution look like. So Yeah, I mean it’s it can be very emotional like especially for females. Um, because there just weren’t a lot of people talking about it. So, um, long story short, I took the year and wore wigs and I was like, you know what, I’m just going to focus on my scalp health. I’m going to focus on my wellness. Um, and really like give this thing like 100%. So, meanwhile, there was actually this trend um, or I guess a hack online where a lot of women were using Monistat to grow their hair back, which is so strange. But the reason that was working is because it has a lot of like anti-fungal properties. What’s Monistat? You got to tell Sean, Danny, you got to tell him. You should know about it. No, you shouldn’t know about it, but Is it a good thing that I don’t know what that is? This is good clickbait. Tell him. Okay, so all the guys on the podcast would be like, what the By the way, we always joke, we always joke that we have four female listeners. Hopefully that’ll change after this episode. Four people listeners, we’re all like dying inside laughing right now. They’re like putting their hands on their face right now. So Monistat is what people what females use for yeast infection. Okay, gotcha. Who And so a lot of women were using this on their scalp though and it’s helping their hair grow. And people are taking before and after pictures and it’s like insane. So the reason that’s working is because it has these anti-fungal properties in it, which nowadays, you know, they always tell you don’t wash your hair, it’s not good for you. So a lot of females are using um dry shampoo. And so they’re putting all of this dry shampoo, all this product that’s just like sitting on your scalp, blocking your follicle and so your hair doesn’t really have like a fair chance of growing. So when they were using Monistat, you know, it’s kind of like detoxifying, it’s getting rid of all that product build up and your hair is growing. So the only thing with that is you shouldn’t be using it long-term. It’s just like has a lot of harmful things in it. So my goal was to find a more natural way to essentially accomplish the same thing. So I would like get into my bathroom and I studied bio at the University of Texas. I was going to So did I. They don’t teach you anything. I learned photosynthesis for like seven years. They don’t teach you anything about the human body. Exactly. She can hang with the chemist. I can hang now. She can hang. She’s like, okay, I remember that. I kind of I kind of get it, but It’s amazing how much you learn when you really need to learn versus like my major. Now I wish I really would have paid attention because I think it really would have benefited me, but You would have known. Anyways, so um, so you know, I’m like a little chemist in my in my bathroom and I’m getting all these ingredients from online, whole foods, all over the place and just making my own scalp serums and I would, you know, share on YouTube like this is how I make it, this is where you order this and then mix it this way and and then people started asking, they’re like, hey, can you just like ship it to me? Right. And so I go to Jordan, I’m like, I really think this could be a thing. A lot of people when was this like a couple years ago? This was a 2019 Uh no, they probably yeah, 2019. 2019. Um, and so that’s kind of like where the idea originated from. And it was totally clean. So it’s something that people could use every day and not feel like it’s going to be harmful. So we had a lot of like eucalyptus, uh natural ingredients, jojoba oil. Um, but there were a lot of things I wanted to put in it that I just didn’t have access to. So long story short, found partners, found a great chemist and then came out with our first product, which was a scalp serum and to be honest, I did not think that it would pop off at all. I really was just like, I want to serve my audience. I’ve been very like service driven with all of my content. I’m like, I just really want to serve people because I feel like if I serve them, they’ll come back. So that was really just like the heart behind it. But what happened was a lot of people were buying it for like their day were down the street or their mom or their husband and people started taking like before and after pictures and it’s like insane. We never asked for before and after pictures, but I feel like that’s kind of what made it blow up was people That’s marketing there is, right? A before and after. Yes. People started sending in their before and afters and like, so then I would start sharing them, you know, left and right. And I mean, every day I’m probably tagged in like 15 before and afters, even to this day. So were there not scalp serums before that? Or they were, but they just weren’t You know, I think it was just such a new like a niche like, you know, putting something on your scalp, like a skin care routine, like creating that scalp routine was very new. People weren’t really thinking about it. So I’m sure that there were scalp serums out there, um, but I don’t think people were educated about like how to use them or why they were important. Um, so our biggest thing is just like if you’re taking care of your skin, like you should be taking care of your scalp. It’s kind of like an extension of, you know. And so, um, so I think once people kind of understood how to use it, then they went to Divi first because we’re also one of the only like clean scalp serums out there. Gotcha. So the business launches when? 2020. 2020. Uh, 2021. 2021. October 2021. So we’re not even two full years in, you know, and it’s exploded. So I don’t know how much you guys typically share. Do you guys share revenue stuff or not really? Yeah, I mean, like our first like full year, I think you already shared it. Well, you said 20, it was 40, but uh, yeah, we did about $40 million and then, um, you know, this year we’re on track to do 30%, 35% growth. Yeah. Um, it’s it’s crazy. And that’s mostly from kind of the power of your community or that’s that plus a bunch of other marketing that you have to do or how how does the business grow? I mean, how much do we see? That probably exceeded your expectations. I mean, that would exceed anyone’s expectations. Yeah, I always say like when we launched the product, we thought that we were launching it for like 10% of Danny’s audience. Like we were like, hey, these people need to be served. Danny, you know, acquired this audience, they want a resource and it just grew so far beyond that. And a lot of people think that, you know, Divi, um, is all Danny’s audience that’s buying it and, you know, she’s only made up about 15% of the overall revenue. And so it was just a product that I think took off and worked. It was just right place, right time. It was like during the era of the skinification of the scalp is like what the beauty gurus call it. And so I missed that whole era. Yeah, you missed the era. Well, it’s here. It’s now. I don’t have a skin care routine either. So I I didn’t catch up. I need to start with skin, move to scalp. I gave you two boxes. Yeah, I know. You’re you’re in it now. Um, and so yeah, it’s it’s just been wild. I mean, we we never expected early. And so did you guys look at like other creator led businesses? Like who was an inspiration that you’re like, oh, you know, if we do this well, this could be like, you know, whatever, um, Skims or this could be like the Kylie’s Kylie’s lip thing or whatever. Yeah. I mean, we’ve always admired the Kardashians in a business sense. Like how they’ve how they’ve like used their reality TV to grow all these businesses and like we one thing we love about them is like how they all support each other. It’s like a an ecosystem. Like you’re using, you know, Kylie’s makeup and then you’re wearing Kim’s Skims and so we always love that aspect of what they do. But I mean, in terms of like our inspiration, to be honest, everyone in our space was just launching clothing lines. Um, so it was totally different. Yeah, it was very, very different. Were you tempted to do that too? 100%. Jordan was like, please don’t. Please don’t. The returns are insane. My parents, my dad actually has a showroom at the uh Dallas World uh Trade Center in Dallas. So he, um, you know, sells wholesale to all, you know, Nordstrom, all these boutiques. My dad always told me, he’s like, the one thing I ask you is, please don’t get in the fashion industry. It’s just it’s it’s a lot. And so, um, but one thing I knew that I wanted if I ever did launch a business is that I wanted to have something that could be on subscription. And so a lot of my ideas were mainly tech at first. Um, I never really thought of like Tech like what? Like what would it be? Uh, you know, some service that you could get. I had I honestly didn’t have like a a what Like you We had the Sassy Club. There was like one Yeah, there was one time where she like wanted to launch her own app because she felt like, you know, she could build a better community like through a different platform than Instagram and and and and we tried it. We called it, what did you call it? The Sassy Club. The Sassy Club at the time and it was like we used this uh this third party app system and we drove a large part of our community to it and we tried to do like more the whole concept was like, let’s meet in real life with our audience. And so it was like we do meetups and stuff like that and that was just really hard. It was kind of like a Bumble. Right. Yeah, it was kind of like a Bumble. And so we tried that, you know, it it was pretty difficult and then It was it was difficult to manage like the in-face interactions. Right. Yeah. Now let me ask you a question. I just hired a guy, paid a guy $5,000 to do a couple of like one-on-one like workshops with me. And it was all about this idea of personal branding. Which honestly, a pretty lame phrase in general. Like I cringed that I even did all this, but I’m putting it out there in the spirit of authenticity. So I paid this guy. Why did I pay this guy? Well, this podcast itself has gotten pretty popular. But uh I’ve always had this problem which was just like um you see some people and their brand is so clear. It’s like uh there’s this guy who this guy named Pomp and Pomp is all about Bitcoin. He’s the Bitcoin guy. Like you know him about you know him because of Bitcoin. He talks about Bitcoin. Everything he loves, you know, every fourth word needs to be Bitcoin. Yep. And then you have like um Tim Ferris who’s uh you know, the four-hour work week guy or the four-hour body, four-hour chef. He’s the four-hour guy. He’s all about kind of life hacking your way there. And so you you go down the list and a lot of people who have built good online followings, they have a clear kind of like they’re the blank guy or they’re the blank gal, whatever. Like that that’s what they’re known for. And for me, I’ve always been like, well, I don’t know, the business business guy. I don’t know that sounds very like specific or focused. And I was like, oh, I’ve gotten pretty far without that, but maybe I maybe somebody can help me kind of sharpen this. So this guy who I hired, he works with like, you know, like Jay Shetty and like um a bunch of people who are like that, like uh the guy who did the Quest bar thing, Tom whatever Bill you. Um and he’s like, yeah, you know, like Jay Shetty, his story is he was like kind of like in and out of trouble, then decided to go be a monk and he was a monk and then he like got kicked out of the monastery because a monk came to him and was like, you know, you like something bigger in store for you. So he decided to make his life mission to bring ancient monk wisdom in a modern way to the world or whatever. I I butchered I butchered that, but something like that. Right. He’s consistent, man. Right. He’s doing it every day. I just knew I was like the blue-eyed Indian guy. Like, you know, that’s what stood out to me. Like the guy’s got clear green eyes. Yeah. But I was like, okay, I see how I see the value in if you really kind of like sharpen this like whatever your brand is all about. But then I’ve met people who are maybe like you who um you probably never hired a consultant or like did a brand workshop or like sat down with a piece of paper and like tried to architect it. It seems like it kind of happened organically and naturally for you. So I I have two questions for you. One, do you think you have like a focus like that, like the blank you you are the, you know, just like the Bitcoin guy. Do you have like a thing that’s like our brand is is about this word or these three words or whatever. Do you have something like that? Um, so when I started going through my hair loss, I think it was the first time that I kind of felt like I had that thing. Like I was kind of like the wig influencer for a while and then kind of like the hair loss influencer. I mean, as cliché as it sounds, I feel like like I think our biggest thing is we’ve always just been very authentic and like goofy. Um and we’ve kind of I feel like what we’ve done is figured out how to collide those worlds of like being professional but also getting, you know, taking your heels off, getting back home, just like and being real about what it’s like having two kids. Like you’re in heels changing diapers, kids peeing all over you. Um but like I would say it it took like 10 years for people to kind of I’ve never had, you know, this persona or this video pop off and go viral and then everyone knows who I am. Like I’ve never had that moment. It’s just been like very gradual of but I but I totally feel what you’re saying. Like I I still go through those times where I’m like, okay, who am I? Like what do what’s my identity? Like what do and I I do feel like there are some bloggers out there that are so good at like, okay, when you think of Chick-fil-A, you think of this one person. Or when you think of like this one brand, you think of it. Yeah. Dude, that should have been mine. Chick-fil-A. You’re a genius. You’ve been in front of me the whole time. Yeah, and it’s like and so I do try to find those things that like, okay, when in Dallas, when people go here, like are they going to what brands are they thinking of when they think of Danny? You know, but it it’s it’s challenging because also like I’m very, you know, one day I want to be doing this, one day I like to like kind of shift and be on my toes and so What do you think people get wrong when they try to build a following? Not like the people who are just obviously bad, but let’s say people who have the potential where it could be working out. What do you think are the mistakes that those people make that like They’re trying to be perfect all the time. And it’s so unrelatable. I think like one of the biggest reasons that like people can relate is because we have made so many mistakes and we share them and like there’s times when we get online and we’re like, man, that was bad. We should have done that. Like there was an example, a small example, but I was uh cutting up like fruit for my daughter Stella’s lunch and I’m cutting the grapes wrong, you know, like where they can choke on grapes and like had no idea. Like my mom never cut my grapes. So like I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong, but you know, like the DMs start flooding and the Facebook groups are popping off. Danny’s like cutting the grapes wrong. Are you trying to kill your kid? Yeah. Yeah. Like you’re influencing all these moms to cut grapes wrong and I’m like, oh my gosh, I didn’t know. Like so, you know, you get on and you’re like, guys, I’m so sorry. Like I made a mistake. Let me like teach you the right way to to cut grapes instead of like deleting the content and being embarrassed about it. And so it’s like I think you cut them wrong the second time, too. I did. I did. I did. Um, but yeah, so I just feel like I have a lot of girlfriends like in Dallas that are, you know, trying to do something similar and they’re trying so hard to just be perfect all the time. And it’s not really It’s a sense of about You said the word relatable. I think that’s a key uh key thing. Like we had the comedian Hassan Minhaj, I don’t know if you know him. He’s like uh he’s on Netflix and stuff like that. He came on and um and I was asking him something about because we do this like we’re doing these live podcasts now sometimes. So we’re doing one this Saturday here in Austin. And so I had asked him, I was like, hey, I’m going on stage, kind of like stand-up comedy. There’s going to be whatever like thousand people in the audience. How do I, you know, any what what would you say like first five minutes? How can I set a good tone here? And he goes, um, he gave me two pieces of advice. He goes, first, make it clear that you are there. So he’s like, talk about the room, talk about the person in the front row, talk about, you know, the city that you’re in and like what it’s been like for you to be there. Like just make it clear like give them the fact that you’re there and everybody will be present together when you do that. And he goes, the second thing is uh low status. I go, low status? He goes, yeah, like people make this mistake a lot that they try to be high status. They’re like, Yeah. Uh, I want your approval, so I’m going to present a version of myself that is high status. Mhm. When in actuality, the way people relate to you and like you is doing something low status. So making fun of yourself, showing a weakness, being vulnerable, saying something that’s makes you look bad, not great, or like embarrassing to you. And so he’s like, you know, comedy is actually a low status art form, not like not high status, which is what you’re like if you go to a conference, you go on stage, uh it’s typically going to be all high status stuff. People trying to say things that show how important they are and how smart they are and their resume and all that. He’s like, that’s not how people relate to you. And so what you’re saying kind of reminds me of that is like a uh doing things that are showing the the showing some of the flaws almost not just because they’re there, but like it actually helps. It actually builds that relatability. I know, I I I agree. I mean, I feel like the times that we connect with our audience the most is like in those goofy times when I’m running around with no pants on and like we’re like, oh, I relate. Same thing, you know. I think there’s like a there’s like a pushback on like A-list celebrities even towards influencers because it’s like I don’t understand like this is not relevant to my life at all what the Kardashians are doing in the private jets and all this stuff. And like I think that that’s where people feel at home, you know, it’s it’s very stripped down. Yeah, yeah, it’s a lot more authentic. It’s kind of like follow follow my day. And so you uh you’ve done that and now you also launched Divi. Yes. And it’s because that’s kind of how we when we initially found you guys, I read this thread. I read the a Twitter thread. Somebody else somebody else had written about this. And they named five or six creators I never heard of that had businesses that were really big. I was like, Divi, uh it’s a, you know, this sort of like hair care product, whatever, and it was doing 40 million or something in revenue. I I don’t remember what the exact numbers were. But I remember being like, wow, that’s like really significant and so cool. Like I never really like I never heard of that. You hear the same three or four examples all the time when it comes to like like Logan Paul and Prime and Mr. Beast and whatever. Like especially in the tech world, we kind hear the same, we’re not like as deep in, so you only hear the hear the same, you know, three or four examples every single time. So how did that come about? How’d you when did you decide to instead of posting for other people, like let’s create our own brand and how’d you pick the product? How did you like how’d you have the confidence to go for it? Yeah. So, um, there was definitely an era on Instagram where everything was perfect. You know, it’s like back in the day of like posting the perfect selfie or the perfect like latte art, whatever it was. Um, and so I definitely played that game and it gets very exhausting. After a while, I started actually losing my hair when I was in college, whenever I was at UT. First, it started with like just me being so stressed out because I’m at UT, I’m flying to LA every weekend, I’m posting on these videos, I have like Neutrogena’s like, where is the brand deal? And I have like four exams the next day. So I’m stressed out all the time. Started pulling my hair. Then I get hair extensions to try to like cover that up. That makes it worse. Then I bleach my hair, that makes it worse. When we get married, I think like a year in, I look in the mirror and I’m like, I literally have no more hair. I was like, I didn’t even want to leave the house anymore. So Jordan This is a dumb I mean, are we talking a couple strands of hair? What are we talking about? Yeah, no, I mean like bald spots. Like Patches. Like patches of hair. I mean And it was stress driven? Stress driven and then hair extensions, so that’s probably like more traction alopecia. So what happens when you put hair extensions in, like your hair can’t withstand that weight and instead of just losing hair where the hair extension is, with traction alopecia, you actually lose hair like around that whole surrounding area. I see. So it was like multiple bald spots like all over. So Jordan, of course, my husband, he’s like, wait, I don’t get it. Like why don’t you just get a wig? All the Kardashians wear wigs. What’s what’s wrong with that? So he takes me to a wig shop in Dallas, like the first place he Googles. We walk in, it’s like a Halloween store. Like the most expensive wig is like playing called $40. It’s like bright neon yellow. I’m like, I don’t know if this is going to work. You’re like classic wigs. They’re like the most expensive one is like 15 bucks. So I leave there like so defeated. I’m like, I’m always going to be bald, you know. So we actually um learned about this like wig shop in Los Angeles called the wig shop actually. Yeah. Uh from Jeffrey Star. Yeah, that’s what I was going to say. Jeffrey Star. Jeffrey Star, who is another YouTuber. Anyway, long story short, we fly out there, find my first wig. I’m in wigs for a year and actually when I first got my first wig, I didn’t tell anybody because I was so embarrassed. I was like We actually took a trip to Chicago with my parents and my sister-in-law and my brother and we didn’t tell them the entire time. They go, oh, nice haircut. You know, like they had no idea. I mean, these things can look so real now. It’s it’s insane. So about a month into wearing it, I just felt like a fraud. I was like, I got to tell people. I feel like I’m probably not the only female going through something like this. I think that like people will appreciate it and hopefully they’ll be cool with it. So I shared that I was wearing wigs and it kind of just opened up this door of like all these females that are kind of going through the same thing, like this like hidden epidemic of hair loss. Um, so Yeah, my wife all the time after uh after we had our first baby, I think there’s like a a known kind of like postpartum Yeah. like issue with with hair loss. And so she was talking about it all the time and I was like, I was like, what do you mean? Like it’s nothing, don’t worry about it. She’s like, no, look at this. And these like baby hair, whatever. And it really bothered her and I I didn’t even think really even to to try like what what what a solution look like. So Yeah, I mean it’s it can be very emotional like especially for females. Um, because there just weren’t a lot of people talking about it. So, um, long story short, I took the year and wore wigs and I was like, you know what, I’m just going to focus on my scalp health. I’m going to focus on my wellness. Um, and really like give this thing like 100%. So, meanwhile, there was actually this trend um, or I guess a hack online where a lot of women were using Monistat to grow their hair back, which is so strange. But the reason that was working is because it has a lot of like anti-fungal properties. What’s Monistat? You got to tell Sean, Danny, you got to tell him. You should know about it. No, you shouldn’t know about it, but Is it a good thing that I don’t know what that is? This is good clickbait. Tell him. Okay, so all the guys on the podcast would be like, what the By the way, we always joke, we always joke that we have four female listeners. Hopefully that’ll change after this episode. Four people listeners, we’re all like dying inside laughing right now. They’re like putting their hands on their face right now. So Monistat is what people what females use for yeast infection. Okay, gotcha. Who And so a lot of women were using this on their scalp though and it’s helping their hair grow. And people are taking before and after pictures and it’s like insane. So the reason that’s working is because it has these anti-fungal properties in it, which nowadays, you know, they always tell you don’t wash your hair, it’s not good for you. So a lot of females are using um dry shampoo. And so they’re putting all of this dry shampoo, all this product that’s just like sitting on your scalp, blocking your follicle and so your hair doesn’t really have like a fair chance of growing. So when they were using Monistat, you know, it’s kind of like detoxifying, it’s getting rid of all that product build up and your hair is growing. So the only thing with that is you shouldn’t be using it long-term. It’s just like has a lot of harmful things in it. So my goal was to find a more natural way to essentially accomplish the same thing. So I would like get into my bathroom and I studied bio at the University of Texas. I was going to So did I. They don’t teach you anything. I learned photosynthesis for like seven years. They don’t teach you anything about the human body. Exactly. She can hang with the chemist. I can hang now. She can hang. She’s like, okay, I remember that. I kind of I kind of get it, but It’s amazing how much you learn when you really need to learn versus like my major. Now I wish I really would have paid attention because I think it really would have benefited me, but You would have known. Anyways, so um, so you know, I’m like a little chemist in my in my bathroom and I’m getting all these ingredients from online, whole foods, all over the place and just making my own scalp serums and I would, you know, share on YouTube like this is how I make it, this is where you order this and then mix it this way and and then people started asking, they’re like, hey, can you just like ship it to me? Right. And so I go to Jordan, I’m like, I really think this could be a thing. A lot of people when was this like a couple years ago? This was a 2019 Uh no, they probably yeah, 2019. 2019. Um, and so that’s kind of like where the idea originated from. And it was totally clean. So it’s something that people could use every day and not feel like it’s going to be harmful. So we had a lot of like eucalyptus, uh natural ingredients, jojoba oil. Um, but there were a lot of things I wanted to put in it that I just didn’t have access to. So long story short, found partners, found a great chemist and then came out with our first product, which was a scalp serum and to be honest, I did not think that it would pop off at all. I really was just like, I want to serve my audience. I’ve been very like service driven with all of my content. I’m like, I just really want to serve people because I feel like if I serve them, they’ll come back. So that was really just like the heart behind it. But what happened was a lot of people were buying it for like their day were down the street or their mom or their husband and people started taking like before