Hey everyone, we're super excited to announce the launch of our slack community for D two C pod. This is a space exclusively for D two C founders and operators to connect, share ideas, ask questions and support each other. You'll be able to engage with the best minds and operators and consumer and currently we're on a waitlist and it will open up the community once we reach 150 members. So apply using the link in the description and we hope to see you on slack. So before we kick off today's recording, I've got one more for you. Keeping up your momentum this year starts with the right selling tools. And if you're looking to increase revenue, grow faster, build more pipeline and close more deals, check out the all new sales hub from HubSpot. You'll be able to manage your whole sales process.

Plus my favorite part, the reporting. It's super intuitive, powerful and customizable. Plus the whole thing is powered by AI, so your teams can spend less time on tedious, time consuming stuff and more time on developing relationships. Also, no one likes a clunky platform that takes months to onboard onto. But getting set up on Saleshub is really quick and easy. It's free to get started. The pricing will scale with your business, and with more than 1300 integrations and add ons, you can tune it to your exact needs. Visit HubSpot.com sales to start selling with sales hub what is going on? DTC pod today we are joined by Will Bauman, who is the co founder and CEO of Fourth Wall.

So will, I'll let you kick us off. I'm really excited for this conversation because we've had the opportunity to work with you guys a little bit. You guys are helping us out ship and be able to distribute some merch for some projects that we're working on. But yeah, why don't you give us a little background, tell us a little bit about yourself, how you started getting involved in the commerce ecosystem and what you guys are up to at fourth wall.

Awesome.

Let's go. Well, first, thank you guys for having us on. Really cool to be part of the show. Let's see, I can get background on me, but let me start with fourth wall. So our goal really is to make it easy for folks like yourselves to sell products online without having to be ecommerce professionals, specifically in your creative arts. Right? So in your case, it's a podcast, it's a show. Sure, you're talented. You could run a DTC brand, you could set everything up end to end.

But I. Your focus is your podcast or your content creation, why are you worrying about supply chain and sales tax and, like, all the hard parts that go into building a professional brand? And so that's really what fourth wall aspires to build for, you know, creative artists who their content or creation is something else other than running an ecommerce shop full time. And that's really what we try to do with sales tax support, customer supply chain, all that stuff.

Yeah, and let's. I think that's actually a great place to start because a funny backstory is like, you know, obviously if you're, if your core competency is running a commerce business, then, you know, you're going to want to probably get set up on Shopify and, like, build out your whole business because that's the core competency of what you do. But if your core competency falls outside of specifically running and operating like a massive ecommerce store, but you want to get involved in all the benefits of being able to sell items and do that. Like, it's not the easiest process in the world. And I, Ramon and I, for one of the companies that we're working on in terms of cast magic, like, we're having this chat and Ramon's like, hey, let's spin up some swag. And I'm like, yeah, let's do it. He's like, go set up a Shopify store. I'm like, yeah, I can do that.

And then I'm like, wait a minute. Like, I. We have so many initiatives that we're running right now. Like, as soon as I opened up the store to, like, start basically selling, like, you know, registering in all the states where you have to have tax and we have to, like, get the designs and load up the CMS and all that. I'm like, you know what? Like, if I'm running a commerce business, this makes sense. And we have d to c brands and we run them on Shopify and that's not a problem. But for a creator or someone else who's just looking to dig their toes in, I'd love if you could just kind of talk about, what are those pain points for someone that it's like a massive pain in the neck to be dealing with? Like, yeah, like, for anyone who's about to launch on Shopify, like, who shouldn't be doing it and, like, why nothing.

And I'll say, like, for the background, like, we love, like, we aspire to be Shopify, right? We see all the amazing stuff they did. We think of ourselves as, like, the canva to Shopify's. Photoshop, right? Like, you want to launch a professional branded experience, but like, Photoshop's a power user tool. Shopify is a power user tool. So the people that we service really well are ones who, when they sign up for Shopify, they look at 100 options and a million themes and a million apps and try to guess I'm, which of these do I need to start with? And then register for sales tax and then manage customer support end to end and then register for. Do you want paypal? Well, you have to spend up a PayPal account. Do you want to offer Afterpay? You have to spin up that account. It's not like built in for you to just beautiful website branded to you.