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.

When you're on a fourth wall shop, it looks just like a Shopify. Like, if you go to mkBHD.com, for example, or like, you know, over 75,000 others, like, you don't know that we powered those stores for those creators, but we do. We're the kind of behind the scenes and where we facilitate is the professional branding that you would get on a shopify. Again, you don't know that we exist. But then we do all the payment processing, all the customer support. We act as merchant of records, which means we facilitate all sales tax. We collect that, we rent that to the appropriate government authorities. All that.

When you start on the experience, there's a product catalog with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of different items you can design and sell instantly. You don't have to figure out which of a hundred Shopify apps is the best one for you to sell the products you want online. So for anyone whose focus is their content, their startup, their business, their creative arts, and who is looking into spinning up something, something like this, that they want to sell products online ranging from merch to stickers to journals to hot sauces or candies, but doesn't want to deal with the supply chain end to end and sales tax end to end and customer support end to end and every little detail there, like, lot of fucking work. And like, we take that all to zero, basically.

Can you just like, tell us a little bit about, like, what's the deal with sales tax? What do people need to know? Because that was like a wall that, like, we ran into and Ramon's like, there's no way that you need to register. I'm like, dude, like, I don't want to be out of compliance. And, and that's why when we kind of landed on, on fourth wall, we're like, okay, this is, this is great, but what? Just walk us through what do people need to know who are like spinning up commerce stores? What do they need to know about sales tax? And why does like working with fourth wall mitigate that if you're not looking to go all the way in and building out your own shopify?

And yeah, for sure. So for a lot of people like you don't necessarily have, I'm not an accountant so please take this with granted caution, but like for the most part you don't have to worry about sales tax until you pass different order thresholds in different states. So if you're selling like an order or two it's usually okay. Again, chat with your tax professionals on this. But there's different regis nexus registration. So every state and threshold is different. But once you start passing 5000 orders or something, which is like pretty reasonable for people who have online social followings, then you have to register for sales tech which is called registering nexus, registering your business. And then each state, each county, each threshold has its own setup for all this stuff.

And it sounds small but I can promise you from our team having doing it, it is a nightmare. It's so much work to set this stuff up and make sure everything goes out on time and report all the orders. There's tools that try to make it easier ranging from like Avalara to numeral HQ. But like it's still really painful in my experience. And so we basically like there's a real sweet spot threshold where people who are kind of passing order number 50, order number 100 and like don't want to deal with all that but are going to have to start that. Like start to really shift over to fourth wall right around that point where it's like, again, if you're running a hundred million dollar DTC business and you're planning to scale that, like you should be registering it, you should hire a sales tax professional, you should have somebody in house who's doing this for you and is appropriate for you. But if you're selling ten grand a month, 20 grand a month, you know, like is that your top priority or is it scaling the business?

Yeah, and I think what's interesting there is like just knowing who products are built for and as like the market starts to open up. Like Shopify is literally perfect for if your core competency as a business is being an EcoM store or even if you're a retail store and you want to like launch your product online and like run your store that way and run it as a business, like that makes sense. But if your core competency is not doing this, but you want to create merch and, you know, it can be a key channel that's part of your business mix than having the tools to like, you know, not have to go do all that paperwork yourself and just get set up quick and easy, I think is a massive, massive value add.

I would love to add here that the fact will, when there was the emergence of these companies like teespring and everything and printable back in the day, a printful, so many of them have print in the name or full. And so you guys are sort of a new version of that. But also when we were considering how are we going to sell our swagger, there was like either the infrastructure company or the company that like, you had to go with. And then you guys basically just said, no, we can do that to like every single question we had. And so you really, really know and understand your customer. But how is that decision making process internally of like, hey, we just want to be the partner and they don't need to be forced to, to have to make the products with us. How did that decision come about when you're just, you're understanding your customers and who they are?

Yeah, absolutely. So we had perhaps a bit of an unfair advantage where one of my co founders previously started a company called Teespring. And so he left maybe six years ago, but we had a head start on what customers wanted, where I think the real flaws, without going too much on the teespring story, like, it ended up being a very like kind of a cheap or low quality merge platform for Internet marketers to resell products, actually. Okay, cool. Maybe froze for a second, but for teespring, it ended up being kind of, for Internet marketers, was their primary demographic, and it ended up being a bit of a race to the bottom of lower quality products, which was tough when it came to people with communities. And so that solves a side of the market. We're really focused for people with communities, whether that's a startup who wants to sell products or give away things to customers or employees, whether that's a youtuber who has a large channel that follows them and wants to sell plushies or custom candies, whether that's a, you know, podcast or twitch streamer, lifestyle influencer, Instagram or gym, gym membership, guy like restaurant, right? Anything in that. And what they all had in common is they all wanted to own their brand.

They wanted to look like them and feel like them. They all wanted to sell really quality products. So either from our catalog or things that they had found themselves that they just wanted to make easy, not have to worry about fulfillment or shipping or those details, and they just wanted it to work. And so those were, like, the three areas that we have really focused on is, like, that customer Persona of people who want a professional ecommerce experience without needing to be ecommerce professionals.

Got it. And why don't you walk us a little bit through? Yeah. Like, what does the on ramp, and what does the process look like to get set up with you guys? Assuming that, you know, call it, say, I'm a creator or I'm an influencer. I'm someone who's got a core business going on, and I want to introduce some elements of commerce without taking on that burden. What does it look like getting set up with you guys? And how does that whole workflow and creative process, too, like, how does that play out?

Yeah, absolutely. So you could be signed up and start selling on fourth ball and probably, like, five minutes. So if somebody starts a little timer right now, and by the end of the time I finish stocking, you could probably be good to go. We usually recommend taking a bit longer because there is a quality element that we want you to get right, but it really comes down to three steps. So step one is sign up on fourth wall.com, get started. Click that little get started button or start now button, and they'll walk you through the process. Step two is choosing products that you want to sell. So there's three ways to sell on fourth wall.

There's digital products like PDF's or courses or things like that. You can sell something you have. And this is Ramona Blaine. I know you all had pre produced some stuff and needed some help with fulfillment. So that's where we help there, which is like, we've already got it. We just need someone to deal with it. And step three is choosing a product from our product catalog, of which there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of items you can design and sell instantly. This ranges from merch, so t shirts, hats, and hoodies, to a lot more elevated custom streetwear, apparel, plushies, jewelry, hot sauces, you'd name it.

There's quite a few options in that part of the catalog experience as well. And you take all that, and then you upload your design, and then you set your sales price. If we charge, let's say, $12 for a hat, I. That's all it is. You could sell it for $20 and make $8 per unit sold. You could sell it for $30 and make 18, and that's it. Then you just, you know, step one is sign up. Step two is upload your products.

Step three is style your storefront however you want. Simple WYSIWYG drag and drop editor. Then you're live and you can start selling. For most people, we do recommend ordering samples just so that they can wear the product, show it to their audience.

Yeah. And will. Yeah. I got to experience firsthand the full process and it was pretty easy. I'm curious. I know this has been a journey to get to this point and to be able to say, you can do it in a few clicks. But walk us through the early days of fourth wall. How much of this process was, was manual to be able to get to the point of it being, you know, fast and, and essentially almost fully automated? Because I know you guys also go above and beyond and do things in the backend that the user might not even be aware that you're just doing for them to enable their onboarding to be as seamless as possible.

Yeah, the early days sucked compared to today. It was a lot more work. Like for example, you couldn't maybe like on our first year, you couldn't drag and drop products to rearrange on the store what appeared first. And so we filtered by the updated at timestamp in the database, you had to manually save a million items. So it was definitely tougher then in terms of building the stack. But our theory basically from day one was we really kind of put in two years of technical investment, whereas basically my co founders and I and around 25 engineers without really having customers and just focused on building what we kind of knew was like the right long term approach for winning this market and just making that investment upfront. So that took a little while and there was definitely like technical foundation stuff. But now we're at a spot wherever team shipping every day.

We have a great technical foundation and infrastructure foundation, which makes it super easy to deal with sales spikes. For example, you can go without an issue of like zero orders to over 1000 2000 a minute on your shop without the platform missing a beat. So there's just a ton of investment. Every single part of the thing that has made this to go from like what was once very manual behind the scenes to being fully automated today.

Yeah. And one thing I love about what you do as well is you clearly invest. You don't underestimate the power that a creator could have and you want to grow with them. And the reason I mentioned that is because when I saw the pricing in your fulfillment, I had to double check and ask if that was right because our volume was still low. And so the way I saw that is like, man, this is, this is a huge competitive advantage and this is an investment on their end. And the only reason you make that investment is because you want to be the long term partner of that creator. And you know that creators grow and you never know who's the next, you know, Mister Beast, if you want to put it that way. But sometimes a creator can go from literally having a community of a thousand people to having a community of a thousand, of a hundred thousand people in a matter of 30 days.

And, and so I found that to be really strategic on your own.

Yeah. And we have really made a key point of like, creators are the celebrity of the future, right? That's where the next generation of movie stars are going to start on YouTube. The next generation of musicians are going to start on TikTok to get growth and discovery. Like, it's where the future of entertainment is being born today. And so we really have focused on that is our core customer Persona, the theory of winning them. And then it makes it easier for other brands like yourselves to discover us because, you know, as is your favorite TikToker, your favorite youtuber, your favorite Twitch streamer podcast uses fourth wall. It just becomes more familiar.

So we are really excited to announce that DTC pod is officially part of the HubSpot podcast network. The HubSpot podcast network is the audio destination for business professionals. And we're really excited about being part of the network because we're going to be able to keep growing the show, bringing you guys amazing guests, and obviously helping you guys learn from the best founders, marketers and builders of the most successful consumer brands. So anyway, keep listening to DTC pod and more shows like us on the HubSpot podcast network@HubSpot.com. podcastnetwork.

Yeah, I'm curious actually on that, like, you know, do you see an increase in, in creators joining just given platforms like TikTok and enable, you know, creating new creators every day because of how easy it is for them to get exposure? And also, what's interesting about your business is like, I wonder how many of your merchants don't necessarily depend on ads to run their fourth wall store compared to a Shopify store, which like likely 90 plus percent of them run on ads. So do you see that? Do you see stores operating completely on the distribution of the community and not really on ads?

We see, it's almost zero. The number of people on our platform that run paid advertising to drive sales that's really cool. And it's like a real superpower to have a community built around you that you can just shout out and say, hey, like, we have people that can't keep up with demand for how much they're selling, and they've never touched paid ads once, so.

Yeah. And then what about in terms. Yeah, go ahead, Blaine.

No, I was just gonna ask, like, and what typically, obviously, you've got all different sort of creator can sort of sell whatever product they want. But, like, you know, where would you. What do you see as the most popular sort of products that you see creators and communities launching? And then also, like, on the fulfillment side of things, like, how do you deal with that? Because it might be different, you know, storing something in the CPG spade versus the food space. So do you. Or versus, like, the apparel space. So do you guys have parameters set up around the types of products that, you know, creators can sell with you? And what do you see selling most frequently and commonly?

So the honest answer is, what still sells the best is, like a black t shirt, black hoodie. Like, it's, you know, it's the basics that still sell generally the best across all users on the platform. But. But beyond that, each individual creator has their own niche of types of products. One creator, for example, may be able to sell 20,000 journals without any issue, but the same product or the similar product for another creator may sell zero. So, usually our theory and how we guide people to start is in the beginning of your community monetization journey. You should try to sell five hats on demand or five t shirts or something. That's just a sign that you can sell and you have a community who wants to build around that.

Usually then if you can get to 50, you can start doing a little more unique, maybe more overweight. Custom screen print runs a little more unique. Then by the time you get to maybe like 500 units sold, that's when you can do more elevated apparel. So cut and sew, maybe a custom bomber jacket. And then by the time you can move 5000 of those, you can sell basically any consumer good you want, whether it's candies, hot sauces, things like that, and sell it out super quickly.

That reminds me that a value proposition of the way I see fourth wall two is like a creator might think they want to start a business, but in reality, what they want is to start a store or a new revenue stream. And there's a very big difference between starting a business and having a plug and play store. And the main difference is one has a huge operational overhead and capital expenses that require you to start and run a business. And the other one achieves the same revenue outcome without you having to take more time out of what you're great at, which is creating content. And the reason I say that is because you guys even go as far as providing all of the customer support for the store.

Exactly. And that's something that's like, it's a huge value prop just knowing that when something arrives, there's a quality guarantee. If it's from our catalog and you don't have to handle that, you don't have to facilitate that. And we know there's an extra onus because we don't have branded our name. It's not like customer support comes from fourth wall. It's a support dot. Yourdomain.com, contact email. So we make sure the team is incredibly fast, responsive.

I think we have like a sub eight hour resolution time, including nights, weekends, all that stuff. So we like, really prioritize every little detail throughout the experience to make sure it feels the same quality or better that if you were running it yourself and yet it's someone else who's your partner behind the scenes doing that at scale across, again, 75,080 different shops.

Will, the next question I have for you guys is, where do you see the market going? Do you see this kind of, how do you see things evolving? Do you just see more creators and more businesses who, like Ramon, was alluding to have a store and not a business in this? Just coming on to fourth wall? And what do you guys project for the growth and the future plans of how you guys are thinking about building things out at fourth wall?

Yeah, absolutely. So I'm incredibly bullish on creators as a whole. I just think it's such a superpower that if you own an audience and you have distribution, you solve, like, the hardest part of business building in my experience, which is like going from zero to one in terms of customers, you start with that audience day one. So I think whether you aspire to be a creator or aspire to be a business person, having that audience is so, so powerful, we expect over time that we will have a greater, greater and greater opportunity, share of that cohort, because I just think we have the right product for that audience. Our theory over time is by capturing these folks day one, growing with them, succeeding with them, it allow us to do more interesting and more complex businesses with them at scale, or at least refer them to partners that can help them ten x when they do cross that milestone and they do want to launch a business and turn it from a content arm to a true business arm. Like, you know, you can imagine MrBeast and feastables at some point. He's, he's on Shopify and they sponsor him. But, you know, maybe we get the next Mister beast.

Today is already on fourth wall and we're already working with them and we're building that relationship and that trust and that sort of, you know, experience today. And that's really our goal from kind of starting a bit upstream and, and.

Will, we've had like several similar, like, not similar, but like, commerce is such an interesting ecosystem because you've got so many platforms that do so many different things. And one that comes to mind that we chatted with was Pietra and they kind of do something similar, but it almost seems like the creator who's on board with them has to manage a whole lot more of the process because it's kind of like what you were saying. There's a difference between being able to get the 80 20 of being able to, okay, we'll run all the store and all the important stuff for you, or will give you the tools to literally set up and source your product and run your business and go figure out your tax and do all those things. So how do you see the market shaping out between in terms of positioning, in terms of what your business does with how you guys approach it versus that sort of approach?

Yeah, I think they're a cool company and I know rode at least somewhat, and we've chatted a few times and I think they're building something cool and special in their own space as well. I just think they're targeting two different Personas. So we are primarily focused on individuals whose primary art or content or creativity is invested somewhere else. And I think the Pietras and the shopifys of the world are really for someone who wants to do ecommerce as their 100% job, they quit everything else. They've made that their goal. They're going to run paid ads around that. They're going to run supply chain optimizations, they're going to do that. They're going to hire their own customer support.

They're going to raise funds and build a team of ten to build the product. Ours is really focused on the teams of one, two and three who believe in this, who want a premium experience, but don't necessarily want to worry about every detail in it, and they just want it to work and they want it to be super high quality and know that. And then eventually they can scale and add on those starts, but it's not our day one experience for our primary customer base.

So that being said, will, I wonder, how, how do you guys currently reach your, your customers? I guess, like how, how through positioning do you find the ideal customers? I mean, interestingly enough, you have the creators themselves who sort of say how easy it is. I'm curious if that's a channel you guys leverage and because everyone just gets confused and overwhelmed with all these options. So I'm curious how you get to them.

So there's a number of growth channels we use in our business. Word of mouth, exactly as you alluded to, is a very effective one for us. The creator space is pretty niche and pretty tight. And so when one person recommends someone, you kind of see that happen quite a bit. So if you search on Reddit or Discord or Twitter and just type in Forthwall, you'll see pretty much universal praise for the product as a whole. And so that has been a really effective channel for us. Separately, we do a lot of cold outbound. So this is, our team sends probably 510 thousand emails a week, in addition to a ton of different DM's so accounts.

Probably even on this call, my Twitter account has DM'd a bunch of people. We do similar on Instagram. And then finally, SEO is a pretty effective channel for us, both in terms of existing or like traditional Google search SEO. And then also what I would consider that are like YouTube search, TikTok search, things like that, as people find us from various channels. The one hard part for us from a growth standpoint is similar to Shopify. And most of our tactics, frankly, mirror a lot of theirs, is our branding is not like plastered over all these sites. You don't go to a creator's page on fourth wall with a big banner advertisement in the top left that says this is fourth wall, or a giant thing that says powered by fourth wall. It's very, very subtle, it's very, very hidden.

So we really have to find ways to grow that aren't of the product growing itself. In a sense, it's a lot more word of mouth, it's a lot more sales, it's a lot more search and community oriented. So I think of it in terms of like a network or a circular effect where your most trusted question you're going to ask a friend, a buddy, like what platform you use. If they say one, they like it, that's then next you search on your like, sub segment community on top of that, which may be your private discords. Your Twitter groups, your Reddits, and beyond that, it's just global search or sales folks. So that's kind of where we see our different channels in place.

Yeah. And you know, the reason I, this has been a very insightful conversation, will, and the reason I wanted to have you honest, because we have so many people who have shown us the success of their brand after they launch a brand and they said that they consumed content on DTC pod preparing for launching their company.

Yeah.

You know, most recently we had some girls that we interview. They have a company called Good, Good Girl Snacks. They sell pickles. I fell in love with what I saw they were doing on social content. They're the creat. The founders are becoming the creators and the influencers. They're turning the brand into an influencer. So I reached out to have them on and they said, we actually have consumed all DTC pod before we even started the brand.

And so we just have people who are creators that tune in to the podcast because they are trying to figure out how to start their own brand. And, and many creators actually end up selling half of their business to a CEO or someone to run the business because they don't know that these resources are available for them to get data, to get insights and to be able to just get to the root of what they want, which is a new revenue channel without having to have the headache or sell half of their business and have more overhead. So for anyone who might be listening and is considering starting a store, how can they learn more about fourth wall? Keep up with everything you're up to and find you as well.

Yeah. So for fourth wall itself, forthwall.com is probably our best hub. We have training materials, YouTube videos, all sorts of things on that. If you also have questions, you can email me at any time. I'm willing. So drop me an email. I reply to pretty much all of them. You can also dm me on Twitter, dubb Dubbauman on Twitter, same on Instagram.

So I'm permanently online. So just hit me up on any of those channels if you have questions and happy to do an intro call, walk you through with the team, get things set up from there.

Awesome. Thank you will. This was a great conversation.

Thanks will.

Yeah, I appreciate y'all having me. This is fun.

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