Hello? DTC Pod. I'm excited today to have our guest Oren Shabble from Product World, and Oren keeps his hands busy with a lot of other stuff too. So, Oren, I'm excited to dive into each and every single one of those, and I'll let you go ahead and do the introduction on everything you're working on. Tell us a little bit more about yourself and what you keep yourself busy with.

Yeah, no problem. So look, happy to be here. Thanks for having me on the pod, I guess I'm a serial entrepreneur and product developer. Started agency side in New York, working in kind of liquor and fashion there. Ended up transitioning into a bunch of high tech jobs. My first kind of big jump was bringing the consumer drones, like camera drones, into retail globally. So we brought those to Best Buy and Fnac in France and Australia and all that and kind of fought in the kind of consumer electronics wars for a while. Then started the product development agency in Austin with some partners that's still going to this day that does complex electronics products.

And then after that, I did a roll up with a bunch of smaller DTC cannabis companies and Dispensaries that we brought into the public market last year. And then now I work with just a number of businesses, both kind of my own and partnered with others on their product roadmaps and bringing their products to market. I have way more projects than I should. I have my hands in all kinds of things. But I really love building and putting together different products in different niches. Right now, I've got stuff that's in women's fashion, stuff that's in surf. I'm working on things in higher end jewelry a lot in the kind of sneaker and kind of fashion end of it. Some things remaining in DTC CPG, stuff like in beverage and in cannabis related things.

Yeah. So just keeping the time busy and excited to connect here and talk about.

Some was, you know, on my research, I found a mutual friend that you work with, colin Gwynn from Gwynn Partners. So I lived for three or four years in Austin, and I actually went out to the compound with Colin. He took me out on the boat.

Wakeboarding, and I was when partners started, it was the original partners were Craig, myself, and so we've been around there forever. Now they're the kind of active ones as I'm kind of doing other things. I'm still kind of silent in there, but they have a wonderful agency. Colin's a hell of a guy. Learned a lot from him about many things.

Did you work on blaster stuff?

Oh, yeah. So now I remember when we first now it's become way bigger now than anything I have. New ones are amazing. They're doing an incredible job with a lot of that. But, yeah, I remember from all the original prototypes, the original packaging, all the things, it was an internal development effort at the agency where we'd take a certain amount of time that we had and then devoted to our own projects. And Colin had the vision for it. And we were bringing in all these iterations based on airsoft, guns and things like that, then turn it into what it is today. And yeah, it's come a long way.

It's amazing what them and the team have done with it from there. Now it's in Target and Walmart and all these places and yeah, really incredible.

Yeah. So initially, I think for context for the audience, it just really caught my attention how deep you go on your Twitter in all kinds of topics around building a product. A lot of people master a vertical, but it seems like you go pretty deep in each and every single one of the verticals. So I was like, I have to talk to this guy. And then I saw you work there's, this whole thing of the separation between DDC and then drop shipping. And I saw that you go between both what are the main differentiators, I guess, between how do you view the world of, say, drop shipping versus building a brand. Why is there sort of also a separation here? And does there have to be what separates these two?

Yeah, so no problem. Actually, it's a topic I would like to talk about. So drop shipping is great for people that first want to get into just general entrepreneurship because you don't have to actually make or develop a product. You take something that already exists and you sell it and you don't even have to have the factory it's shipped right from it. That's the name drop shipping. But the downside of that is that usually it ends up being pretty low margin because you're making something that 100 other people could also be selling and then also you're not making anything that has any real future branded value. Right? And so a lot of people want to say, hey, cool, I just want to make a couple of thousand extra dollars a month. That's a lot of entrepreneurs initial goals.

But then if you just take the time to develop your own product and kind of make a brand out of it or make something different different? All of a sudden you have this exponential value that's coming from what your brand is worth if someone wants to acquire it or if you want to continue building out those SKUs. And what I like to say is that for anyone that started dropshipping, you have the skill set to make your own product and brand. It's just as hard to drop ship as it is to do those other things. It just seems more approachable, and I highly encourage people to do it because you're building something with actual value, you're making something differentiated, and you're going to be able to have something that's potentially acquirable in the future. And I think it's just a better long term approach. But the skill set you gain from learning how to drop ship is super important for anyone who kind of wants to sell direct to consumer products.

So could you use drop shipping as well to sort of validate the viability of a market or a product?

Yeah, for sure, if you say, hey, so I think there's two ways to approach developing a product. One is saying, I believe there's an opportunity in a specific audience, like, all right, I want to be able to reach 40 to 50 year olds that are really into golf, who are in the Midwest, something like that. And I think that they're untapped market, they're easy to access, I can access them for cheap, and I can get them excited about stuff. And that's option one. Option two is you're solving a consumer need. You're saying that, hey, I think that this product is women of a certain age group aren't being served correctly with the type of cosmetics that they're having if they have this skin tone, something of that nature. And so if you want to test something that's more about an audience and say, hey, I want to make sure this audience is on TikTok. I can get them for cheap.

Drop shipping is great because you can actually get to an audience with a product that isn't your end product and understand if you can reach them. If you're trying to test a product through drop shipping, you want to be testing the differentiated product and not just doing something that is generic. And so there's multiple ways to approach it. I'm always on the side of testing a product first and understanding if that has fit. And you can also do that through presale. You don't have to be doing that by setting up a drop shipping something else. You can just say, hey, we're going to start selling this in three months. Will you give me your email? And if people respond well to that, you probably have something that you can validate.

So you would test even, I guess there's the big gap of email to actually purchasing. There's also the approach of preorder then sending the money back or being like, all right, we'll hold this if we'll send you the product whenever it's ready or we'll give you the full refund. But you're talking about also the approach of getting the email. Good, yeah, no, go ahead.

I think that the idea that someone's going to buy it before it exists is really useful if you have an established brand or an established kind of personality. So actually this is something I recommend to people a lot who are in cash flow crunches with an existing product is I'm like, hey, just presale. If you have customers already love your stuff, you should be utilizing that. But if you're new, I think it's way harder than people would anticipate to just offer something for sale and assume they're going to get unless your idea is magical and you can really validate, you're going to create it. That's why I think email is a little more useful. Because the other good part about that, if you use that as a validator and you say, cool, I'm going to put out content about this product, it doesn't exist. I'm going to get a bunch of emails and text messages. Is that say, then you can't make it, or you need to figure something else out.

You still have this base that you can work from of an audience that you're beginning to build that is going to be valuable if you pivot it into something else. And it's also hard to get people to convince to do that. And I think that you obviously have to cross the line to conversion. But I just think it's such an easy validator. If you start posting organic videos and you start to see hundreds of sign ups, then you have something. If you start to see a handful of sign ups, you probably don't.

So yeah, that's one thing I wanted to dive into is let's say somebody listens to this and they try it out, they're like, Oren, I got these emails, but I have no, like you've seen more data points. You know how many emails will let you know, all right, this is a winner, or yeah, you're getting emails, but it's not decent enough. Is there specific benchmarks you follow for that?

Yeah, look, a lot of it depends on the product that you have. Like, if you have an extremely high end luxury product that is costing a high amount with a really specific niche, it's going to be less than if it's something mainstream. But I think the real indicator this is why I love kind of TikTok for this and you can also do similar things on Reels and YouTube now, at least for the time being, is if you just post variations. Of a handful of the same videos that you know will perform that showcase your product kind of again and again and continue to tweak it. And you'll see accounts like this, to have this where it's like ten of a very similar video. They're kind of testing to hit it, and you consistently start getting, okay, if I post something like this, I'm getting five figures of TikTok views, and then I'm starting to get tens of subscribers per that. Then you have a product that you can say is validated enough to consider expanding it. I think that's an opportunity we haven't had didn't exist five years ago right.

Is to be able to kind of continue making that content and do it. But where people fall short is that you can't just make ten videos and expect to have your thing validated. Like, the whole point on the TikTok ends, you need to make like 100. And so if you and you get a couple of creator friends yeah, make it be posting three a day for a month with a different person, a different look, a different concept, refining it, seeing what working, and people aren't putting enough content in when they validate it. You post ten and you're like, my account didn't blow up. This isn't a good idea. That's not it. There's a combination of both the creative and feeding the algorithm with a certain number of things and testing enough looks and feels to get there.

And so I'd say make 100. And I'm not saying high produced videos, just like you or me are talking right now. You're explaining your product using a typical formula with a great hook for TikTok. And if you make 100 of those with a couple of different people, a couple of different settings, you're going to be able to know if you have something validated or not.

And so what is the what about the counterargument of, like, Oren, I can just run Facebook ads and drive traffic and test it for is really that's.

More a concept for I guess there's two things. One is you can do the TikTok concept without spending money, which is what a lot of people want to look at videos.

Don't you have to send out all that product to a bunch of people?

No, I'm saying I would say make 100, you and couple people, you know, cutting the videos yourself, not whitelisting or running into influencers or anything like that. I mean, just you creating. Yeah, not working through any of that. So if you want to validate with Facebook ads and thing too, then you're already validating a Paid funnel. And I think to validate a product, you need to validate it has organic legs, especially in this world in my opinion, where it's like you can pay at a small scale and make almost anything work. If I want to spend $100 and make some sales, I can probably sell something. But having with ads, you have to know if it's going to scale. If you're saying, cool, can I get a return at 10,000? Can I get a return at 100,000? Because that's an extremely different equation.

And you can have a lucky week if you're testing with only $1,000. And it's like you have to get a much wider range of activity to test on Paid. And now that was the only option I feel like we had, again, three years ago. Five years ago, all we could do was test via paid ads. Right. It's the only way you could get that audience that quick. But now with organic reach of video on TikTok, Reels and YouTube, you can do that without spending that same cash on ads.

Yeah, and I feel like when ads was the only option, it's like you first almost had to do that to understand the unit economics and then work the product backwards from that. Whereas now, if you're just passionate about the product, I think biggest takeaway from ecommerce to brand too is it also depends a lot on the person that's doing it, knowing what lifestyle they want or what they want. If this is a side hustle, something you want to do outside of work and you just don't have the time, probably shouldn't be looking into building a brand. And just like you mentioned, you just want to make a few extra five grand a month or something like that. Just stick. Don't put yourself in that position of trying to do a brand as a side hustle.

Well, this is why I love this is I actually love this as a concept because what a lot of people don't consider too, is you can just buy businesses. Especially now with this is another thing that didn't exist a couple of years ago. That's just a miracle for new entrepreneurs is you can go on MicroAcquire or Flipa or buy a Biz sell and then shopify has their own I forget what the name of it is off the top of my head. You can just buy a validated existing e commerce store that's doing a little bit of money. And so my friend's, wife did this, and she bought an existing business for, I think it was $40,000, which you can finance and things like that. And it was existing. It was doing a couple of month, and she didn't want to build it. She just wanted to run something and grow it.

She didn't want to have to have the initial idea go through what we talked about of validating it. And so they spent that money. That's not a crazy amount of money. And then now it makes significantly more. I think they're doing nine, ten K a month off of it. And then I had a pretty high margin, so she was able to take that and build it. You can do that if you can buy $1,000 store, you can buy a $2 million store, all that's kind of available, and you can cut to the chase right there and then know your validation is taken care of by buying something existing. And just the fact that's an option that we have.

Again, you couldn't have marketplaces to buy small shopify stores like five years ago. People should take advantage of that. Even if you have a great idea and you just want to buy an existing audience or an existing infrastructure or factory links, there is a big set of things that you can work with that just we didn't have and people should take advantage of.

Totally. And I want to expand on that too. I think I want to use as an example. For example, my girlfriend has this jewelry holding pottery that she just carves by hand. And I want to run through the process of taking a company from sort of validating it, doing yourself, to now understanding, all right, well, there's demand. How do we get suppliers and then think about creative and actually getting the customers. So how would you go about sourcing suppliers once you validate it, and you're like, I can't keep making this in my house, I can't keep baking these cookies, I can't keep making this pottery by hand. Where do you go, where do you look, even to sort of find suppliers for your product?

Yeah, and so there's a couple things so if you want to go overseas, which is where you're going to get the best costing, then I think people will tend to be really intimidated by Alibaba, but I wouldn't be it's not that hard to use. So basically, that's just a search network for international factories, and all of them have rankings. So they'll basically show you how much dollars in revenue they're doing through the platform, their on time delivery rate, their reviews by the customers they have, and how long they've been on the platform. And so if you were to search there for ceramics manufacturers, for instance, you're going to find hundreds that have been on there for years that have our preferred vendors. The way you see like someone who's Amazon Prime on Amazon that have shipped hundreds of thousands of dollars of product and that are kind of validated vendors. And if you kind of pick from those and you have two options there, you can either reach out direct to the factory, say I want to make this, can you give me a quote? Or you can put out an RFP which is Request for Proposal or RFQ which is Request for Quotation and detail your product and have vendors submit. I recommend just going straight to the factories, but I would go hit up five or six ceramics factories in those places. Say, here's what I'm trying to make, here's my target price point for how I do it.

Here's the sketches and the various information. And if I wanted to get X amount of units, what would that cost me? What's your turnaround time and do you have the bandwidth to create more of these? Do you understand? Understand, okay, here's my unit economics, here's how long I have to pay or order ahead to get these things and then here's how much capacity they have if I end up selling more of these. And you chart that out and you say, all right, I have to put X amount of money down now I pay X amount when I get the product. You work through terms and things like that with those vendors to determine when you pay. Another nice part about Alibaba is if your preferred sellers on there, you can get financing and pay for things later through the platform, which is nice. Alibaba also has trade assurance, which means if you get a product, if you described your product immaculately on the platform and they send you something that's not as good, they'll refund you. There's lots of little things that they've made to make that process really easy. And so I would go and start there now if you want to make your things domestically, it's a little bit harder because the US doesn't have an alibaba to hunt down exact factories.

So you're kind of doing a lot more work on Google. But there are, there's still tons of local factories for especially beverage apparel, anything, DTC, CPG, stuff like beverages, that kind of thing is that that's all really available local. But just having those conversations with those factories and really mapping that out is step one. There's also services, so one I like to recommend a lot is called Pietra. So they are basically an aggregator for Alibaba or in other places where they'll find a bunch of factories overseas and they take care of the process for you. They've already vetted those vendors and you know you're in good hands and you can pay extra money to have them help you manage the process. So there's services like that where if you don't want to dive in, you could use it and just figure out your unit economics. And I think that's what you do to actually start sourcing the product, then launching it is its own separate.

Yeah. Yeah. So actually we just had Ron from Pietra on the so okay, so you now understand how to find a supplier. You find a supplier, you get samples, you like it. What do you do next? Do you go and then try and think from your approach? So there's obviously two routes you can go to the B, two B route. But why would you do that when you can just make TikTok videos until it hits? Right?

Yes. I think you have to consider what you want and what your economics are. Right. And so if you're doing it solo and you're bootstrapped and you're not trying to spend a ton of money, then that's the best way to do it. Right. Making your organic videos. But for a lot of places, if you have some overhead or you say, hey, I don't know how many units I can move through that, I think it's kind of good to think through a mixed approach where you say, all right. And the mixed approach I like to recommend to most companies is get a couple of small retailers to start with who are going to be invested in helping you succeed with the product, meet them in person.

And so if you're in La. And Southern California and you're in Beverage, for instance, there's tons of small grocery chains and independent stores that are perfect for this. You say, Cool, I want to sell my product in your store. We're going to work together on this. I want to get your feedback. I want you to feel like you're a part of it. And so you can kind of build out what retail looks like and validate if you're actually going to succeed in it. And the reason you choose to do that is because retailers have a captive audience.

People walk into Best Buy to buy something. They walk into Airwan to buy something. And I wouldn't discount that. Now, is it easier to do everything through TikTok? Yep. But eventually to get big enough, you're gonna have to have a combo of all those things. And so the three big channels are DTC, selling your own stuff online, number one. Number two, selling through retail, and then number three, selling through Amazon. I just put as its own entire tranche of things, and I recommend kind of waiting a bit on Amazon versus doing it from the very beginning, but I think you need a strategy for all three.

And it really depends on how many people you have on your team, how much money you have for inventory, and how much time you have to spend on it. If you have a couple people, you have a decent amount of money for inventory. You should be trying to validate all three of those things at a small scale to really see what's going to succeed for you and where the margins are. And if one doesn't work, you're like, you know what? I'm just not selling enough on Amazon. Cool. Cut It. But if one starts to take off, you're like, hey, you know what? I'm doing a lot better at retail than I'm doing DTC. And this is something that happened with a company I work with called Fill Water, where they have a great product influencers.

Kind of loved it. They're trying to sell as much as they can, DTC. But at the end of the day, people don't buy water DTC. They buy it in store. And they were doing so well in stores, even though their model had been, hey, we really want to be a DTC water company, they just leaned in, and now they're in Whole Foods and Sprouts and everywhere around the mean So I think we have to think through.

Yeah, and you can build relationship with those store owners and probably just make it absolutely risk free for them of like, hey, can I just sit this product in your shelf? Don't pay me anything. Let's see if it moves and then we can worry about what my wholesale pricing is and everything.

Yeah. When tons of them have now like incubators and programs for small brands because they realize a lot of these places have a made on TikTok section or they'll have a way they want to test new products or local products. Discovery is so much more a part of the retail process than it was before. I think this is more of a mindset thing where Boomers and Gen X like to walk into a place and buy the thing that they know is great. They're like, I'm going to go buy the Coca Cola, because I love Coca Cola and I want to experiment. Millennial and Gen Z customers are like, okay, cool. I tried this thing last time. It was great.

I'm going to try something new this time. And they kind of have their they're always in the mood to have a different experience, and so retailers have to cater to that, too. They need to keep things fresh and interesting and they're not sure what's going to work and they want to base that on Data. So I do think there's a lot of opportunity there. The key thing is just not to go too big too fast. And that's why I recommend get a couple of retailers. Three retailers. Five retailers.

Get their feedback. Spend time in the store. Meet your customer. Really understand the data to then build out what you can do to scale.

Yeah, and since you mentioned pietra, I know Fair is the version of retail for this where once you get big enough, you can get listed on Fair and you basically get access to, like, 50,000 retailers that can buy your product.

Yeah, for sure. And there's, I think, a couple of platforms like this and that's. Like again, these are all things that this is why there's such a unique opportunity to build your own brand, your. Own ecommerce now is because if you had told me five years ago you're starting a brand and be like, hey, guess what? If you get to list yourself on Fair and you're going to have 200 retailers that are sending you requests, that would sound crazy, right? It whereas now all these tools are at our disposal. And if you do these things in tandem, which I think is hard to execute if you have like, a two person team, is actually kind of easy to execute if you have the right five person team, is like, all right, we're making great content on TikTok. We have a couple of retailers running a pilot program with we have a brand that looks good. We have not just a single product, but a mix of products, secondary products, attachments upsells. We have a good overall value and we're telling a great story.

And then we're also beginning to explore channels like Amazon and Paid and getting returns on it. If you're doing all those things at a scale and you just continue to do it over time, the compounding effects of all those working at once is like, in six months, a year, you really start to take off. And I think that it's just people don't have either the Acumen to actually handle all those things at once or are intimidated by how many things that is. Whereas I think some entrepreneurs are just like, yeah, of course we're going to do all that.

Yeah. And I want to dive into distribution, but first I want to talk about packaging. So I saw that you've tweeted some just, like, products that their packaging just makes the complete experience. But I want to know, is there the right time to think about presentation and packaging? Is this something you do from day one? How do you view that and how do you source the right packaging partners at the right time?

Yeah. And so I think that it's one of those things where no matter how good your packaging is, your product should also be good. So I wouldn't go looking at packaging before you have a product, you know, that works. But that said, I think you need to come out the gate with the packaging right now. Because here's the thing. Every time someone buys one of your products, say, a sunglass brand, if I give you a great sunglass cool, I might post it on social media. I might wear it every day. But if you have a super sick box and opening experience, there's like a way higher chance that people are going to post it on social media and you're going to start to get that organic reach because people are going to want to make content with it.

I think that if you've leaned into that from the start, where that's really impressive, where and you're like, oh, wow, I want to keep this box. I want to reuse this bottle as a vase. Or whatever it is that's just giving your brand extra living room. And every one of those interactions, potentially making them on social media, is such a big opportunity for your brand as you ship 100 units to 1000 units to 10,000 units. So I definitely recommend doing it. And I think what people tend to think about wrong is you think, oh, packaging has to be really expensive or complicated or unique to be compelling. And for sure you can do that. And you can go say, I'm going to make some crazy custom bottle that looks amazing.

But also you could say, all right, what can I do with just a standard cardboard box that okay, it folds into an origami bird after and comes with an instructional or just has a really unique pattern or setup on it. Or one I talk about is District Vision, where they have a note from the founders in every box, and then the founders emails on the side, which I'm like, oh, it's cool. I can see people instagramming the fact that there's like a thank you note from Tom and Max, like, in the box. Right. So I think there's approaches that aren't necessarily expensive to do that. You should do it from the beginning, and with a lot of it is in terms of costing it and sourcing it comes from where your product's made from. There's some really high end box vendors in Italy and places like that, and in Portugal, and then obviously, you can do the same thing on Alibaba and just find great packaging vendors. But I would recommend using a real packaging designer for that.

You probably see I put it out on Twitter all the time. I'm always looking for packaging designers because I just can't get enough. Like I said, the queue is always full. But people who really understand sizing and materials and stuff like that is really important. But one of the key tips and tricks I have for that is use import yeti. So it's import yeti.com. And what it does is it searches customs records for any brand and shows you the vendors they buy from. And for most brands, it might be hard to find their exact factory for some things, but almost all of them are ordering boxes direct to a certain location.

And so you can kind of look up nice brands you have and then find their box provider or their packaging provider pretty easily and then just reach out to them.

Yeah, because you could probably search box supplier X City or X Place, which where the containers are coming from.

Yeah, we even look at the brands. For instance, I actually did this for I was looking I was trying to find out who John Elliott used to make a particular sweater, couldn't find that, found who makes all their shoeboxes. And it's a super nice shoebox company in Italy, and I use them for something else now.

Yeah, that's amazing. I recently got a product from this brand called Elements. It's a beverage and when you open the box, the box itself, it's not expensive. The print is just so sick with it inside. I just took a picture and we posted it on social. Just because the experience and in the world of UGC, it just makes your life a lot easier to not have to sort of source all of that content and just get a bunch of organic content. So if we now start getting into the distribution side of things so, for example, pottery is a very content rich product because you can film yourself making the pottery. I mean, there's so many stages and processes putting it in the fire, like all this stuff, taking it to the kelm.

So how do I know what kind of content to make? Do I have to look for trends? Do I just start making stuff and see what sticks?

Yeah, the answer is make it all. But volume of content is so important, it compounds in a kind of a crazy way. Like if you post twice a week and then you move from posting twice a week to every day, you get more than just that multiple in return value. And if you go from posting once a day to twice a day, you get more than double the value. And if you go to posting four to ten times a day, it goes even farther. It compounds so much it's almost crazy. Like the more you do, the better. And for a lot of people, that's complicated logistically, or you might burn out or anything like that, but I think it's a lot of it's just creating it, but it's about having a strategy.

And a lot of what I like to look at is making it like a storyline almost, or like how do I explaining all these pieces of the process that make sense when you kind of scroll through it in a way that you're learning about the brand. And so I have a pretty big document I have that just has a master list of all kinds of videos and I made it by just looking at a bunch of different brands that had stuff that worked. And there's a guy, JT Barnet on LinkedIn where he's coming out the pod now. Oh, yeah, he's sick. I love his content, but he has a series on LinkedIn which is just like TikTok brands that are crushing it. He kind of breaks it down and I've just gone to each of those brands as he posts them and be like, all right, I'm going to look at them, I'm going to look at what content they did that went well. I'm going to put the list about it on the note. Some of it's like factory tours, some of its background stories, some of it's unboxing, whatever it is.

So I just have this master list and it's something anyone could put together from brands in their niche and then you just roll through those concepts and see what works. But the goal is just saying, hey, we're going to make content every day, or have someone in our company responsible for making it every day and we're going to keep putting it out there. And then the best content that performs organically, you turn that into your ads and then you kind of get this cycle of graduating content from organic to advertising and you're just kind of always in that flow. And then once you have enough customers, you begin asking them for it. I think that's one of the most compelling things that you can do now is saying, hey, tag us in your things or send us a video with this theme, or we'll give you a free thing if you do. That and really beginning to evolve them and getting them excited to promote your product and share your product with it, because it's something that people will do. Now that, again, five years ago, not everyone would be making a video with it. Now a lot will.

Yeah, I mean, that's literally what trend does. We just automate the entire workflow, the content. You can find a spokesperson and we use people that might not be influencers because anyone can sort of make this kind of content for you. But even in the early days I'm just thinking through it, you could also probably just find an intern around your local college and just start churning content out. So if you're one person doing this, I know you mentioned five people, you probably have to face out each one of these stages. Let's say I'm one person trying to prove all this out or two people supplier making, content, posting, packaging. Would you map that out in a three month process? Six months?

Yeah. I think it takes 90 days to get through the product sourcing and sampling process. If you're doing it fast because you're going to send all your samples by air, you don't have to wait on shipment, but basically production, talking and communication there. And you're probably going to end up doing things three or four times to make sure you get it right. That's probably 90 days. I'm working on a more complex jewelry product right now. We'll probably have spent six months sampling and getting it right before we launch and we were going as fast as we humanly could and then from there the nice part is that doesn't take up all your time. A lot of that is hurrying up and waiting based on getting your vendors feedback and stuff.

And so you can be creating or mapping out your launch plans, detailing other things that you have, making your content list and preparing in that same time. And then you can also be using the samples you get to help create your content. And especially if you do have a domestic factory and you can actually spend time inside it and working inside of it, it's important to document that entire process too. Like, building in public is one of the biggest tools that a brand can have. If you're going through that process and you're sharing a lot of that input on Twitter, you're building an audience that can help you launch your product, for instance.

So where can people find like and I'm not wrapping up here, but since you brought up that you have these resources, is this Product World where you have all?

Yeah, so I have a website called Product World and then an email list called Product People. And an email list is really popular. I think we're up to close to 4000 people on there now. And it's purely just factory links for different things I'm interested in or researching and then strategies for launching that and finding your product and differentiating your product. So if you are going through that process now of how do I find out what to make, how do I have ideas, how do I make it better, how do I find the factory? I just hit that every week inside there. And then I list some of the resources and individual things as articles on the site. But yeah, it's a resource, it's free, and you're just trying to kind of enable more people to be able to do that and understand the opportunities there. One of the things since you mentioned you have pietra I'm about to do on that newsletter is I'm starting a product with two friends from scratch on pietra and then documenting the whole experience.

We're going to share it all in the newsletter just because it's just important, I think, to show people what you can do there and how that works and then launching it and working after that is a whole different beast. Right? Because there's different strategies to take. Either you seem to be an expert in one thing, you say, okay, I'm going to hire somebody, or I'm going to be an expert in paid media and we're going to really kill paid media. Or I want to build an audience myself as founder, I'm going to use that to jumpstart getting B, two B relationships and building a big email list and be great at that. Or hey, we're going to be great at making organic TikTok content, or one of those things, and we're just going to focus 100% on that. If you're great at one of these kind of promotional methods or sales, just B two B sales is another one where I'm going to crush selling to retailers. If you just get one of those things and you're great at it and start there, especially if have you a small team, then, you know, okay, when I want to expand, I just hire out one of these other pieces and I know I already have one locked in and generating revenue.

I love the fact that you map out every single avenue and say what you're good at because just go down the path. That's easy for you. You might see a bunch of content across running Facebook ads, but if your strength is sales, just go b to b. I mean, why would you make it so much harder on you? As you mentioned with all these tools now, there's multiple ways to do this, not just one. Or if you're good at sales and deal structuring, you could just acquire too. If I'm going to put my gray hat on, you could also acquire, say, pottery TikTok accounts.

Yeah, I know it's gray, but I do this all the time and just build if you don't even know what you want to make yet, but you know the niche, just be building in it. I met someone the other day who just has like a giant set of plant social media accounts, all that on your Twitter? Yeah. And I was just like, oh, this is great. They have a whole network set up and they don't know what they're going to prioritize yet, but when they do, they had like half a million or a million followers across all the medium. And I'm like, cool, they're going to be just fine when they decide whatever their perfect planner is, they're going to be good. But you can just do that in the interim by just creating value for people, right? Like, I'm not selling anything on my site or my newsletter and people are just going to it. And one day when I want to, that audience is there. And I think it's the same thing for whatever niche that you're planning to go into.

And it's an easy way to start. It's just writing on the internet or making videos on the internet or curating other people's writing and videos on the internet about whatever your chosen niche is.

Yeah. And I think it's the patience it takes to not be desperate to instantly monetize it too. And just it's a hustle. It's not going to be easy, none of this stuff. Yeah, it might be easier for you to go B, two B, whatever, but that doesn't mean it's not going to suck. You have to physically visit all of these places, get on calls.

What does happen is what I've seen, or at least what's happened to me personally, and I'm now seeing with a few people in my circle, is that once you get one product to hit, or once you get two products to hit and you start to be like, oh, I can do this, then it's actually really easy to do, like seven. Then you start to see, oh, I only need one accounting department and I can do this across multiple things, my costs go down or oh, I'm sending stuff to influencers anyway. I can send them five products and get a discounted rate on whatever we're working on. It actually starts to really add up in scale but it's just getting that comfort level in your head where you're like, no matter what it is, I'm good enough or I have enough relationship chips that are good enough at all these different things that we can make it work as long as the product's good enough. And I think that that's the state that everyone should aspire to get to because then you're just functioning in this perfect realm where you're like, I can make anything work on Amazon I'm going to keep doing.

And what are what are some of the categories? Let's say Oren, my first one just worked, actually, last week. Now I want to do four or five. What are the categories you're looking into right now? I know you mentioned pickleball, and I know that's a really hot one, right?

So yeah, I have stuff that I was looking at that we want to do. That's funny. Those are ones I'm looking at. And I have also the ones I'm actually building in. So one I'm building right now is in Sleepwear. I think that it's such an easy TikTok sales category and such an interesting purchase and that the Snuggie was as good as it went. I think Jewelry is another one where think there's really unique opportunities in yeah. And then all these emerging sports.

I feel like people picked up all these sports in the pandemic, and we saw all these tennis brands and golf brands launch, but I don't think any of them have quite nailed it yet. Pickleball is huge. It's just at the very beginning of kind of where it's at. And I just try to note opportunities. One of the biggest ones I see is always just generational shifts, right? So you have boomers are all retiring. Gen X are basically becoming the new boomers. They're going to be looking to their retirement and kind of grappling with old age for the first time. Millennials are then going to be kind of in that stage where they're who are a very different generation growing up with the Internet, who are going to be looking at a whole different set of challenges and Hobies.

And they are very much more vain than previous generations. And so there's all these things to sell to them is like as these things progress, what are things that these older generations are grappling with and how would you sell those same concepts to a newer generation? I think is really, really interesting to me when I'm coming up with kind of concepts there, but to the point of how do you add things onto each other to sell more? I think that's where it works is being in the same niche and target demographic. Like, if I have a successful womenswear brand, I don't want to go just then develop a pickleball brand for boomers. Right. I want to say, what else can I sell to this demographic where I can use the same influencers, where the same email list might be relevant, where the same social media accounts could cross promote and what other problems do they have. And I think the biggest solution to that is just spend time with your customers or actually ask your customers those questions, or go on reddit and see what they complain about and start to build a roadmap of problems you can solve.

Yeah, I love that. So it's like, if it's pottery, it's like, well, you might as well sell like candles or something that's related to.

Kitchens or interior design and all the other yeah, exactly. Kitchenware, ceramics, all kind of ties together. What do those same people want?

Just keep expanding and you can expand the LTV, I guess, which at the end of the day, just get better unit economics. Cost of goods goes down, everything.

Let me say, if you look to sell your business at some point, if you have customers where your average customers bought four things from you over the course of three years, the value of that business to an end buyer is much higher than when you have all those people bought one thing from you one time.

Yeah, speaking of tools, you could even sell it to OpenStore if you're just trying to cash out, which is one of our podcast. They're actually their offices right down here in Miami, and they just offer instant liquidity. So just get your valuation up by extending the LTV. So one more thing I want to touch on is, let's say I suck at making TikToks, whatever. I'm not great at ads. Is SEO a channel for ecommerce if you're patient?

Yeah, 1000%. It just takes more time. I'd say it's going to take six months to see some progress there. And you need to be writing multiple times a week. I'm a huge SEO fan. I spent a lot of time in SEO. But I think you need to have researched your product for SEO early. And so one of these things I did, a little example I put in my newsletter doing this for protein.

And it was funny because I didn't have any preconceived notions going into it, but I was like, look, I'm just going to use Hrefs and answer the public, which are just, ahrefs is a paid tool. Answer the public is free. And just see what people are looking for around protein. And then look at the scores on SEO of how difficult it would be to rank on the first page for that. Then also look at how much traffic it is for those terms. And the one that really stood out was caramel. There was all this searches for caramel protein, and then no one is making any caramel protein. Mean, I was like, oh, it was funny.

I spent 20 minutes on this and I'm like, I found an opportunity. But that's how you need to do SEO is you need to identify that opportunity and say, guess what? There's way more traffic here than people trying to sell something. I can see it. The numbers validate it. I'm going to make a product for this, and I'm going to make content around that and every subterm and every term around it and try to own 100% of that traffic.

Yeah. Ahrefs makes it so easy. I mean, you could literally just keep clicking and expanding and expanding and look like long tail keywords. And the challenging part with anyone that's starting out, though, it's like SEO takes time to learn. It's not just most of the stuff that you find. It's like, oh, just write good content. It's not just that. I mean, there's SEO optimization, there's backlinking, there's heavy research.

You have to understand keyword difficulty, domain authority, like what backlinks you're getting. You can get screwed if you don't do that right. So it's much easier to make TikToks.

But I guess it's one of those things for any of those, it depends on the kind of person you are. But I feel like we're in this golden generation where I usually just recommend buying courses and stuff. Like when I want to start TikTok, I bought a course from this guy, Jimmy Farley that was great. And it wasn't like the end all, be all of everything, but it gave me all the pieces I needed to feel comfortable to make something. Or JT. Yeah, or JT. He has a master class for brands. It's supposed to be supposed to be great, but even with SEO, go spend $200 on someone's gum road master class on SEO and just follow it.

Expertise available for hundreds of dollars is like a crazy opportunity. I think people are like, oh, I don't buy courses around like, no, just do it. Just get it and follow the exact playbook. And if it doesn't work for you, DM the person you bought it from and be like, what am I doing wrong? And they'll probably answer. And I think that that's just an opportunity that's huge out there.

Totally. Or you can even message some of these creators yourself and show them. As long as you show hustle, people will respond. And so as we wrap up towards the end here, I do think it's important to touch too on something I came across on your Twitter, which is mindset. I think a lot of this is like, even if you listen to this episode and you have the entire playbook, play by play, it's going to take commitment. It's going to take shit not working. Videos not working. Hundreds of videos potentially not working.

Multiple accounts, facebook ads account shut down. So I think I saw one tweet of yours that I loved, which was, your goal for the rest of the year should be to believe in yourself ten times more than you do today. You're working on a bunch of stuff. Shit hits the fan for you probably almost every day, working on so many products. So how do you get through it.

Yeah, well, I think I just fell in love with the process of building right where it's just like when I realized all the other things that I thought I enjoyed in my life. Like, oh, going out to the club or doing this or doing that. When you're actually making something and you're invested in making it and you realize that nothing can really stop you. Right. This little things that up, like, you're right, I've had a dozen things come up yesterday and today and this shopify bug or, oh, the pricing is wrong internationally in a store I'm working on or, hey, this shipment is delayed. We're not going to make our launch date. Literally all that has happened in the last, like, 48 hours for me on something. But none of it really matters.

All of it, we're going to get through, everything is going to be fine. And because of the network I have, of people that I work with and people that I found on the Internet, I can answer almost any question. I can get almost any help that's working there. And then all of this is just continuing to put me in a better and better scenario for myself and my family and the people that I work with, people that are around me. That if you're just positively looking at that and you realize that none of those things can set you back and that if you handle it one time, then now it's going to be easy to handle it again. And that your plan isn't just to get to tomorrow. Your plan is to have your own little empire. At some point.

It's just there that's some mindset it's hard for people to just develop that mindset. But I think just that eternal optimism and that belief that you can get through whatever, which is true, because I think anyone listening to this podcast who has invested enough to be trying to learn how they can participate in the DTC economy has that within them. It's just continuing to believe that and affirm yourself, if you can't do that yourself, getting people around you that can. Like, I have a great group chat with two other guys from Twitter I have our podcast with, where a lot of it is. We're dealing with something bad, and they're both like, nah, no problem. You got it. Don't even let it hold you back. Or Someone's hating on the Internet, screw them, whatever it is.

Getting that kind of support from people around you is huge as well. And I think that it just needs to become a focus of your life. And for a lot of people, those concepts of positivity and manifestation and all working through, I think, are invaluable. You just have to lean into it.

Yeah. And also, like, what you mentioned these courses. How can you connect with the other people that are taking that course? They're exactly on that same journey with. You. They have discords. They have Facebook groups. If you're not used to it, it makes a massive difference. And also when you're on the Internet, it's a superpower.

We'll hear from that, right?

Yeah. And then what's it called? Not going to be judged. I mean, they're literally going through the same shit with you making the same mistakes. But also in the early days, there is something you have to savor, which is like the feeling of that first online sale, the feeling of that first video working. Hang on to that, because I think that's one of the best feelings that you might not experience again. Obviously, entrepreneurship does give you its treats and rewards, but that's like the first one. I just remember it just like the first online sale just feels wild. So ride that wave.

You realize it's in your hands. Yeah. And just ride off that dopamine and be like, all I want the thing that drives me is the shopify notifications. It feels great. Lean into it.

Yeah. Sweet all right. Well, Owen, one last question I have for you is, like, with the strategy that we just broke down, can that get you to seven figures, or is that more of a six figure strategy? And things get I think for sure.

Seven figures is, I think, more achievable than people think. And I think a lot of it comes to really what it comes down to is cash flow. There's a difference between six figures and seven figures is, do I have the money to invest in inventory to scale? And that's if you're selling a digital product or something, then it's a little bit easier. And I think the biggest hack to that is really working through terms and financing with your vendors and doing these traditional things like small business loans and credit cards for your LLCs and whatnot to help you do that. And then the other piece is selling digital things, whether you have digital downloads or content or things that can make you money that you can use to fund inventory that don't actually cost you anything. And then doing things like presales and setups as you grow, when you have real customers that are there and support you that help you kind of bridge those gaps. But I think that's the biggest difference between using the same plan for six or seven figures is how much money you had to start or how you're able to get cash flow to get to the inventory to get there.

Sweet all right, Oren, well, bunch of value bombs here. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing all your knowledge. Where can people keep up with you personally with Product World, Product People Et.

Oren Meets World on TikTok, on Twitter, on Instagram, and then it's Productworld XYZ has all the signups for Product People, which is the newsletter which I highly recommend. I try to drive as much value as I can through there and yeah. Feel free to reach out or DM me anytime.

Awesome. Thank you. Oren.