Yeah, personal background. Dropped out of college, got into Ecommerce when I was like 1718 years old. And back then it was all about drop shipping and finding the next hot product as quick as possible and making as much money off that. And then obviously, once I learned the skill sets, I'm like, I got to do something way more valuable than just finding fish lenses online and back posture correctors and selling them for two months. And then now I'm stuck with my balls in my hands, essentially.

Right.

So the Nash revolution of that process was like, how do you build micro brands that you can essentially build enterprise value in, right? Generate revenue, maybe even not even that much profit, but be able to sell that as an asset down the line. So fast forward a few years between drop shipping, learning the game obviously properly, and testing a fuck ton of products. I landed on some brands, or I landed on some brand ideas. And now the current brand that I'm pushing and operating is a Limitless pill. So I'm not the founder and CEO myself. I'm actually the main operator. And I do have a partner as well that found the actual product. I just made it viral.

Okay, amazing. Well, we're more interested in talking to operators anyway, because you guys are the ones making it work. So yeah. Why don't you tell me a little bit more about the concept behind the brand and then let's go through what it actually takes to get it off the ground and what you're doing.

Yeah, absolutely. So the concept behind the brand is we're pretty much so my partner Jazz at Limitless on Instagram. Funny enough, he had trademarked the word NZT 48, which is the same exact trademark within the movie from Bradley Cooper.

Yeah, I remember that.

And he's been sitting on that trademark for years, essentially. He did, like, a soft launch, I think, in 2016. 2017, when I first was learning Dropshipping. Funny enough, he owned the trademark of this product. So fast forward a few years later, I meet him, and he has a bunch of products or brands, essentially, that need to go viral, right. Or start moving off the shelf. So I'm like, this is the one. This one makes a lot of sense, obviously, on it has already paved the way in the market.

Right?

They already sold, like, $300 million. Joe Rogan did a lot of educational so the market's penetrated. Then you see Thesis come into the market, then you see, like, other neurohacker Aqualia. So the market's been penetrated, but there's still so much opportunity, because if you look at the supplement market overall, and then the Nootropics is, like, very small amount because it's still growing. But the world, obviously is all going towards biohacking brain functionality, right. Natural ingredients, et cetera. So we're like, okay, how do we go ahead and position ourselves in this market with a product that has a unique selling advantage and it can compete with multimillion dollar brands and, yeah, NZT 48 was born, and the rest is history. I guess now we'll dive into it.

That's actually super fascinating, the fact that you've got, like, a trademark around a term that comes out of a movie. So you've got brand equity already established.

You ever got a season desist?

No, we actually send those out more than we get.

Oh, my God. How does getting a trademark for something like that work? Right? If there's IP that's essentially created in a movie or somewhere else, what does that look like?

Yeah, it's really just, honestly, a timing game. Think about it as, like, flipping domains or patent pending products. As soon as you know the patent is about to expire, or the domain is about to expire, and there's opportunity to snipe it, that's what you got to do. And luckily for me, I didn't have to go through that process.

Yeah, of course.

My partner is really good at it, and he put enough money, obviously, up on the bid, was able to snipe that, and then a few years later, now their project is going also.

I'm sure at that time, they weren't even thinking of, like, we should trademark this because somebody's going to make an actual product out of it. It's also, like, the timing really worked out for you in the sense that by now, probably movies are trademarking. Like, every product that they invent in the movie or whatever.

Yeah, what's really interesting is obviously the movie is, like, almost a decade old, but now they just released a show. So it's like, not only are we able to maximize off the first generation of viewers and adopters, but now we're getting even more of a natural boost because of the show actually going live again.

So how did you launch? Like, what was the first go to market?

Go to market is always, like, MVP, the minimum viable product that you can launch as long as you have a really good product, which we had. We're like, okay, let's just put a shitty website up and launch some ads and see kind of how it works. Sorry if I'm shaking.

Before the inventory, before having the product.

No, we had the product. You have product. It's been in development for, like, eight months before we launched. So we already know we had formulated it to be the best on the market that we could find.

Right?

Like, one of the main advantages we had was being able to pack all the ingredients that, let's say, an on, it has in two pills in one.

Right?

Or like, Aqualia has in four pills. We have it in one.

Right.

So that was our main advantage, is being able to give you a full serving, full nootropic dosage in one pill. And we launched with literally, like, if you guys do history of our website, like, the shittiest front page with the shittiest product page, and we're like, let's just put some ads out, obviously, and take over TikTok. And literally within the first month of running, between a little bit of TikTok organic and ads, we were able to get like 25 million views. Like, first month out the gate, right? The first 29 days, nothing would pop off. Like, literally day 30, we had one video go crazy, and then from there, it was just like a snowball effect.

Was this organic content meaning well, it was organic content, but was it produced in house or was it using creators?

Yeah, the TikTok strategy right now for any successful ecommerce brand that you're seeing, or like, a new generation brand, is always TikTok first, right? So for the TikTok native brands, the main thing you want to do is essentially you want to hire these kids or creators that will run their own secondary pages that can be very aggressive or very non formal in their language and their marketing. And you pretty much just give them the freedom to do whatever they want, post whatever they want on third party pages, not your main brand page. You keep your brand page as official, as clean, as on par as you want and as you can. And then those kids can do whatever they want. They can talk conspiracies, they can talk about FOMO scarcity, very sales, non sales AI. And you kind of count on them to push viral and impressions, virality and impressions to your page. And from your page, they see the representation and the trust. They end up being in a purchase.

So I definitely want to expand on the TikTok strategy, but before I want to take a step back to that first two weeks of 25 million views. Were you getting conversions? Were you getting sales? What happened from there? Sometimes people really hit the mark with virality. They might not get the sales, they might have gotten the views from the wrong country or something like that. How did that translate into the trajectory of the business?

Yeah, the key sauce here is usually what a lot of people don't understand is once you go viral once, it's not going to generate you a lot of money because that video is more structured for views, it's not structured for sales. But the way you maximize all the traffic that you're getting from that viral video is by posting another one right after it. That's specifically salesy. And the way we do that, for example, is we'll go viral off one video that's talking about, if you don't take these pills, for example, or these ingredients, you're going to die in three days.

Right.

It's like very controversial.

Right.

So it'll engage a lot of people. People will start giving you their opinions. Then what you want to do is you want to find one really good comment and you want to reply to it.

Right.

And you're like, actually, here's why this is true. And then you actually go into the product benefits, the features, and give credibility to the brand. And that's the video that's actually going to generate you sales.

Yeah, it reminds me just a side note of the slot video. We'll tell you after that.

No, I'd love to know because I think this is like a major challenge for any brand. They know that Organic Social is a channel that's tough to crack. And I mean, Ramon and I have been through it. We were running a creator sprint for Cast Magic, and I think we went through how many different creators? A whole bunch of different creators, a whole bunch of turns. And literally on the last one before Ramon was going to be like, fuck this, I'm turning this channel off. It hit 6 million views, and we probably brought in 20K worth of MRR in a week.

Right.

So I'm curious what it was. And the other thing is, for our creative that performed, it was also something that I didn't even think was going to perform.

Like, all these other ones, I'm like handholding trying to tell them everything about the product, and this guy just made some it was a random listicle tools, and it just blew up.

So I'm curious for the limitless pill, right? For that creative that really popped, what was the concept behind it? And then maybe talk me through some of the concepts that you also thought were going to maybe perform and didn't perform.

Yeah, I can't even take credit for the content. Like the first content piece that popped off because it wasn't my idea. Creators shout out to that creator, Sydney, specifically, that we had at the time. But the video was so organic, and we've tried to duplicate this video so many times, and it never worked again, which is kind of crazy to think about. But the main theme was like, conspiracy style videos. Like, hey, do you remember the movie? Okay, well, here's what you didn't know about the movie.

Right.

This pill, there's actually a real life version of it, but it's banned in all these big pharma stores because they don't want you to be as smart as the elite.

Right.

So it's like that conspiracy theory that plays into the native TikTok audience of younger demographic, younger audiences that's so into conspiracies and paradigm shifts and whatnot. And yeah, that literally ended up doing, like 2 million views in the first day. And then from there, I think it's done like, 10 million more views.

Wow.

Okay.

So when you look for these creators, you can go for the creator that you're like, all right, this person. Because how beautiful the content is isn't necessarily a factor. It's somebody who understands the context and just gets it. And you can identify these people by looking at their TikTok page. And however, some of these could already be like they could already have over 100K followers. They might be expensive. So how do you spot the talent in the ones that might just be kids that they don't even know yet, that they have the capability of going viral? Do you go after the ones that are already?

That's a great question. So the new thing is, especially because of TikTok, there's an opportunity now, or at least like the Arbitrage is like, TikTok allows any mom, dad, or child to be a viral sensation overnight as a first time user.

Right?

And we've never had that opportunity in our lives ever before.

Right.

So because there is this platform that's TikTok, and it has this behemoth of an opportunity where anybody's a fucking creator, you can go literally find anybody with a brain that's willing to follow instructions to run content for you. And essentially, that's what we do.

Right?

So we go on Twitter or we go on these sub communities, whether it's on Facebook or working with specific communities, like my boy Jimmy Farley, shout out to him. He has a great creator community that he kind of trains content with. And we just find kids that are willing to work, get paid, obviously, and do content every single day.

Right.

And as long as they can do that, you give them enough of information where they can use Chat, GBT, Dolly, and Submagic, and they can create unlimited content, unlimited ideas, and hopefully hit one dart for sure. And that one dart can make you endless amounts of money.

So in practice, incentive alignment is tough. I feel like with some of these creators, I feel like there's a lot of magic in incentive alignment because you don't want to be chasing them. Like, yeah, you need to get content up today. Well, incentives should be in place for them to want to do it, to get paid. If you don't want to do it, that's your problem. You're not going to get paid.

Right.

So does this consist of a flat fee with upside commission and bonuses on performance? Is it always changing? There's no blueprint. How do you approach incentive?

Yeah, I think here's the thing. Just like, influencers got really hyped up, and the rate until this day, nobody knows what the fuck the rate is per million followers, right. With creators, there's like this idea of per video, right, which is like per video, I want 30 or 50 or $100. For us, we focus on finding creators that are willing to work with us for three to $500 to post one video a day on TikTok for 30 days, plus the ability to earn 20% commissions. And then where the advantage is, is being able to post those same videos you make on another YouTube or Facebook channel. So now, instead of giving yourself one shot a day, you give yourself three shots a day with the same bullet.

Yeah. And it's a volume game at that point. Right. You reach out to 185 will say no, and then five will say yes. And so then it becomes like a game of just oiling your machine of reaching out and finding those people, especially like that community you mentioned. That's a great place. There's a lot of these communities that you could tap into. They've already taken the courses.

Exactly.

They're hungry, they're ready to get their first gig, and you can tap into those community.

Yeah. One thing I was curious about, in terms of the system that you're setting up to be able to do the outreach and manage the whole program, how.

Do you run that?

Is it just manual with a lot of work?

No, really, it's pretty simple. It's funny because I literally just had a coaching call earlier today from somebody who's doing like $2 million a month, but they are doing nothing on TikTok and they're like, where do I even start?

Right?

So the idea is you want to not overstress or overwork yourself and try to make everything perfect. Day one, right? So, for example, you hire three to five creators. Month one. Your job is not to babysit them and micromanage. You just want to give them enough information where they can go ahead and do the selling for you. Your day is not to check on their content every single day. Make sure they post it, make sure their scripts are aligning with your brand messaging. That's the last thing you want to do.

You just want to let them like it's kind of think about it as a dog or a child. You just put them out and you let them do their thing. And that's what you want to do with these creators when you first start. And then within a month or so, you'll start seeing some creators really get the product, really get the brand and start improving. And some won't. And those that won't, you gunt them off. And those that do, you double down on them, give them more education, and you let them do their thing.

So you're just basically like, your time is worth more than trying to push around for $500, whatever that's so cost, because whatever works is going to make up for whatever.

It's like old ecommerce ways or even till this day, right? Like, you spend $1,000 into scripting editing, finding the perfect influencer that matches your perfect brand image just to make a video that will most likely flop, right? Instead of investing all that time, you're like, fuck all that. Here's three to $500. Give me 30 videos and hopefully one of them works. And usually one out of 30 is like a very high chances of you finding one, right?

Yeah, I really like that because, Ramon, we've even seen it when we brought in, what, five or six, seven creators into our kind of pool that we're working with. And some of them were really good. And not only that, every video they did would get better and better in terms of their way to speak about the product and what they're doing. And then we'd have some that were, I think, remote would just be slack and be like, dude, what is going on here? What is this? This isn't it. But I think to your point, rather than worry about that, that's just kind of the name of the game.

Exactly.

It's all your brand. Like you said, it's a separate page, so who cares? I mean, some of them, I could tell, they get stuck on a loop of same concept over and over. It's like, really doesn't get it. Let's talk about I'm curious about TikTok shops. So actually, that's how I came across your work. I saw you were posting stuff on TikTok shops. It's still really early there. So is this for the Limitless bill that you're working on? TikTok shops, is it for other stuff? What's going on with TikTok Shops.

Yeah, I mean, TikTok Shop is like the new again arbitrage opportunity, right? It's like Amazon Day One. What people don't understand is a lot of people are running to TikTok Shop as dropshippers because it's like low barrier entry. But that also means for you as a dropshipper high saturation rate.

Right?

Because if you can set it up, then there's a million other kids that can do the same thing. In reality, the way you want to look at TikTok Shop is like Amazon Day one. The people who launched the first protein workout or first house brand or first sheet brand on Amazon are still dominating until this day. Why? Because of SEO keyword rankings, obviously page and reviews. TikTok Shop is building the same exact infrastructure that Amazon has. So if you treat that for your brand the same exact way, and you can go ahead and leverage the on platform SEO, because now TikTok, if I'm not mistaken, I think I read a stat 40% of Millennials and Gen Z use it as a search engine.

Right?

So imagine search engine for content. And with that content you have product listings with every single piece of video, which we've never had before.

Right?

That's like going on Google. The first article you find has a product plugged in which is not there anymore.

Right.

So that's the opportunity right now that's being built with TikTok Shop and to even make it sweeter because it's such a new product for TikTok and it's in their best interest to win and make it successful. Not only are they paying customers to use the TikTok Shop, but they're paying brands a credit incentives and helping people go viral just for using their new product. Yeah, so the way it works is.

Basically a brand will upload a video link to their product and then people can check out right there. Does it have to be an actual company or can a creator link to a shop?

Yeah, as of right now. So the way we have it set up, for example, is first we built a TikTok army, and then now that TikTok army has the opportunity to connect to TikTok Shop. I see, so now all those kids and all those pages connect with our TikTok Shop in platform affiliate, in platform commission, in platform sales. So it's a no brainer.

It's crazy because now there's many playbooks to run with TikTok. Like Instagram is like sponsor an influencer and then it's like make reels go viral. But this is the biggest threat to Amazon at the moment.

Correct.

Is like doing stuff in UGC, et cetera. But TikTok is getting so far ahead. You can run the organic content playbook, you can do ads, you can run.

The influencer play now you can do.

Shop, now you can run SEO, I mean, just the SEO alone, it's like a whole strategy. And how you put the keywords? I was looking the other day, there's tools already that help you find for SEO, even real estate. It's wild. So I'm curious, what type of success have you seen? What are some of the numbers that you've seen that made you say, all right, my attention should be here?

Yeah. Well, number one thing is, TikTok, I believe, pays about $20 for each brand new customer on TikTok to use TikTok Shop. So if I'm selling a $30 product, my customer is only paying $10. So if I can position myself in front of a million customers, for example, they're only going to pay one third of my product cost, but I'm still going to get paid the full revenue thanks to TikTok. So that's already a no brainer. Two is if you run ads to TikTok Shop, which I haven't done much yet, they're still giving you as a brand credit to run ads towards their TikTok Shop. Three is just the early adopter movement.

Right.

So the earlier you are, the better, because you get to be infiltrated in the system, you get priority support, and you get to kind of see what's good and what's bad in the platform and be a part of that success early on.

And I'm curious, what are brands selling? Are brands selling 20 grand a day, 40 grand a day? Is the algorithm pushing for more, less?

Yeah.

I mean, right now, there's a max of 200 orders a day per new brand, and then usually after like, 30 to 60 days, once they see that your 200 orders a day are being fulfilled on time within two to three days and your score rating is 100%, then they allow you to extend.

Oh, wow. Right.

So what people don't understand is TikTok is taking this very seriously because they don't want drop shippers, and they made that clear because they don't allow you to ship from China, the US. That's completely banned.

Right.

Are there products that are banned?

There's no products that are banned, but you can sell pretty much anything as long as you have certifications.

Okay.

So TikTok will ask you for specific certifications invoices proof of business. They want to make sure they're not selling shit product because at the end of the day, it's their customer.

Right.

You're not getting access to their emails, their names, et cetera. So they want to make sure you're selling good quality products. Yeah.

So I'm curious. Let's say I'm the brand that you had the call with. I'm a brand making $2 million a month. I haven't done anything on TikTok, and I'm overwhelmed. Like I mentioned before, I can do the organic, I can do the shops. Should I hire an agency? Should I consult with someone and then build the playbook in house? What is the best way to yeah.

For me, agencies are a no go. They've always been a no go just because they kind of treat you like a one night stand.

Right.

I think every single agency out there. And again, I can say this because I've been an agency and I've been a brand holder. You're only cool for the first month. If that right. You're usually only the top priority client for the first week. And as soon as I sign somebody else, fuck this guy. Let me go help this. So agencies always suck, so you never want to pay those guys.

What you really want to do is try to do this thing in house furry TikTok right now, as speaking. Yeah, obviously, VAS just in house talent, whatever the case may be, your main goal should be to one, build as many secondary pages as you can through other creators. Because now you have a content building machine and you have a workflow of virality, essentially, right? Now, once you do that, because of TikTok Shop, they have their own creator marketplace. So inside of your TikTok Shop, you can actually go ahead, set specific parameters for the type of influencers you want to work with, for example, and allow those influencers to request free samples from your product so you can say, hey, this month of November, I want to go ahead and give away 1000 free samples. Okay? So what you can do is you can say, anybody with 10,000 followers, 30 videos in the last month, and $10 generated can get a free sample from me. And TikTok requires every single person that requests a free sample to make a video for you. So now you're pretty much letting yourself automate an affiliate machine on TikTok Shop, plus all the viral content that you have, right? Because you don't want to look for creating viral content just to generate sales. You want views and you want to find more affiliates.

And the best way to do that is by seeing your content over and over again, go viral. So they're like, hey, I'm a creator. I want to go viral. Let me sell this product. Dude, that's crazy.

It's almost like, I know Facebook or Instagram just shut down Instagram Shop and all of this, but it seems like it was so backwards because they just tried to take a shopping experience and lump it onto Instagram, whereas TikTok is saying, no, let's build out the whole value chain. Let's factor in the creator, let's factor in the affiliate component, and let's factor in the brand to really build the flywheel.

Yeah, I mean, it goes back to the idea of instagram wasn't built for shopping, right? It never was. And they kind of put themselves in this corner, this pedestal, when Instagram started becoming, like, the luxury lifestyle education platform, right? And once you go more like education and information, then you can't natively connect with people. The reason why TikTok Shop is crushing it compared to Instagram is because, again, going back to that first point, anybody can go in, either make money or get really good fucking deals, right? Instagram didn't do that. People don't go on. Instagram to do either or. And on top of that, TikTok is entertaining. So if you can get entertained, get coupons, and make money, why the fuck would you want to be on Instagram Shop?

I'm curious what the stack would look like for a company to run this in house. And I'm curious because our sponsor of this episode actually it's more now it's a manager VA company, but they focus on management level. We use a bunch of know. They basically do a bunch of our work too. So I'm big on VAS. I'm curious, what is the ideal team stack for running this operation? Like, how many people for TikTok specifically? Yeah, you want to crush TikTok.

Let's say you didn't really have a solid TikTok strategy in place. Maybe you had a couple of creators making videos. But let's say you wanted to build out automations for the recruitment of TikTok creators that are spinning up pages as well as layering in TikTok Shop. What does the lift look like?

I mean, our business does over a million dollars a month and we have seven people. So let that sink in. Like, for TikTok specifically, we have a VA and a manager to manage that VA. Essentially, as long as your team is full of athletes, right? Essentially, that can play multiple positions. That's the key thing. But in general, one VA is able to manage and onboard the brand new TikTok creators and then go ahead and do outreach and message those people. It's not rocket science.

Yeah.

The other people, though, are eight players.

Yeah, I mean, I would say so. But at the same time, again, running an ecommerce business is not hard and it's not rocket science. It's like you need one video editor that can create really good video ads. You need one really good graphic designer, a creative strategist that can tell you the type of ads and then a media buyer for each platform.

Right.

If you can do that and structure a really good squad, then you can probably run it up as far as you want, as long as operations is on hold, et cetera.

Right? Sweet.

So let's take a step back. I want to talk about some of your other experience before Limitless Pill. I know you've worked on a whole bunch of different brands. What were you focused on before it and what's some of the other stuff you do?

Yeah, so Mid COVID, actually I came across Trends.com I'm not sure if you guys heard of. Yeah, yeah.

Trends.com and trend IO that was owned.

By Vanpar and Sharp Urea. Yeah, exactly. So I came across Trends, literally Mid COVID and I signed up for a dollar, and I came across an article talking about the online plant industry is going to boom. I still have that fucking article bookmarked. And I read through the article and they give me the top five plants I should sell, who the top competitors are, the operations and the hurdles you need to get over. But long story short, here's a gold mine, essentially for you to dig in. I'm like, okay, let me try selling plants online. It's COVID.

You can't leave the house, so it makes all the sense. So long story short, I copy paste the website. Literally like the whole website, just copy pasted, changed the logo, and I'm like, let me run some ads, right? I've never been to a nursery. I don't even know what the plants are called still. I just copy pasted them, right? And I launched. And I think within the first week, we make like $20,000 off, like 2000, $3,000 in spent. And I'm like, holy fuck, people are really buying plants. So now we refund all those orders, sit down, try to figure out the nursery, the operations, the packaging.

And throughout the year of COVID after figuring all that out without going too much in depth, we did close to like $2 million in sales selling plants online. And that was like the first experience of what a brand looks like and what you can do when you have a brand versus selling drop shipping products. And from there, it was like, okay, plants was really fucking tough. It was a really fucking headache. Because we're selling live plants right now, are dying on the way to us. They're dying on the way to the customer. They're dying in the fucking warehouse that we're storing. So it was overall a headache.

I ended up closing that business down. It lost money after the first year. Funny enough, we had an offer that I declined. Yeah, I would definitely take that offer back now. But that was kind of the first brand experience that I had. And from there it was like, okay, what's the next thing? And one thing led to another, and.

Yeah. And I'd love to talk about some of the considerations because like you're saying, when you're selling plants, I think a lot of people who get into ecommerce, they're really focused on a product, a pain point they're solving. But sometimes maybe it's not really well suited for an ecommerce direct consumer motion. So I'd love to talk through some of the challenges that you had, like doing the plant stuff. Like you said, the plants are dying, they're live, they're big to ship. How do you store them? How'd you find them, how'd you ship them? Break it down.

There's a lot into that. It's funny because if I were running that business now, I would have made it like ten times more profitable because I know all the things that I could have fixed early on. The main issue, at least one of the main issues was the actual industry and the product, right? The product was perishable and the industry was outdated. The only way now, when I look back at it, to really win in that industry was to pretty much own the actual supply, as in the farm, and grow my own plants.

Right.

Because one of the main issues, we actually faced a lot of trouble on Black Friday, and we ended up shutting down, like February and March the year after, because we couldn't fulfill all the volume we did on Black Friday. So we sold close to $180,000 in sales in one day on Black Friday. All plants. And these are like $100 plants. So you do the math on how many orders, right? I call my farmer up, which is my supply chain. I'm like, hey, I need this amount, no problem. The week after, I get like one 10th of the amount. Hey, what happened to IPO? Oh, we had a storm.

All the crop died the week after. We had a fire the week after, all the plants aren't ready enough. The week after, the leaves are too small, right? So it's like one thing led to another to another, and now you have angry customers, you have chargebacks, you can only do so much consolidation. And that business just turned into a headache. That's one side is the supply chain, the other side was like the actual packaging. So we sold potted plants. Not just plants, meaning we got the plants from Florida, right? We had to ship it to our warehouse. In our warehouse, we repotted them.

So we took it from the shitty nursery pot into a ceramic pot because we were selling luxury plants. So we would buy the plant for $10, sell it for 150. So we had to put in a nice ceramic pot. Now, after potting in that ceramic pot, we had to essentially hire people to learn how to pot plants. And then those same people had to learn how to package, right? Which the packaging was like a ten step formula that we had to come up with. So it was just like a complete headache. But going through that business, I learned the hardest stage of operations, I feel like, where now I can sell anything in any manner, in anywhere, in any shape, because I've been through the hardest shit.

I mean, counterintuitively, there are then markets where there's no barrier to entry, so then it gets rapidly saturated, right? Like the fact that, yeah, that was a huge pain point, but that's why also not many people were probably trying to do it at that point in time. I'm curious, are there specific criteria for the products that you want to do that they must have in order. For example, they say the richest isn't the niches, but at the same time, does stuff that's niche go viral? Does it have to be, like, super broad consumer and apply to literally everyone in order for this stuff to work?

Yeah, great question. So it's like, think about it this way, right? Society or the ecom culture is training you to make $10,000 a month drop shipping the product, when in reality, you can take that same product, build it for three to five years, and sell it for $100 million, right? And that's been proven over and over again with multiple brands. So for us, we look for products that solve a problem correlate to a passion, and they're perishable because we want to resell the customer, we want to engage them emotionally, and then we want to be able to solve their problem in their life that they face often. So as long as the product falls into those three categories, then we continue selling that product and build around that idea. I like that a lot.

That's a great framework. I'm curious, just going back to the plants for a second. How did you guys scale all this sort of stuff? Who are you hiring? Where did you go to do it? Where was your warehouse?

Dude, the thing is, as an entrepreneur, you never think about how you're going to do it. You just do this and you figure it out. Every single time I was in a position where it's, like, sold the product, then I figured out how to deliver. I took over the warehouse, and I figured out how to pay for it. I just hired a person. I figured out how to train them, right? It's never like, oh, I have this magical system that I have now. Just come in, go through the system, and life is perfect. So looking back at it, I remember our first facility when we were shipping plants from Miami to Boston, and then shipping from Boston.

We had taken over a warehouse. Our USPS guy, our Ups guy at the time, this guy Phil, was like, the most depressed Ups driver. It's like, what's up, dude? Every fucking guy would show up. He's like, what are you guys fucking doing?

Right?

Like, first week, he's like, picking up three plants, ten plants, 20 plants a day. He's like, you guys need help. I was like, yeah. So he literally calls up the local hockey kids that work in that city, and they all need jobs. So we literally hired, like, half the hockey team, dude, to fucking fulfill products for us.

That's epic.

Yeah. And they've never done no packaging. They don't even know what ecommerce is. They just came in there, right? So that was, like, one big blessing. And then we moved to another warehouse, and we ended up knowing a friend that his mom was a realtor. So we ended up working with her, and then she recommended kids from his high school, and then we ended up doing the same thing here.

Right.

It was just like just being very resourceful. That's what it is as an entrepreneur. You just got to pull strings, figure out who you have, and then between God and your plan, things will work out.

So here's my question. You said there were a couple of things you'd do differently if you could start your plant business over from day one. What would those be? If you had to execute on a plant business today, how would you spin it up?

Yeah. One, I would own the supply chain right away. I would go to work with a farmer and make sure that I can literally ship and manage the farm myself.

Right.

Because if I could ship from the same moment I'm picking the plant out, then my chances of success and that plant being in great shape is like 30 times.

Well, how do you know that's a worthy investment?

Because that's what the biggest competitors in the industry do now.

But for that specific vertical or product.

We'Re saying if he has to do his plant business all over again, you.

Already validated, so you know it's worth to do correctly.

Correctly. And there's brands like the SIL or Bloomscape. These are all brands that do millions of dollars a month, and that's their business model to it.

Right.

That's number one. Number two is invest in packaging. We bootlegged our packaging, meaning we bought foam, we bought boxes, we bought inserts to make this one unique packaging, instead of spending 100K up front to develop a specific box that can hold your plant and make sure it's not going to break it. And the third thing was I would build a community based brand where I'm charging, let's say, $20 or $8 a month to generate more profits, to allow people to maintain and further take care of the well being of their plant. Because that's one thing. We did good, but we didn't do great. And I think between good and great, there's a lot of plants, for example, that as soon as you get it, it might look dead today, but you give it some water, you put some sun on it, for example, you give it some more educational, it'll survive. So between making more profit as an info product, owning the actual supply chain, and then investing in the most important thing, which is the packaging, those are the three main things that I would do to turn that business around.

What about on the marketing front? What would you have done differently?

Nothing. Marketing wasn't the problem. Marketing is never the problem. It's always the supply chain.

So what was the marketing then, for that business?

TikTok wasn't around at the time, so it was Instagram and Facebook and influencers.

Yeah.

We had literally, like, Kylie Jenner's friends, like Stassy, Chantel, Jeffries, like all these people who are locked in their home, especially girls who absolutely love plants, which I had no clue, just ship them a free plan. We would have a post from, like, 10 million followers, say, I love plants. And it was like a new thing, right? When have you ever gotten reached out by a plant company?

Right? Yeah.

Marketing is never the problem. Marketing is always the easiest thing. It's how do you fulfill your promise that you're doing on the marketing side of the know?

It's a funny story. During the pandemic, I ordered tuna from Hawaii to my apartment, and it was really good, but it took so long to get there, and so they were just, like, backed up, backed up. And I was like, this actually came all the way from Hawaii, and I'm from the Caribbean, so I'm like, all right, well, I should just get lobsters from the Caribbean and sell them online. So I made a landing page. I ran ads. It was called Caribbean Catch, and the ads blew up. Average order value was, like, $300 on lobster and tuna, and I didn't have any of the supply figured out. So then I started cold calling places in Jamaica.

They supply lobster to red lobster and all this stuff. I was like, I got to get back to software. Just like frozen foods, just having to figure out the shipment of it has to arrive frozen, and the zoning and all that, the cost, the margins, just it reminded me of that.

Selling lobsters online. Wow.

Live lobster.

I thought plants was hard. You're trying to sell animals?

Yeah, some live lobsters online. That's cool. So what else do you do?

Now?

You say you do some consulting with brands too, so why don't you walk me through that? What do you do with brands? What's your process?

Yeah, the main thing is the main thing, it's always ecommerce. We just kind of do different things. So whether it's we operate brands, we incubate brands, or we help grow brands, as simple as that. So brands will come up to us. They'll say, hey, we love what you're doing with brands, so and so on TikTok, can you help us do that? So we'll easily go in, consult, help them build the system out, recruit them, the creators, if we want to point them towards the right direction. But there's no magic sales pitch. It's just like, brands need help and specific things that we're really good at, and we just go ahead and help you with that.

Sweet.

And then why don't you talk to us a little bit about the incubation side? That's really cool.

Yeah, the incubation side really just comes down to finding opportunity in the market and being able to maximize that opportunity. Like, now the game is for me because I have the leverage is I go ahead and let's say I want to launch a new supplement. My goal was not to do the R and D and develop the supplement with my own money. It's to go ahead and find a manufacturing facility that has the money, has the resources, and has the machinery and be like, hey, I'm running this brand up. Here's my portfolio. I'll give you 10% of the brand if you could do the R and D for me and make me this specific product. So that's the idea of incubation. And we specifically focus on supplements and beauty.

It's either feel good or look good, because those are recession proof industries, and people always want to do those two things. So we go ahead. We partner up with a manufacturing facility. All usually in the US. Or Mexico right now is a really hotspot you give them part of your portfolio or give them part of your brand. You partner up with that manufacturing facility. So you save yourself a fuck ton of costs and time and then you go ahead and incubate it in a brand new market.

I bet that portfolio looks good.

It's pretty healthy.

It's a tough sale. Probably for anyone who's like approaching. You've done it before, and you've proven it over and over. So how do you vet those partners?

To be honest. I'm going to answer your question. But it's not really a hard process because think about it this way. When we first started this podcast. You guys are really good at SaaS and you're trying to do direct to consumer. And it's like for me, it's the other way around. So for the suppliers, the issue is they always see be brands like us ordering from them all the time, but they don't get it. They don't understand where they're selling it or how they're selling it.

But they want to be involved, right? Because they're fulfilling the invoices that you're paying.

Right.

So it's a really easy sell if you're like. Hey, who do you manufacture for? Well, I manufacture for I don't know sweet dreams, for example. Oh, really? Okay, well, I'm going to do something very similar. Do you want to own part of sweet Dreams?

Right.

So it's pretty organic. But for me, in terms of vetting those partners, usually it's either word of mouth or just seeing what other products they've done. And if they've done other products for other brands that are really good, then obviously they can produce something really good for me too.

Yeah.

And I think it makes a bunch of sense, right? Because their focus and their core competency is manufacturing is not an easy thing to do, especially if you've been inside some of these factors, getting those things up and running. And Ramon, the olive brand that we're working on, they process 500 tons of olives every day. Just imagine the Cap X to build out a facility and run an operation that does that, but then to go and scale out the actual brand component of it. There's a lot like going and recruiting creators and running Facebook ads and getting behind their computer. It's a different right.

So there's a reason why every manufacturer doesn't have an it's. Like they don't that's not what they do, but they would love to do it, they just don't have the time and the capability to do so.

Yeah, and then you've got all the brands that are like hammering the distribution and the consumer side. So it's just different sort of markets. So I'm curious, why don't you tell us some of the brands that you said you like looking at? Supplements and beauty. So what are some other products that you're looking at that you've worked out? What are some concepts that really have excited you and stuff like that?

Right now there's a few industries that really excite me. They all revolve around health in a sense. Like, for example, one thing I do see in the upcoming, I think two to three years that will be really popping is the opposite of what's popping now, which is like energy.

Right?

Everything being sold online right now is like testo, boosting energy, get high, get more energy, more caffeine, et cetera. I think the opposite kind of loop is going to come around the next two, three years. It's like you've taken all these supplements to fucking boost your energy. It's time for you to take supplements to wind down. So not to go to sleep, but just wind down, maintain your energy levels, good mood, et cetera. So I think that's one really big, broad industry that is going to pop off pretty soon. Another one is actual health, the idea of health, but more tailored specialty health. Meaning you take supplements, right? I take supplements.

Have you ever tested what supplements you need for? Yeah, have you? Me either. But why do I take them? Because online tells me, right, gurus, other people tell me this is the right thing to do. So, for example, I think 90% of men take testosterone boosters, but they've never measured their testosterone. So think about the idea of selling a health kit that can go ahead and help people measure their health at home, return it to you, and then you sell their supplements to it.

Right?

So it's like just the idea of tailored health towards where we're going to specifically around the biohacking or the calming down and the whole Zen energy thing. I think that's what really excites me right now.

Yeah, I think the biohacking industry, it's so interesting to me because you have people like Huberman and all these other people leading the charge around it. It's just so fascinating that it took this long before a Stanford professor and now everyone in the world is tuning into a Stanford professor. And then on top of that, you have all these influencers who are typically going out drinking, dressing up, going to events, and now all of a sudden they're reciting complex neurological terms like being like absolute biohackers. But I think part of it too is as creators, they're educators as well. They have audience and this is really exciting content that they can share. And they want to share new and novel ideas and content. So I think that really pairs it's just an interesting pairing between creator like science, something new, novel. People need to be different.

Exactly.

I'm curious on that note. So what makes a great brand?

That's an interesting question. So yesterday I was at an event where the founder of hims and hers, which is a billion dollar brand, was talking and then another founder from Glow Recipe, which is like 100 million dollar brand, was talking. They were both talking about the idea of like, what makes a brand? At the end of the day, a brand is really just the way you communicate to a specific group of people and doing it consistently for a long period of time. That communication can be whether it's through product, which is having a really high quality product every single time. It can be through customer service, having really good customer service every single time, or from a visual representation, which a lot of people think what a brand is a really nice logo color that's consistent on every single platform. So the idea of brand is just being consistent to a group of people for a very long time. If you can do that, then you have a brand with a thousand loyal followers that'll go ahead and do a lot of science or a lot of marketing for you for the rest of your life.

Yeah, it's funny because there's a lot of actually, this is a great timing and a market opportunity for M and A. I saw you had a post of you sent this tweet of Beekeepers brand is like, they have the brand they're established, they're doing absolutely nothing on TikTok. That's a perfect roll up opportunity. I mean, that's probably what OpenStore is going to do. And all these other people, it's like you could buy these brands that are established and just run the playbook. Is that something you're actually interested in yourself?

Yeah, I think there's opportunity. Not only a lot of people can't afford to buy brands like Beekeepers, for example, taking them online, right. But there's like opportunity for you as the online expert to go work with these big brands and say, hey, give me a piece of equity or a really high salary, for example, or a piece of what I make here. A lot of honey for building your online piece.

Right.

Because the way I think about it, business is this, right? For example, the reason why my partner worked up, partnered up with me, he owns a jet. He's super fucking rich guy's, probably worth like a hundred million dollars. He worked with me because, one, I'm young, two, I'm more involved in the industry than he is. And somebody who's older than you that's already crushing it in a specific department, like, let's say Fiji, for example, right? Just stupid example. They're already doing a lot of good things that are right. They're not going to waste time and try to relearn what the new strategy is. They want to go ahead and hire somebody who does so for you as an entrepreneur, the best opportunity you can do now is be really good at this skill, whether it's TikTok shop or ads or creative strategy and go find brands that are lacking that online presence and say, hey, I'll run the whole show for you. You just need to give me X, Y and Z and there's a huge opportunity to do that.

Yeah, I think it's always like that. It's like a tale as old as time. I feel like when I was graduating college, apps were like a really big thing and no one had a mobile app. And it's like if you could build a mobile app for someone, it was like the biggest thing now. And now apps are like a dime a dozen. And even the way we think about building apps, it's like it doesn't make sense to build an app unless you really need an app and there's a real use case around it. But at that time, when there's a shift in culture or what people are focused on, that's where there's an opportunity for, you can go and learn the new thing and then the bigger business, who they don't have to worry about. Their core competency is somewhere else they can kind of bring it.

Mean as we kind of wrap up here, why don't you tell us about miami? Right. How long have you been here? How's the e commerce scene been? What do you like about it?

I love the weather in Miami. I love the food and I love the culture to some degree. But I also hate how absorbing it is.

Right.

Like, if you don't have a good head between your shoulders, it's really easy to get sucked in and fall for what Miami truly is, right? And the grass is never greener on the other side. And that's true definition of Miami. Like, they can be driving Lambos and wearing jewelry and popping bottles at the club, but in reality, they probably go back to their mini apartment, their million dollars in debt and their family hates, right? So when I first moved to Miami, I kind of went through that whole Miami phase of going out Thursday through Sunday and Kiki on the river and Komodo and Live and all these cool stuff. But then you realize you're like, oh, I'm just wasting my money here and this is here forever. It's not going anywhere. Like, oh, Connie is here today. Well, he's going to be here next year. Same exact drake's here today.

He's going to be here next month. Same exact time. So it's like you never miss out on anything. But yeah, that's kind of. Like, the story of Miami.

Right?

It's like if you have a good head on your shoulders, it's great to network, like great people like you guys, obviously, the community, the hustlers is like a lot of that inspiration that you need is here. But that same inspiration can make you feel, I guess, depressed and feel like you need to compete or do stuff that you're not really supposed to do.

Yeah, 100%. I feel like for us, I got lucky. I feel like I'd been kind of over that phase of my life, I guess. So for me, it's like a great home base, and I love being able to meet up, especially do a lot of in person stuff. I think it's great for, like, New York might be almost a little bit overwhelming because everyone in the world is there so you can balance your life. I think it's been I think it's.

Still early here, though.

Yeah, I think so too.

There's so much going.

But yeah, man. Anyway, this was a whole bunch of fun. Why don't you shout out your socials working people?

Where is the main thing? The mohayak? Or just go to mohayak.com and you'll find a book.

How do you spell that?

Moehayek.com.

Sweet.

Well, thanks for coming on the show.

Thank you, boys. Well, it was great.

That was great, man.