Welcome to Dtcpod, where we take you behind the wheel with the best founders and operators of consumer brands. You'll learn the ins and outs of business from setting up shop, hitting your first millions, scaling past eight figures, and even navigating an exit. As founders ourselves, our goal is to help you learn from the best as you build. Visit us@dtcpod.com to sign up for our weekly newsletter. Join our founder community and find additional resources from every episode. Dtcpod is brought to you by Trend, the creative solution for your brand. Go to trend. IO to access thousands of creators for content needs such as product photography, unboxing videos, or even TikTok and Igorganic Creative. Use the code Dtcpod ten for 10% off your next content purchase. As a D to C brand, you need real time financial visibility to save money and make better decisions. Waiting for books from slow and expensive bookkeepers that don't get ecommerce is slowing you down. Trusted by hundreds of brands, final Loop is a real time accounting service built by D to C founders. For D to C. Founders try final loop. Completely free, no credit card required. Just visit Finalloop.com D to CPOD and get 14 days free and a two month PNL within 24 hours with all the ecom data and breakdowns you need to crush it. What's up, DTC Pod? Today we've got Philip Rafini, who's the founder of Content assistant. So Philip, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about yourself, your background, and what you're up to at Content Assistant.

Yeah, so quick one liner is Content Assistant. Helps companies basically produce organic content. A little bit about myself. Went to school at University of Michigan, where I studied business computer science. I had my own ecommerce brand all throughout college selling office products. Did that to my senior year. Decided I wanted to do the big tech thing. So sold the business, paid off all my student loans, and went to go be a product manager at Microsoft, which is the worst thing I've ever done. It's extremely boring. People at these companies actually work less than 20 hours a week, and I spent most of the time walking around getting coffee with my friends. But I was like the first PM on an operating system and app store for automotive companies, which is like air quotes. Startup within Microsoft. Not the same as running a startup. You still get paid the same thing even if it lives or dies. So after that, went to go do a startup of my own. Didn't work out with my co founder. And then for the past two years, I've just been doing growth consulting for startups in crypto, fintech, bunch of different places. And then I also did my master's at Chianghua University in China through a program called the Shoresman Scholars, which was just a fun sidebar of making friends who weren't all just I want to start a tech company or e commerce company. And now I run content Assistant, which came from seeing problems that I constantly saw within the startups I was doing growth consulting for, which was everyone asking know, Philip, how'd you grow your TikTok? We want to create content, and we don't know how to start.

Well, that's awesome. I love that background. I love the context of having done a little bit of everything, not only in terms of where you worked, right. Like, having worked at the super corporate level, at the startup level, but also who you're working with, working around the world. I didn't know you were at Qinghua. I was back in China, like, ten years ago, back in the day, and like, BLCU, I worked there at Amazon, actually, for a while, so that's cool. What year were you out there?

When? Yeah. When? August 2021 to June 2022. So during COVID so I went through four weeks of quarantine. We got locked down on campus for two months. I've been to China twice. The first time, I went to ten different cities. The second time, while I was there, I only got to go to Beijing and Shanghai for a weekend once because of all the lockdowns, but it was one of the most interesting things I've ever done.

Wow. Yeah. And definitely want to get back into the content stuff and not distract too much. But what was the environment like when you were there? I think the reason I want to ask is just because from the time I was there in college, 2012, 2013, there's been a lot like, China and its position in the world has obviously changed a whole lot.

Right.

And when I was there, it was like a total free for all. Anyone could do anything right. What was kind of the like, on the piggyback of COVID and when you were there? I don't know. What was the feeling while you were out there?