From Idea to $11M in 18 Months | Oliver Brocato - Tabs

one day I wake up and I'm 21 years old and I'm worth millions and millions of dollars and it's a holy [ __ ] this guy's about to make 7 million online selling these guys actually get how to Market on the internet and by the way [ __ ] all of those YouTubers and those gurus that try to perpetuate that lot you can't cheat that there is no shortcut you need to fail and I'm sitting there thinking what the [ __ ] did I do I call it my academic advice like I said I need

to I need to go back to school it was like probably like one of the lowest points for me I'm completely isolated I'm completely alone company's taking and I'm like [ __ ] right but at the same time it also forced me to put my back against the wall and slowly slowly like I started to build things bad things started to rebound and explode and after July we have been growing month after month after month but we're not gonna be pushing over a million dollar months that's what viral marketing is so you know I was

working with as many micro influencers as it possibly could but it was incredibly challenging logistically and that's when I had this holy [ __ ] [ __ ] moment this is the model that we need to run on right because instead of like always chasing after the next influencer to post about us I was able to basically find one Creator get him on my retainer and now it's set and forget then my thought process became that well how do I scale things like how insane is that decreasing the Box by one ounce is going to

make me three hundred thousand dollars this year what the [ __ ] people don't want to think that those successful people are like the same as that because because they don't want to realize that they're missing out on their potential how to make you feel to be to know that you could be at that level but you're not because you're too busy [ __ ] playing fortnite hello and welcome to the we're gonna make it podcast where we talk to entrepreneurs that are in the shadows lesser known but using cutting-edge Technologies strategies and tactics to

grow their businesses to the multiple eight figures if you want to learn about those strategies or tactics subscribe to our free newsletter but other than that please enjoy the episode all right Oliver picado my friend okay thank you for coming thank you for having me sex chocolate yep how did you get into that where's your business at what's it all about yeah absolutely man um this year we're gonna do over 10 million dollars in Revenue at 40 to 45 net profit margins and uh we're probably gonna put up over a billion views organically and how

old are you I'm 21. okay so guys I'm bringing Oliver on here because a lot of times we see podcasts on social media you see people with a large following and then any business they kind of start from that following is successful Oliver here has done it without building a personal brand he's recently made a few videos on his YouTube channel sharing his actual whole story so if you want to go listen to that where can they find you there Oliver brocato okay so I've watched the video I know your story so I just want

to get straight into like the business tactics how you're making this possible let's talk about it a lot of people make money online Drop Shipping is really popular right the number one thing that stuck out about you to me when I saw your content was you focus first things first on making a good product absolutely Drop Shipping that's almost like the third or fourth thing that's like snuck under the rug in a way where you don't talk about the products like find a product that is like popular right now right and sell it there's no

focus on the product so right how did you get that mindset and then how did you make a good product yeah absolutely I mean I I think first of all that Drop Shipping is a bit of a scam in the sense that everybody tells beginners that like this is your entry point into e-commerce and like this is how you're going to make millions of dollars this is how you're going to be successful but the reality is is that I think that it's arguably harder to run a successful Drop Shipping Store than it is to build

a legitimate brand and the reason being is that with Drop Shipping you're always chasing the the next Buck you're always chasing the quick fad and things are constantly moving and so it's really hard to establish yourself on top of that you know with Drop Shipping you're delivering a shitty customer experience which means that there is no LTV you're getting a quick lick which means that you need to be profitable on the customer acquisition cost and you don't get to milk the returning customer that hopefully you want to create with legitimate brand where when I acquire

one customer I hope and I know that they're going to come back over the next five years 10 20 times which allows me margin to play with when I'm acquiring them in the beginning yeah this is huge because a lot of people just think they need to like use aggressive marketing tactics to find a quick product and then sell it and that's success but then they run into problems where their ads are unprofitable or they can't scale their store right no [ __ ] because no one's going to their friend and telling them to buy

their product no one's coming back to buy more absolutely and you're also just like not building anything long term because you're always chasing like the next quick hot product whereas with a brand You're Building equity and by the way like the real wealth comes from the exit not from the cash flow because every single dollar that you generate with a legitimate brand you get to see three to five x of that when you eventually exit could be more even if you know you're running a bigger brand so like that's where like generational wealth is made

not off of like selling trinkets you know from Alibaba but actually building out an amazing product building out an amazing customer experience and ultimately a brand so how do you make a good product that's a good question you know for me most people start off with you know trying to build the product and Brandon and they try to figure out how to Market it whereas I have a very kind of clear understanding and background of tick tock and you know viral marketing and so I kind of reverse engineered it where I was like how do

I build a product that's going to go viral that lends itself to organically going viral and that was like the Genesis and the thesis of tops a lot of people are like yo what sex chocolate what are you like obsessed with sex what are you obsessed with chocolate and like you know well I certainly like both definitely not your passion no no no no I can't I do like both but you know it wasn't it wasn't like oh like I'm obsessed with sex chakra like no it was like I know that I could Market the

[ __ ] out of this I know that I could blow this thing up on social media and ultimately um make this thing pop and we've done just that so you almost took the approach that this would be controversial in a way so that's why it's a good business opportunity because your strategy would be organic and so people just talk about this naturally to get their attention a hundred percent so that's why you chose to make the business exactly so you know little secret for you we actually saw a similar product on Tech talk that

was the Genesis of tops we saw a similar product and some random chick posted a tick tock about it had 8 million views 2 million likes I go to do research on the brand they're not being sold online they're packaging and branding sucks they have no social media presence and it's like holy [ __ ] there's massive opportunity here clearly it can go viral clearly like it's an intrinsically viral product if somebody with the right background came in to execute they could make millions and millions of dollars and I decided that that person was going

to be me okay so you found that product you're like wow this has potential a clear-cut strategy absolutely it's going to be controversial yeah so I watched your video and you said it took you over a year to make this product yeah dude what is that process because I'm someone who's only sold online products so a physical product yeah chocolate yeah the ingredients the packaging the how did you even find this suppliers tell me everything okay I mean first of all like it's complex it took a ton of time it took a ton of work

but that also became our mode because those Bears the entry is what protected us from the other 300 Ecom guys that go in they see something hot rip you off and you know the market gets saturated and you get [ __ ] right so while it was definitely difficult it's also kind of been our protection and been you know one of our competitive advantages so how did you find them like your actual manufacturers yeah so what's crazy is that everything is at your fingertips like I truly believe that like with the internet like you could

do anything you could [ __ ] do whatever you put your mind to and like some people think that I had like some secret sauce or like some like connection to a manufacturer like the reality is I looked up chocolate co-manufacturer on Google and then I scraped every single website for the first 20 or 30 pages and I just was just ringing phones calling people pitching myself asking what the moq was asking you know what's uh minimum order quantity okay so the thing is with like a bottom manufacturers is that they're not going to deal

with you unless you're ordering two million squares right off the bat I only had thirty thousand dollars total to start this business which I compiled from my previous Ventures you know um then there were many you know from fidget Spinners to running an agency um to drop shipping to running stores on eBay and Etsy um to working for my friend's mom who owned a fashion brand like there were a bunch of other Ventures and over time I saved up a little bit of money and I basically deployed all of that Capital um to start tabs

okay so you literally Googled a chocolate menu literally found 20. and so you're calling them more than twenty it was like it was a hundred yes okay so say you settled on them like one or like three yeah what were you looking for between those three who came up with the formula yeah absolutely so the biggest thing was the moq because the realities is that nobody wants to work with somebody that's only gonna order ten thousand dollars worth of chocolate right like hey there's a lot of time energy and effort that comes with the formulation

and then B like in order to do a run there are a lot of fixed costs involved right it doesn't matter if you're doing a 10 000 piece run or a 10 million piece run setting up the equipment cleaning all the equipment Etc et cetera like those stay consistent and so as a result like 99.9 of the chocolate co-manufacturers don't want to touch you unless you're doing big numbers and so right off the bat there were only like one or two um you know companies that we found that were viable and then in terms of

like kind of finding the one it was just conversations it was pricing um sampling the chocolate which was super fun I got to order like eight different kinds of chocolate we had like a taste test with all my friends um yeah yeah I mean it was it was fine uh but you know that's what that process looked like there and so did you have like this chocolate manufacturer was totally fine just putting anything in the chocolate yeah knowing what the product was gonna be yeah absolutely in fact you know that's what he specialized in he

specialized in like alternative chocolates not necessarily sex chocolate but you know he played around and he had one project weird where he was working with a brand and it was like you know a beetroot like super food healthy chocolate or like a CBD chocolate or you know so he focused on like different kind of variations of chocolate and for us you know it's not that big of a difference instead of you know a nootropic it's a sex supplement that usually comes in a pill and powder it's not like we radicalized or came up with some

insane formula we didn't reinvent the wheel I'm not a scientist I'm not a chemist basically we took the most popular and effective natural supplements they usually come in a pill in powder format and repackaged it and turned it into an incredibly luxury experience that was destigmatized that wasn't taboo and something that people could be proud to share with their partner and those like your values that you defined from the start absolutely that's the conversation you're having with your manufacturer absolutely and so your chocolate manufacturer and your packaging manufacturer are different yeah from what I saw

there are a lot of moving parts so you know there's the chocolate manufacturer right but even before that you know there are three different supplement you know manufacturers that we have to uh you know work with in order to get the raw materials over to the chocolatier so they don't actually make that that's what no no no no so the chocolate to your hands handles the chocolate but they're specialty supplements and each of those specialty supplements come from their own vendors then you know for the chocolate there's also custom virgin polycarbonate molds the chocolates don't

just spawn and you know like a breakable format with like you know our logo and tea and you know an oppressions like it doesn't just like come out of the press like that you know we had to we had to formulate and create these uh so you specialize in the chocolate yeah man how critical was that for you to launch did you launch with that absolutely I mean in reality I don't know how critical it was in my head it was super critical because you know this was like my first real business it looks professional

yeah I appreciate that that builds trust well that was the thing like this was like I was putting like my whole entire savings on the line and so like to me like every single detail mattered I wasn't gonna leave any stone unturned because it's like yo I'm pretty much gambling the house so might as well take the best swing I possibly could really like really respect that and that's what young entrepreneurs need to understand and the fact that you understand that 21 is really impressive that's why you're seeing the success you're seeing so how many

manufacturers total do you have probably like eight damn those are all just calls texts multiple relationships you're trying to build different countries different time zones different countries different times so it's different lead times yeah uh that's the hard part oh my God management yeah 100 because if one of the manufacturers [ __ ] up or if if we [ __ ] up and we don't order the right amount everything's at Halt and in the beginning we [ __ ] up a lot and I'll talk I'll tell you all about that but I want to hear

it so yeah first tell me about your packaging though so what were you actually like focused on when it came to the packaging you wanted to make a controversial product in a way right with a luxury feel right so the packaging probably was a big emphasis on that absolutely I mean before we get the packaging like just like the chocolate right the chocolate breaks in half and it's a half for each partner that was super intentional the reason being is that like if you see that on video you don't need to explain it you don't

need like you know a bunch of text or a bunch of like hey this is how it works and this is what you're supposed to do like no no in three seconds visually you're able to Grapple with the idea of sex chocolate we split it in half my girl eats half I eat half and then there's some like cut to like you know a sexy scene or whatever and so by Able by allowing us like describe the essence of the product in a three second video clip that is what is contributed to our success greatly

additionally like you know we could have put 50 chocolates in a box we could have put 100 chocolates in a box or done a massive like a massive bar instead we decided to go the opposite and do do it very scarce the reason being music we wanted to create this luxury feel we wanted to create this experience and so we thought that exactly and if you put like a hundred it's like okay it's a whatever it doesn't really matter but by keeping it like very limited it just creates this Vibe it creates this feeling and

so that was super intentional as well like every single detail was very very like conscious you have one core value luxury experience and then you're making every decision off of that absolutely not quantity design so someone if I had a piece of chocolate supposed to be a sex chocolate and it was just like a blank Square [ __ ] that it was like rough around the edge like this is sketchy or it's like a bar it's like yo this is like Hershey's like no no we differentiated ourselves we're not selling chocolate we're selling an experience

we're selling a mood and therefore like the whole entire Vibe needs to be spot on I mean otherwise how do you justify selling three tiny 20 gram squares of chocolate for 29.99 like you can't justify that right but I'm not selling you chocolate I'm selling you the best night of your life with your loved one okay so then the packaging itself right it looks beautiful old yeah that's a lot of your ugc I can see like a lot of yeah being shown 100 what has been the complications there or what has been like how did

you actually go about that in the first place reaching out to these people how did you word it do you have that Vision in your mind did you have a graphic designer did they do that what how did that work no graphic designer um designed it myself oh yeah yeah just designed it myself I think we were I was using canva I was using canva which is like pretty crazy um and then they the manufacturer had their designer kind of clean it up and you know make like 3D renders and they sent us samples and

it was an amazing process it seems I know it sounds straightforward to you because you've done it but a lot of people this is probably like scary and so that's why I like to hear like the details I'm sure so yeah and I will tell you I took a lot of inspiration from the trough Hot Sauce Box have you seen the trough Hot Sauce Box It's amazing And if you actually look at the sauce box it's very very similar to my box uh it just creates this luxury feel are you familiar with traffic no okay

they're like a super high-end expensive truffle hot sauce brand and they sell a little bottle of truffle hot sauce truffle is expensive but I mean it's truffle infused it probably costs them pennies right and they saw they sell the bottle for like 30 bucks uh and they did such a phenomenal job on The Branding the customer experience and specifically the packaging and so when I went to build my box I used them as a model and framework to pull from um and so you know when you look at my box like there's the gold foil

stamping and um you know when you when you lift it open it has our socials on the inside lid and where the chocolate lies in each crevice you pull out the chocolate and there's an emoji underneath of it and if you flip it on the back like there's like a special setting like it's it's all about contributing to that customer experience and to that Vibe because at the end of the day that's what's going to get the customers through the door now the product the product needs to deliver if we want to keep them coming

back but in terms of the customer acquisition it's not the chocolate it's not it's not the experience it's you know is it attractive is this something that I want to buy and um I think they did a pretty good job nailed it so that's the manufacturing process how many people for packaging did you talk to different potential hundreds hundreds but we said hundreds of messages how many samples did you get um probably like three or four okay we narrowed it down really really quickly um but I mean yeah like it's important to cast the one

to talk to all the different options and at least just like kind of get like uh similar cops where are you talking to these people um so for the packaging we found the manufacturer on Alibaba we were looking for box manufacturers on Alibaba and we just you know shot a message to any relevant on the platform are you on WeChat uh it originally was on the platform then we moved over to Skype and then my contact truly like stopped responding on Skype so then somehow got onto WeChat which was super weird because you need like

an activation card you know what I'm talking about like you need somebody in WeChat to like activate you which was like pretty [ __ ] crazy but um yeah so now we're on WeChat and Skype when she doesn't respond I have to hit her on WeChat um but the Skype chat was kind of like our direct comms um and by the way the Box the Box requires a ton of hand labor like it is not like a you know a mass production kind of factory machine that's spitting them out like one by one like there's

so much attention to detail and TLC and care that goes into it and I actually looked into moving the Box production operations to the United States because Elite times were quite were quite hot months right um but I kid you not I couldn't even find a US manufacturer that would take it here because of how labor intensive it was um so like we're kind of stuck with you know it being made in China and we kind of have to bite the bullet and just order a lot of boxes at once and make sure that we're

planning you know months in advance and the chocolate's made in the United States I want to make like I want to get that straight the chocolate is literally made in Salt Lake City Utah anything that touches the chocolate or anything involved in the chocolate is made in the United States the only components of the supply chain that are made are you know outsourced from China is a the boxes and then B um the Chrome uh poly Millers um you can imagine you have to get these order those take 90 days a shift yep these take

two months to make but two weeks to ship right you need these poly Millers like it's such a violence oh and then there's like the special plastic film that wraps the chocolate that's a specific manufacturer um it's crazy um and then you look for the poly mailers it creates an embryonic effect which essentially traps the heat from coming in from coming into the chocolate because chocolate melts yeah but you know that was that was not something that I thought about when I first started the brand until we had customers compending left and right when the

summer months hit and I was like holy [ __ ] this is a massive issue I can just imagine like the feeling of survival and stress on your shoulders oh my God from idea yeah this product like just the very first time like we should try this to actually having your first like sellable product right how long was that like 11 months 11 months 11 months that's like r d basically pretty much okay so we've made the product right how did you go about selling it good question uh so originally uh you know from from

the start the game plan was Tick Tock the game plan was running with on Tick Tock organic and working with micro influencers I had a lot of experience in that space and so you know kind of our go to market launch strategy was I was gonna line up and find as many micro influencers as I possibly can send them you know free product try to pay them some sort of small cash um you know bonus uh and get them hooked and and you know the idea is that with Tick Tock um they've done they've democratized

the ability to go viral it doesn't matter if you have 500 followers or 500 000 followers and so instead of paying some big celebrity for their brand name and their distribution I want to work with the smaller guys because if they make good content they can hit the for you page they could go viral and therefore I'm able to stretch my my my marketing dollars you know substantially so you went for the like quantity of smaller exactly and then are you also going for quantity with their posting amount absolutely how is like the actual I

want to go into this whole year yeah that's that's this is like Cutting Edge new [ __ ] 100 Drop Shipping is getting really popular because you don't have to like I come from the era Facebook ads okay yeah if anybody can post a video if you're a drop shipper you can just make a video on your phone 100 has the potential because these algorithms are like democratize exactly so tell me just your entire ugc strategy right right sorry well so like you know initially it started off with it being like micro focused but the

problem was is that it was incredibly difficult to scale for every thousand emails that we sent out to prospective influencers like only like 30 would even bother you know getting back to us and of those that that got back to us like the vast majority of them would like would ask for these ridiculous rates right like rates that were just completely unaffordable and I knew like we were not going to be profitable if we paid them so like in order to work with like one valid influencer for a good deal what's a valid influencer a

valid influencer to me like but that influencer to me is somebody that has anywhere between 50 000 followers to 200 000 followers um but more importantly than their followers creates engaging amazing amazing quality content that hits the for you page and gets views and gets eyeballs uh additionally like I don't really care about like their price I'm all about value right so if the ROI is there the ROI is there so for me it's like what is my kind of CPM gonna look like and I'm shooting for a sub a dollar CPM when I'm working

with Tick Tock influencers really yeah which is crazy but um you know especially in the early days um again like I didn't have a lot of money I need to I needed to make this last and I needed to to stretch the dollars and that's what viral marketing is so you know it's working with as many micro influencers as it possibly could but it was incredibly challenging logistically So eventually I was like yo this is not going to work because what would happen was we would have a micro influencer post about us sales would go

up and then you know they would crash the following day and then you know a week later we have another micro influencer post and sales would go out and then yeah one post at a time and so like you know it was a roller coaster the sales would go up and down up and down and so you know I kind of thought to myself like in order to create longevity in order to create something that had sustainability and in order to create like a baseline or like day in day out we're pumping uh this model

would not work you know I simply was not able to kind of get to the scale that I needed to and it didn't matter like despite the fact that you know I streamlined the process with va's scraping you know influencer leads and handling Outreach and doing all the back and forth like it didn't matter it was just so like time intensive and labor intensive and influencers would steal product and just ghost us it was just a nightmare and an organizational mess um I decided I needed I needed to find a new model um and that's

when I met one quick Interruption of this podcast guys it's no question that AI is completely disrupting The Way businesses operate and these future Technologies are evolving so quickly so if you want to stay up to date and keep yourself informed go ahead and subscribe to our free newsletter I'll leave that in the first link in the description below and if you want to even start a side hustle you can actually start an AI business today we'll even send you a free list of 100 AI business ideas if you sign up through this link this

this kid named Keith I actually met him on Twitter and he was a content creator he wasn't an influencer basically I paid him uh two thousand dollars a flat retainer to make 30 tick tocks about my brand one Tick Tock a day and he he ran like the brand page at tops and by day five some video [ __ ] hit blew up went viral and that month he generated 70 to 80 000 in sales and that's when I had this oh my holy [ __ ] [ __ ] moment this is the model that

we need to run on right because instead of like always chasing after the next influencer to post about us I was able to basically find one Creator get him on my retainer and now it's sudden forgot right like I don't need to like reach out to 10 000 influencers every week it was like you know this guy's just pumping for me day in day out and then my thought process became now what how do I scale this right it's clear that this is working with key but now how do I do this a hundred times

over so you went from finding like these micro influencers fifty thousand two hundred thousand followers which is still quite a bit in a way right but you were going off one after one and they're only making one video yeah one or two videos sometimes I would have them come back and post three or four videos but at the same time like um they didn't want to saturate Their audience yeah and they don't want to put like 20 posts out about a brand like it would ruin their you know like whole entire like uh and everybody's

hitting these people up because they have hundreds of thousands so you're competitive in that nature exactly so then you went to a content creator who had like 5 000 followers no no he had no followers zero follows yeah there's zero followers like a new guy exactly he was a new guy and he basically managed my tabs brand account and he was the face of the tabs brand account and every day he would make tick tocks on behalf of my brand account this new creative basically exactly and so you just try different styles and then one

hit and that related to 80 000 in sales in one day basically I wouldn't say one day it was like over it was over like a couple of weeks but it was like wow this has crazy potential and then my thought process was like okay now how do we do this with a 100 [ __ ] creators in fact how do we bring this from you know eighty thousand dollars a month to ten million dollars a month and and the idea that I had was pretty simple right clearly it works for key it worked on

this one account let's horizontally scale now across 50 other creators across 50 other independent accounts and just kind of like repeat the success that we saw there a lot of people a lot of people think that you could just add more creators to the same account no and that's that's a fallacy and the reason being is that like the way that The Tick Tock the way that The Tick Tock algorithm works and the way that a lot of social media algorithms work is that they start to kind of understand the Creator's ethos they look at

their style they look at their upload schedule they look at their consistency and they start to basically reward good creators and push them out to people that they think would enjoy the content because at the end of the day the social media platform wants retention on their uh you know app or on their on their platform itself and so if you take eight different creators and put them all on the same page it's too many cooks in the kitchen yeah like Tick Tock doesn't know who to show the video to right Does it show the

video to this kid or does it show to this kid or does it show to that kid and when you look at the most successful Tick Tock accounts they're hyper Niche and hyper-specific like if you think about um you know the Cold Stone god um you know who I'm talking about the dude that basically chops up [ __ ] ice cream every single video is the same video or you look at the dude that makes the Subway sandwiches you know that guy yep same exact video every single [ __ ] time bro the same thumbnail

the same storytelling the same clothing the same frame like it is it it follows a recipe it follows a formula Tick Tock loves it viewers love it they know it's gonna get views and it gets pushed out and gets millions of views so I was like instead of having like 20 creators on one account I'm going to basically diversify and set them up with their own individual independent account and have them be the face you made them accounts no okay if I made the accounts Tick Tock like my IP would be tied to 20 accounts

Tick Tock would be like yo this guy's abusing the platform he's trying to like I'll go hack like [ __ ] this guy we're gonna Shadow ban him so no I let the creators create the accounts with their own email their own password their own phone number so they're making a new account yeah they're making a new account okay and then I give them instructions here you're gonna name the account some variation of tabs some very chocolate coat tops USA the viral chocolate at this point we have hundreds of accounts thousands of accounts you don't

control any of them no dude I don't want to be controlling the content what I want to do is cast as wide of a net as possible and hit as much scale as I can I don't want to be like in charge of the TV show I want to own the whole entire [ __ ] News Channel right and my my thought process is that like I have 300 TV shows going on yeah and I don't know which one's gonna test really it might be the prankster it might be the grandparents it might be uh

the model it might be the only fans thoughty I don't know right like I I don't I don't know I can't tell you which one's gonna hit but I know that inevitably if I have enough content going out every single day one is going to hit and all I need is one to hit in order to drive serious impact in sales okay so I want to get into the details of this now yo ugc use what does it stand yeah user generated content okay so how are you finding these people what is the arrangement how

much do you pay and how much instruction are you giving yeah okay so where do I find these people I was able to find them on Twitter and leverage my personal brand and my own following um in order to to you know kind of get them and onboard them as a tick tock content creator for my brand um and here's the thing like I wasn't like super picky like oh you need to be like a super high performing Creator like or like you need to have X background or whatever it's like no do you have

all your limbs and do you have a phone like like let's work let's [ __ ] work dude because that's how like I was my product is so intrinsically viral it doesn't take like a creative genius in order to push out good quality content with it like we don't need to come up with some crazy script and story and concept in order to get views you just need to like flash the product and boom like 2 million abuse boom three million views right like one of my content creators tweeted he's like dude I swear to

God even a monkey could get two million views promoting tabs right so for me it was just a numbers game it was about how many bodies validates your strategy right absolutely sex chocolate just gets people's attention absolutely it was intentional from the start again we did not create this brand and be like okay like how do we Market it we're like yeah we know how to Market it we know how to get eyeballs we know how to get you know to drive customers how do we create a product that is going to make that process

a lot easier and so like that again that was the Genesis of tops but uh you know for me it was just about a numbers game how could I bring on as many creators as I possibly could um and you know Twitter was kind of like my number one place and then it was just like you know referrals right creators are friends with other creators so one creator that I onboarded became three I was hiring anybody and everybody and I was paying them anywhere from like one thousand dollars a month to three thousand dollars a

month um for 30 tick tocks a month one Tick Tock at that so the structure is one upload a day around one to three thousand dollars a month do they have creative control of course I don't want to be there sitting there micromanaging and feeding them scripts and going back and forth to the Creator they have full creative control um now what I will say is that like when a video goes like viral I send it out to all of my creators it's like yo you guys all need to remake this take notes remake this

because the reality is with copy it huh dude with Tick Tock it's not about Reinventing the wheel there's no originality with Tick Tock there's no like secret formula what's it saying it's like um good artist copy great artist steel right yeah uh same thing with Tick Tock right like if you see a viral hit remake that [ __ ] chances are it will go viral again um so you know whenever like a tick tock Creator like hits something everybody remakes it and oftentimes it hits again um that's like I would say like tip number one

tip number two is and which a lot of people don't know about is that actually uh the viral video is not what drives the majority of the sales it's the follow-up videos that drives the true conversions so like what I optimize for is a viral video right to get as many views and top of funnel brand awareness as possible but the sales come from video two three four once you have the viral video you want to respond to comments from that OG viral videos with new tick tocks and in those videos is when you sell

and you sell hard okay so explain that to me so the first video is just like showcasing the product yeah the first the first video is like how do I get eyeballs how do I get seat right because Tick Tock is the Wild West it's the cheapest cpms of all the platforms you can get as many impressions as you know as you can dream right so when you're creating videos you want to optimize for eyeballs not for conversions once you hit that video that's punch number two right I call it the one two punch first

punch is the vowel video second punch is okay now we optimize for conversions so once you have the viral video um everybody leaves comments what is the product how does it work is this real is it legit is it a scam you Tick Tock allows you to make videos responding to comments from older videos okay and when you respond to comments from the original viral video it actually retargets all of the initial viewers from that original viral video if it's from your account yes really yes wow so it's like video two three four five six

seven eight you can make as many as you want it's free retargeting wow and in those retargeting videos is when you [ __ ] sell the [ __ ] out of the product ah and you address pain points you tell them where to shop you tell them to go to your store and buy it right now before we sell out like that is where like you're pushing conversion but don't get it twisted you first need the viral video wand in order to like get to that point so you should be optimizing for Vitality once you

hit virality video two through you know 10 or 20 is when the bulk of the sales will come I had a video that did over 30 million views that video may be generated forty thousand dollars in sales that day itself itself okay the follow-up videos generated a hundred and thirty thousand dollars the next day and for the next week we were ripping the responding to comment videos and you know that month we did close to seven figures okay so if okay so the video goes viral in your account right you are the one making the

follow-up video of like the Creator is so like so like the create like so the Creator posted video it goes viral right then the Creator makes responding to comment videos responding to comments from that original viral video and their new videos new tick tocks okay but then if you say okay so say to your account you're the Creator yeah and it's going viral and then I make a reaction to your comments that's not gonna do anything okay it needs to be like from the same account same account so I have the viral video and I

see a bunch of people comment and now I'm going to respond to comments on that original viral video with like specific you know conversion Focus product Centric kind of tick tocks that are focused on selling and actually bring a viewer and turning them into a customer that's a genius I did not know that I didn't know that by targeting yeah dude I didn't know that either until you know like I stumbled upon this like I it kind of fell into my lap where like you know one of my creators started making the responding to comment

videos and we're like holy [ __ ] [ __ ] I'm looking at the live view of my dashboard on my phone and I see it like Spike by like 800 I'm like what the hell is going on and that's when I kind of discovered like this like little hack uh that is probably like you know responsible for the majority of myself at least the sales that are coming from Tick Tock now I would say we're like pretty well Diversified yeah we have a lot of other channels in the mix and this is specifically for

tick tock or like Instagram reels like I don't know about Instagram it's strictly strictly Tick Tock okay that's people really need to understand how different each platform is there are a lot of nuances and introduces so just to recap basically yeah the first video is supposed to get their interest get their attention yes and then so just be like flashy showing the chocolate and then the next ones where you can talk about like the bullet points yeah what's great about the product this is the price point maybe this is like exactly any like basically objection

you want to open it them that with that first it's not gonna do about it they're bored it's an app nobody wants to [ __ ] watch that but if they have an idea of what the product is now they're interested they will take the time to learn Bingo and you're basically like riding on the tick tocks algorithm and you get free retargeting right so it's like it's a no-brainer if I wanted to do this for my company right I would go to Twitter what do I search ugc Talk content ugc absolutely and then just

look for people who are there there will be thousands what are they gonna be posting are they going to be posting they're gonna be tweeting about their ugc and the brands and the clients that they're working with and you know that's how they find clients and basically for anyone who doesn't know it's like just random people like high school kids high school kids college kids [ __ ] grandparents you know all different walks around you just send them your product and they will just say check out this product and either you give them a script

or make up content what I will say though is that like you know eventually I started onboarding so many different content creators where we were spending a lot of money because it's you know a thousand dollars here three thousand dollars there times fifty times a hundred you're looking at a really high expenditure So eventually I ended up Shifting the model and turning them into affiliate it's where I was paying them on a commission basis smart this way I get to mitigate my downside and risk A and B I get to reward the real killers absolutely

and by doing so I also kind of like weed out the week right like anybody that's not worth their weight is leaving on their own accord and so as a result like the fat gets trimmed very very quickly because if they're not driving sales that's so they're not gonna they're not gonna create content for you anymore right because it's like [ __ ] this I'm making 30 tick tocks and I made five dollars this month well guess what you made me fifty dollars this month and I'm how am I gonna justify paying you three thousand

dollars a month I'm not so how did you restructure that do they still get a smaller flat fee so some of them do some of them are on full affiliate basis where it's like they get like 20 of all the track Revenue that they drive we track that with a UTM Link in BIO and you know a trackable coupon code or discount code uh some of them it's a hybrid model where it's you know a little bit of cash and then you know some sort of uh again affiliate commission what platform did you use to

set up those utms is like impact or social snowball social snowball yeah okay shout out Noah Tucker that's my dog all right cool that's awesome okay so that is really insightful but what other channels have been working for you okay cool uh so we have a lot of viral content that's super viral on Tick Tock right and you've archived it and we've archived it we save it in you know Google drive folder without the watermark and then HD for like file HD format how do you remove the watermark all right you could just like if

you look up on Tick Tock downloader okay it's very easy there's no like Secret Sauce um but then it's like okay it's gone viral on Tick Tock chances are it's gonna go viral on Instagram reels it's gonna go battle on YouTube shorts it's going to go viral on all the other short form platforms as well so how do we take our our most successful content that's smacked on Tick Tock and how do we give it a second life on these new channels and these new platforms so initially I had my VA make like 15 YouTube

accounts 15 Instagram accounts and he was just posting manually and [ __ ] some some of the [ __ ] started to hit we had a Facebook reel that took off and drove like 8 million views and generated like 30 000 in sales in a day all organically zero dollars an ad spend right like randomly like some videos would pop off but eventually uh again these social media platforms are smart they realize that it's like all one IP address and um they [ __ ] banned and shut down all the accounts like all right [

__ ] what do I do now so I decided to create a Discord similar to the Andrew Tate model yeah right yeah I created my own disc where it was like make money online and it started with five members we now have over 2500 members and um you know they're super clear instructions uh and basically we we have them set up an Instagram account a Facebook account a YouTube account some variation of tabs we give them our profile picture we give instructions on how to create the like the the bio wow and then we give

them our Content Library of all of our Vital videos and then day in day out they're posting these across you know a mass network of all these other social media accounts Instagram reels YouTube shorts Pinterest idea pins Facebook reels and we're Mass indicating it across thousands of accounts right and it's not all tied down to one name each one is tied down to its own each like individual kit and again we use social snowball to track you know what kind of Revenue that they're driving and this has become a [ __ ] machine you made

a Discord community of your affiliate yes repurpose your content and upload it any way they want yes damn bro that's smart it's [ __ ] I can imagine it's it's generated millions of dollars in Revenue I had a 14 year old kid who was just reposting my viral content on Instagram reels he made more than his [ __ ] parents one he drove like I think he drove like fifty thousand dollars Revenue completely random and I could I can't tell you he was posting the same videos that the other 2000 members were posting but they

actually why did his video go about on the other guy didn't I don't know the algorithm is a black box and anybody that tries to tell you that like or when you need to use this hashtag and you need to post that this time [ __ ] that [ __ ] nobody [ __ ] knows that's the reality nobody [ __ ] knows but again my thesis is that if you have enough scale you will win and if you have a good product that can go viral of course I mean there's there's a caveat there's

a copy Foundation that that is the comment I have a [ __ ] product that's never gonna work yeah I mean if you're [ __ ] selling a toaster like good luck man yeah you know um but yeah I I have I have I have kids 14 year old kid that you know made like ten thousand dollars in a month made more than his parents he was telling me just reposting battle tick tocks uh and you know I've gamified the community like I've created a real Community there like there's a gym Channel where people are

posting their gym selfies every day um you know if they posted they react to a message and then my VA uploads that all onto a wheel and we spin a wheel every day and give out money to three random people just to incentivize and you know keep the retention high and keep people like excited to post um obviously we give them 20 of any sale that they drive um we do like invite tournaments you know to grow the Discord it's like its own like little like mini like marketing engine in and of itself like that

is something I have not thought about before right because I've been in the Discord Community game that's about how I made my name and so you're making a Discord Community around your business right through an affiliate Opportunity by sharing all of your content and then your incentive how are you incentivizing growth and how are you building awareness of that are the Discord yeah okay so I mean the biggest thing is like the Discord Grows by itself right because we do these invite tourneys where it's like the person that invites the most members gets 100 bucks

second person gets 50 third person gets 25 I was just throwing [ __ ] money at it because it's printing for me right yeah so that was probably like one of the biggest levers and then B some of the content creators that were promoting tabs I switched them to start promoting the Discord so instead of hey buy tabs it was Hey kid you want to make money online join this Discord and then they promote tabs in the record right um so again I was leveraging like the organic content creators to funnel people into the Discord

uh and then you know we were doing like shout out for shout outs with other discords that had similar followings again you know it's not rocket science but it's not common sense either you know what I'm saying I mean how do you get into it sure so like you know channel one is Tick Tock content then we take those viral winners and we give it a second life by you know blasting across other social media channels through my 2000 Affiliates that are Discord then what we also do is we put paid behind them not the

traditional pay not Facebook ads not Google ads not Snapchat ads or Tick Tock ads what we do is we pay meme pages that have millions of followers to post our most vital content for 24 hours on what platform Instagram Twitter Snapchat you name it okay there are these networks of these meme accounts right that have combined accumulative hundreds of millions of followers and we basically you know pay these meme page owners to post our our content organically uh and it's already viral content too so it gets it gets a boost you're there distribution Network essentially

exactly it's already you know the content and we get a boost because of their distribution Network and then it also goes viral because it's like a real so we get their boost of their two million followers then it goes viral because it's a real and it just hits the you know it hits the algorithm um and that [ __ ] smacks how much do you pay for that if they have two million uh it depends on the page depends on the engagement is it a US following is it an Indian following could be anywhere between

100 to 2 000 that's still pretty cheap oh yeah it is it's very cheap and we spend six figures a month on memes but it's still real it's not posts um yeah it's Rios uh and then on Twitter it's you know it's like viral tweets they're like these Twitter meme pages that have millions of followers they put out a viral tweet about you know Finding you know tops like or viral videos some sort of viral video about my product and my brand that's already been validated on Tick Tock and it like on the vast majority

of times it goes around again and we again we get to like ride their boost because they already have this own Distribution on Twitter are you directly linking to the store or no link so the the paid tweet is like you know kind of a native integrated post with a viral kind of like video and then tweet number two is like oh my God I discovered their website um I just found their website tabstructed.com and it's like you know hashtag partner what's the timeline so it's like the first one is the first tweet is its

own tweet and then like a few hours go by then you tweet again they need to know they reply so it's underneath like the viral is it and it's like holy [ __ ] I just I just found yeah so together it's like tweet one is like the viral post and then tweet number two which goes right underneath it which is a reply to this it's like hey guys I just discovered like the chocolate and here's the website and we try to keep it super native because if it feels like an ad it's not gonna

work consumers are really smart they're serves thousands of ads every single day and like we want to make it feel like they discovered us they want we want to make it feel like they found us they discovered us and like you know uh they're making the decision to buy on their own accord not like we're forcing it down their [ __ ] throats which is what most companies do and again that's something that someone could literally see that and be like just send it to their friend like holy [ __ ] have you seen this

sex chocolate dude that's funny that's like that I mean that's that's the reason why it works because like a lot of people send it to their friends yeah wow have you been able to track your LTV yet are you that it's tough because like we've only been in business for a year and that's what I'm saying right so it's like it's really hard to get a gauge of the LTV a b like we only have one product we only have one line and you know now it's time to really kind of like grow the brand

and grow and grow the you know umbrella of products add new flavors add new moods add new uh skus all together uh maybe Venture into CBD maybe Venture into shrooms maybe sex toys I don't know yet um there's you know there are a lot of different avenues that we can take this um but I think that adding some new lines will do wonders for the overall growth of the business and for extending that LTV that you were talking about I'm curious how have you thought about getting like incentivizing like second orders third orders right repurchases

absolutely um so subscriptions okay it's massive right that's smart um you know because it's um you know a food product they're going to finish it and they're going to need to replenish it so what we do is we incentivize subscriptions I think that this is really interesting that I want to talk about uh you know originally I was pushing subscriptions on the product pitch you land on the product page and it's like um you know we incentivize you to buy two boxes or three boxes we have like when you land on the product page there's

one box two box three box if you buy two boxes you get free shipping and a discount if you buy three boxes you get free shipping and an even bigger discount then we added a subscription layer to it if you add subscription you also get 20 off your entire order but what I found was that people that were opting for two boxes or three boxes were now instead opting for one box and a subscription so I was like okay how do I get the best of both worlds how do I incentivize the bundle in a

higher aov while also incentivizing the subscription without sacrificing one or the other so instead of having that all on the product page what I do now is on the product page it's you can only buy it like you can only one do a one-time buy right and so we're really incentivizing the two box or three box package then you go into the cart and we incentivize you know a melting insurance which is 4.99 4.99 and the melting insurance is a genius I'll tell you why because wow if the chocolate melts we were replacing it for

free anyway right now we get to tack on 4.99 on every single order that comes through and we like basically make it a no-brainer for for the mounting insurance it's like we replace the chocolate money back guarantee you get to skip the queue you get faster shipping you know blah blah blah we get we make it like so unreasonable for you not to get the melting insurance that we have like a 80 plus take rate on that yes we have an 80 and bro we're not there's no good there's no there's no cost of goods

it's free money right so I love the mounting insurance we just added that last month but what's also interesting is now when you get to the checkout page where Shopify plus that's when we push a subscription so by this time they've already probably bought the two or three boxes they've probably already bought the melting insurance now they're finally at the checkout page now on the checkout page it's hey upgrade to subscription and save 20 nice and then we see a really good take rate of the flow exactly the flow is super important and if you

try to stack everything at once things get sacrificed but if you build it in a very methodical kind of way but they haven't paid yet they've just been like they chose my product chose insurance now they're moving to subscription to save 20 bye bye then post purchase hey do you want to add another box for 50 off buy and it gets added seamlessly you know we use an app so they don't have to put in their information all over again we use a Shopify app that you know it's a post purchase OC one click upsells

is what the app is called um so they don't need to put in their information on they're able to add it to their order and the order gets updated then they land on the thank you page there's another upsell you know for another box for 50 off boom it gets added seamlessly to the order they don't have to put their information again then post purchase they get emails about hey are you sure you don't want to subscribe if they didn't subscribe already right hey upgrade your upgrade your order to subscription and save a lot of

them that's like a drip campaign it's a drip campaign okay so like the funnel is super important right without all of these different steps you know we're looking at like an aov of I don't know maybe like 25 bucks average order value average order value like 25 bucks with all of these different bumps it's five percent boost here 10 boost here 20 boost here all said and done you know like we're doubling we're it's it's a hundred percent gains and we're able to like squeeze out way more money out of a consumer these are things

that I wish I knew when I started off because because at the end of the day like one store can send 100 visitors um and you know squeeze 50 out of them another schoolwork store can send the same 100 visitors the same product but have all of these you know upsells and cross sales and and squeeze 500 out of the same 100 visitors and you know at the end of the day the person that's able to squeeze the most out of money will win long term while of course offering an amazing customer experience and being

cognizant of you know you know ensuring that they're going to return and they're going to have a good experience and there's going to be high out TV because you don't want to burn the customer just for the quick cash don't get me wrong but there's a balance of course um and it's pivotal so it's like if you can squeeze you know 200 more money out of the same hundred you know visitors that's game changing oh yeah everybody's so focused on acquiring more customers getting more traffic adding more visitors and conversions but wait a second like

have you really maximize like the full potential of your site probably not dropping bombs brother this is really exciting for me too like I've learned a lot and I'm consider myself a marketer so right thanks for coming this is really helpful thanks for having me dude um but still a lot more to talk about pricing so this is probably going to be quick but how did you come up with your initial pricing and if it changed why did it change that's a good question um initially we charged 19.99 there really was no competition there really

was no market right so at the end of the day like we got to create our own price there was no anchor with other Industries with other products it's like you can't charge too much you can't charge two litter because like like customers have an anchor in their mind they're like this is what the product is worth this is where like the competitors land there's the higher end version here the lower end version here there is no other sex chakra besides like you know that small ass company based out of [ __ ] Idaho that

sells the two sex shops regionally right like they're not competition they're I wouldn't even call them involved in the market right like people don't even know about them so as a result like we got to dictate our own pricing and we knew that we wanted to go to the high-end route we knew that we wanted to go the luxury route and so we kind of pulled the number out of our ass I was like [ __ ] that's how it goes 19.99. um what was your competitor average like the pillow the pillow and the powders

it had 10 bucks I don't even know but like I wouldn't even call a pill a competitor because again we don't sell the supplements there's a honey right yeah there's a royal honey yeah like we don't sell like a supplement we don't sell a pillar powder we sell an experience we don't want to be pharmaceutical we don't want to be taboo we want to create something that's luxury that's shared that's something that people are proud to take not like some like sneaky palettes oh I hope my girl didn't see me that because like now that

like shows that I'm vulnerable or like you know I can't get it up like it's embarrassing right like [ __ ] that it's like yo enjoy this with your brother together big big Paradigm show I would always if I ever saw that would assume it's only for one right it is gender 100 so but so we started with 19.99 and then you know I started split testing new prices bunny enough when we increase price we saw an increase in conversion right looks very good I mean luxury goods but like [ __ ] man I was

not expecting that right like I thought that it was crazy to charge 19.99 for three tiny squares of chocolate I thought it was who the [ __ ] is gonna pay this and then when we increase the price more people are paying it you got to be kidding me and now we're doing even more intensive split testing pricing where you know we're split testing like five different other price points you know moving up like two dollar increments um you know sending 20 20 of the traffic to um you know one price twenty percent to another

20 to another so on so forth to really start to even hone in further you know new optimizations the crazy thing which I'm sure you'll resonate to is that like the greater scale that you operate at it's crazy how much more leverage you have little optimizations of saving a penny here or increasing the conversion rate by point one percent here and an extra six figures into your pocket it is absurd it's mental we're in the process of decreasing the weight of our Box by one ounce that is going to save us over three hundred thousand

dollars this year one ounce one ounce the shipping or fitting sure so if it's one ounce less we fall into a different shipping threshold ah okay and so that one ounce is costing us over 300 000 at our current run rate right so like dude like how insane is that decreasing the Box by one ounce is going to make me three hundred thousand dollars this year what the [ __ ] I can't imagine how it feels like to be a big boy that's you know moving hundreds of millions one ounce is going to save them

10 million dollars 20 million dollars that's [ __ ] 100 Lamborghinis bro one one ounce is going to make me a Lamborghini this year what the [ __ ] I love a lot to you how you categorize money that's awesome so those little details definitely go a long way and I'm sure you've tested like promos and offers I wanted to make one point I have a lot of friends that have like are have net worth in the millions and their 20s and one thing I noticed with this point of luxury goods is successful people brag

to their friends about how much they pay for something like if like I hire a consultant or someone like my personal trainer people like will brag like this guy's 500 an hour he's the best at what he does and so it's kind of a weird psychological flip that most people don't think about wait but hold on a second I don't think like the bragging part is important I think it's the fact that you Associated 500 an hour quality with he's the best that one does yeah if that same trainer came to you and said hey

I'm gonna train you for 29.99 a month you'd be like [ __ ] out of here bro I don't want to work with you I don't want to work with you I'm going to go to my [ __ ] Equinox like you can't even afford my gym right yeah 100 but if he comes and tells you yo I'm the I'm the best at what I do I charge a lot of money all of a sudden you associate that with holy [ __ ] it's luxury it's top quality and it's the same thing with my chocolates

if I price it at 4.99 which I could have people would be like yo like this is [ __ ] this is catchy this is fake how does it really work as soon as we price it higher people have this idea in their head like it's like like it must be something insane and I gotta try it yeah have you read the book influenced by Robert chaldini dude that's funny that you mentioned cardini I haven't read that book but I've read a little bit about me and I've I've heard that before I've heard his name

brought up a couple of times and I have done a little bit of skimming but um I gotta check it out yeah in that book they just say if there's like puppies there's 10 puppies you say free puppies no one will come get them because they think they're gonna get like lured into something right you say puppies 300 you'll sell out in a day wild super everybody needs to read that book if you're getting into sales yeah okay so moving on uh that's your pricing structure right you're testing a lot of different stuff right what's

your Tech stack this is a really nerdy specific question for like you're using Shopify using Shopify apps what do you use to actually just make the business function from organization with these ugc people yeah this is not a sexy topic but it's really important for people who are actually in the game for sure okay I mean so clavio for email okay like right off the bat same right um I have an amazing amazing text messaging platform that I use that 99 of people don't know about it's called one text okay uh and they are revolutionizing

the text messaging game they're actually in y combinator right now um you know what YC is right of course yeah for people that don't know what Y combinator is it's like the premier startup accelerator for tech companies like uber was born out of YC right Airbnb like Sam Altman openai dude yeah like he ran it basically they create [ __ ] unicorns I was their third client the founder hit me up on Twitter and was like I want you to demo our [ __ ] he was working at PayPal at the time like swear to

God I was their third client and I should have invested in it I had no I had no money at the time um they're now at like a 30 million dollar evaluation what do they do um basically what they do is they allow people to buy your product within the text message so instead of hey like hey customer here's a link to to finish your purchase it's hey customer this is a real human being press one if you want to buy like you're like you abandon this product press one if you want to buy it

and then they have to put in their credit card information once but now their their card is vaulted within the one text ecosystem which means that any other Merchant that uses one text and has an overlap doesn't need to even ask for their credit card again they can literally click one and they can buy that introduction I'll introduce you but here's where it gets really amazing the tcpa guidelines states that in order to send a text message to a consumer they need to opt in twice they're very strict regulations around this okay because it's around

like text message marketing yeah because this is not marketing it's considered part of the same transaction as before they're able to send an abandoned cart to every single customer that abandons on your site whether or not they opted into marketing so let's say only 20 of visitors opt into like the marketing you're only able to send abandoned text messages to 20 of people this now it allows me to 5x at and send a text message to every single person that abandons their cards which adds an exponential Revenue to my bottom line when are you getting

their phone numbers um when they're filling in the information on Shopify just required yeah it's required it's required but in order to text message Market them they have to click a box yeah are they allow text message or tracking order tracking is that like this yeah for their for their order information they've got email and their phone number and so with typical SMS you know marketing platforms or engines whatever they need to click that box not only do they need to click that box it's like double opt-in right like it's super important otherwise you're gonna

get sued out of your mind with one text it's part of the same transaction it's not marketing and so as a result anybody that puts their phone number in it's fair get and it's made me a lot of money man so shout out one time next okay yeah so clavio one text okay Shopify obviously yeah Shopify Shopify plus um I now pay like two thousand dollars a month for shopping oh you know I save it I save it on the transaction fees so that's a W uh in terms of other apps um One Click upsells

I mentioned that earlier for the Post purchase upsells um I love those guys um you have a CRM a CRM or like notion or oh sure organization Trello yeah I use Trello for organization and obviously slack um like my whole entire business my whole entire business is run off of stock I love stock but in terms of other like interesting apps like social snowball huge shout out to social snow um basically like they streamlined the whole entire affiliate and influencer uh process um they started off as a platform to basically turn your customers into Affiliates

and basically when a customer buys from your store they get an automatic email it's like hey we've created this automatic coupon code for you share with your friends and whenever they buy you'll get 20 of it and so like that was like the original premise of social snowball but now like they realize that there's a lot of opportunity Beyond just that like little space and to be like the solution for to help facilitate influencer marketing at scale and affiliate marketing at sale and they built some incredible tools to to help me um a with just

like the onboarding and the flow where like as before my VA was making custom coupon codes for every single affiliate now it's like automatic right and it's you know it's seamless and then be like the organization that it's streamlined and the analytics is [ __ ] phenomenal so I mean like social snowball has like changed the game for me I don't know how I would run the 2000 affiliate Discord otherwise okay analytics one of my favorite things yeah really important because you're making decisions based on the numbers not your own ideas right do you use

any sort of fancy system to track analytics across the board Google analytics Excel spreadsheets um not really I mean Shopify analytics just internal and then um you know Google analytics okay um nothing crazy um we don't really run ads so like I would like recommend like a triple well or you know one of those kind of like attribution softwares triple will okay but I don't really run ads so I mean Shopify analytics is pretty [ __ ] solid what about your ugc content creators are you like making them report their numbers are you just manually

every day going through looking at their accounts getting like a feeling or right right so originally I was using like a spreadsheet uh my VA um would at the end of each month like create summaries across all the different creators yeah all the different accounts the revenue that they generated the commission that they earned you're paying and how much I'm paying them and then at the end of every month I would go through you know the sheet a and then be like I'd pay them out so I was I was forced like really consume all

the data and the content because like you know I was sending the money so it's like okay you know what's going on um and now I use like a software I'm blanking out on the name but I use a software that like does all the The View tracking and all the follower tracking for all the accounts that we have um you know but at the end of the day like I mean I don't want to say I don't rely on the analytics because I do and analytics are super important but like I think it's important

that you don't over complicate it right like for me like for me it's pretty simple I just want more yeah more creators more Affiliates more scale if I do that yeah I know I'm gonna make more money okay that's beautiful that I mean it just makes sense right business people don't really think about it until they live it and so right hopefully this can help people just start off making without making the mistakes we had to make to learn yeah so I'll link all of the socials all the tools that he just talked about in

the description so you guys can find those but what else I mean I guess a good question I like to ask people is what is a belief you had when you started your business that you believe strongly but it's now untrue or even not even related to your business as an entrepreneur your mindset like what is something that you really thought was true once you've lived it what you've learned recently is not I think that like we put people on pedestals we see a successful rich guy and we're like holy [ __ ] [ __

] that's Albert Einstein or like he was born different or he's some genius or like you know [ __ ] he's like he's insane right like he we're not the set people do that with celebrities people do that with influencers people do that with rich people right at the end of the day like that's all [ __ ] [ __ ] that we are we are the same blood we are all [ __ ] humans they don't have something that like like they don't have something that I don't have I don't care if they're [

__ ] Leonardo DiCaprio I don't care if they're [ __ ] Neymar I don't care if there's a president like it's not like they're like like it's not like they're smarter than me it's not like they they like have some sort of edge that I don't have like I'm sure they have like advantages and you know like maybe qualities that I might not have but like at the end of the day like intrinsically where they said and so you know I think that like it's important that you don't put people on pedestals and like you

don't have these limiting beliefs where it's like I can never be like this guy or I'm not I I'm not smart enough for this guy you could do whatever the [ __ ] you want to do in this life and there is no constraint there is no like ceiling on your potential like at the end of the day it's up to you yeah and I think that's like something that's like really really important um where like you believe in yourself and like understand that like there is no ceiling there is nobody telling you that you

can only get this far and it's not like these people were lucky it's not like they were smarter than you it's not like they had some like crazy quality that like differentiated from the rest like there's a pretty clear path to being successful and it's not rocket science and I believe that most people can't achieve that they're just not like they just don't know how to get that it's at bats right like if you had multiple businesses before this and you were learning you were learning like you literally learned a little bit about copy we

learned what split testing was you learned what good creative was how to make a good product eventually for sure and so it's just a matter out at bats you take the more you learn and then you might get lucky along the way what I what I what I really believe is that it's not about intelligence it's about experience the more experience you have in the space the sharper you become and that leads to training like your intuition like your subconscious right so it's not like like you and you like you and me like we're able

to like look at a situation and it's not that you're smarter than me she said you have pattern recognition you've seen that you've seen that situation 800 other times so you know exactly how to navigate you know exactly what moves you need to make in order to cross that Finish Line whereas for me I'm a newbie I'm like wait hold on a second I get I fall into this mousetrap here I step on this landmine here I'm not able to get from point A to B but it's not because you were smarter than me it's

simply because you had better simply because you had more experience which leads to more intuition and a wherewithal on how to on how to basically move and so my biggest piece of advice for people is to get that experience to learn those skills and you can't cheat that there is no short you need to fail before like times like I had like 20 other Ventures a lot of them were massive failures right um a lot of them were ridiculous A lot of them were ridiculous Concepts you know um but that's part of the game and

the only way to hit big is to have all of those smaller experiences and each one you pull something a learning out of a lesson out of and then all of a sudden like things start to clicks things start to come together and then one day you wake up like you know one day one day I wake up and I'm 21 years old and I'm worth millions and millions of dollars and it's a holy [ __ ] that experience created context and now you can take that to any business you start so it's just a

matter of at-bat and I really feel like three years of Entrepreneurship you start to really get a good idea of like okay these are the basic skills that apply everywhere 100 and even with like we were referencing earlier like for me like my parents like they grew up in a time where if they wanted to learn something they had to go to a library we have the internet now try gbt bro so when you say anybody can do it you don't want to glorify people that's because the best information y combinator Stanford Harvard MIT all

those classes are on YouTube for free but it's interesting because there's people that glorify people in my Niche my age that have made all this money online because they have big followings right but in reality like you should be learning from people like you CEOs of the biggest companies like Salesforce or of Shopify they have interviews of those CEOs with like 5 000 views on YouTube that you can learn from yet people still choose like it's a benefit because there's more information out there but also still people will kind of fall for this trap to

follow people that are popular right or entertaining to listen to I think we could say like a limiting belief like people don't want to think that those successful people are like the same as them because because they don't want to realize that they're missing out on their potential like they want to make you feel exactly yeah how to make you feel to be to know that you could be at that level but you're not because you're too busy [ __ ] playing fortnite all day that's the trap for society and you did it without a

following which is so impressive to sheer businesses you don't need to follow it you don't need to follow it's true does it help absolutely which is why like now I'm like really investing I'm like building on my YouTube channel and you know I don't see any money from that bro but I'm spending a lot of money on editors and a thumbnail designer and you know [ __ ] four thousand dollar camera and you know these lights and the microphone and the whole setup I don't see any return off that in terms of monitor it but

the connections the relationships that I've forged the events that I'm getting invited to the information that I'm getting from these people yeah you need to understand that building a personal and eventually I know that the money will come too I don't know how but I know that the money will come I'm confident I think we I said this before you got here like if you make a good product you can sell it without a personal following but if you have a personal following even average or below average product will sell dude I have like 20

000 followers a humble 20 000 followers on Twitter it is unbelievable no no but I have 20 000 followers on Twitter and it is unbelievable the impact that it's had on my life I have like real like VCS and Big Time investors that DM me like every day hey I want to invest in you like I've I've been following your journey since you you know since you were a college student at the University of Michigan before you dropped out I've been following you since day one they didn't they feel like they know me they trust

me and I got people that are like trying to throw money at my face I have you know people that that find my phone number and text me that tell me that they want to work for me for free what the [ __ ] I'm sure you could resonate to that because I only have twenty thousand followers I cannot imagine what it's like to have two million I think building a business it's the people in your business like it's like your business's value is the sum total of like the average IQ of your business and

so attracting Talent with a personal brand huge the number one most valuable part of having like Elon Musk he starts new business smartest people right there one thousand percent and almost every single person that I work with almost is somebody that I found off of Twitter and they are [ __ ] Killers go into that what's your recruiting process how do you vet them like how do you find like you I think and so I think this comes down to a the personal brand and being in the know like when you're in the know you

you're able to like you know like who's the bullshitter and who's the [ __ ] assassin how do you test them how do you find that out I don't think it's like a test or find it out I think it's just like like yeah I mean a conversation sure sure but like bro if I hear from like eight different mutuals that you're a [ __ ] killer like chances are you're a killer right like and obviously like I'm gonna test them out like I don't I don't have any full-time employees everybody that works on my

team is on a contractor or agency basis so you know like if performance isn't good they're not lasting but like I haven't even had that problem like and I work with I would argue like some of the brightest people in this space I don't even think that I could bring them on board as a full-time employee because they're so talented that they're running like eight different brands their own internal products they're making millions of dollars you know among the 800 things that they do where I'm just like a side project to them but that's okay

because they're so [ __ ] brilliant right huh it's kind of like they have the skill set that they have built over six years right and now they can do the job effectively for you in like a few hours a day or they have a team underneath them that they've trained and they overseas right how many people are core to your operation by the way I don't know the number off my head but like I would probably say like eight to twelve eight to twelve very solid size yeah there's this huge Trend where you can

do way more with way less people like mid Journeys eight people it's like I didn't say I did not know that yeah oh yeah that's absolutely I used to have when I was younger I used to think there's like this flexed having a lot of employees I got 40 employees I'm killing it yeah Alex is having as few employees as possible to get the biggest outcome that's what elon's doing with Twitter and it's really showing so I kind of want to go into more so how do you like who did you learn from how did

you become who you are what how do you like focus on education or how do you think about education yeah so when I was a freshman in high school there was a senior his name was Alan my mom like I owe a lot to this [ __ ] kid he's brilliant um and he was the guy that started the fidget spinner Trend I swear to God if you look up like fidget spinner like whatever like there are Forbes articles on him I think he sold like four hundred thousand dollars in fidget Spinners online when he

was like 18 years old he was a [ __ ] walking Legend I was a young freshman like the fidget spinner had started my school so like he was selling it to like like dudes like in class and I remember being you know the young little Shifty you know 14 year old entrepreneur that I was I was like [ __ ] out of my mom I could make these myself I could sell these myself right um you know I'm gonna start my own fidget spinner company my grandpa left me 500 bucks on a 3D printer

I would print out the frame I would hammer in the skateboard bearings you made them I made them bro with my [ __ ] hats and uh I would sell them to my homies and me and Alan had beef right because like you know [ __ ] this this little twerp that's that ripped my business idea but he was like uber successful he he put it online he was running on Meme Pages back in the day when it was like nobody that's where you learned that bro 100 and um you know he probably hated my

guts like when I was a freshman funny enough he ended up like kind of becoming like my I hate the term Mentor bro I find that [ __ ] like so corny and cheesy it's like oh like my billionaire Mentor like [ __ ] that and you never asked someone like how you Mentor me yeah he's like a friendship yeah right it's a friendship it's a friendship but he took me under his way he took me under his wing and like hey like it's not even like he like gave me like some crazy advice or

like showed me the rubs but like when I was 14 years old like I Saw The Light it wasn't like some like YouTube like Guru [ __ ] the Ferrari it was this kid is goes to my high school he's a [ __ ] beast and baller he is making a bunch of money like selling [ __ ] online it's possible then I saw him like drop out of college and I saw him like you know do 800 other things like you know he was running Bloomberg's social media meme campaign what the [ __ ]

now he's like running like a YC backed financing or sorry a YC backed teen investing app like Robin Hood competitor like for teens uh that's worth like tens of millions of dollars and he's like their head of growth and co-founder right like not surprised but he was like the guy that really like kind of showed me the line and showed me that it was possible to do this because originally like I thought it was a scam right like you see all these [ __ ] flexing the rolly and flexing the Bitties and you know the

lamb bone it's like like you know and then it's like hey buy my course [ __ ] that I want to talk about that though that's interesting so let's talk about that so like my mom was like like I knew that that it was legit when I was a senior in high school uh my mom was head of growth for this app called it's me uh and he brought me on the team to streamline the influencer collaboration process and he was the guy that was the first person to tick tock this was like when it

was weird he's a huge Visionary baby huge and uh this was like when it was weird to be on Tick Tock it was like people dancing and I was like weird like oh what like you're watching tick tocks you're making tick tocks but it was ripe for disruption it was right for disruption for two reasons first influencers on the platform had never done a brand deal before there were no brand deals on Tick Tock because you know there were no companies that were like you know they're throwing money at that so you were able to

get brand deals for pennies on the dollar two the second reason why like it was right for disruption was the viewers weren't seeing any ads right like if you go on Instagram or Facebook whatever it's you know every two posts it's a [ __ ] ad with Tick Tock there were no ads there were no like you know collabs there were no influencer deals so like it was like a holy [ __ ] like money printing moment so he was ahead of growth at this app he brought me on the team to streamline the process

I assembled a team of virtual assistants we [ __ ] scabbed that [ __ ] up we brought that up to number four on the social networking charts and this was right behind Instagram Facebook and WhatsApp Dan they are you know that you're not gonna pass that's meta Facebook Instagram WhatsApp that's meta they're a multi-billion dollar conglomerate with you know [ __ ] you know tens of thousands of employees this was an app with a team of six engineers and like me and my mom spearheading you know growth and we brought it to number four

it was crazy that's really impressive and it's so hundreds of millions of views yeah it's so crazy that this person went to high school too yeah seeing that it's possible is really the biggest motivator and by the way my web developer also went to my high school like we were in the same grade we were homies and he's a [ __ ] killer he's an animal shout out Zach malter and he has his own I helped him like to kind of scale his agency where he just hired his first employee and now he's working for

like eight other econ Brands like all my homies in the space and he's gonna [ __ ] kill it but uh yeah man having people you can trust is really important oh my God because you go through a lot it's a roller coaster I know you've had we're talking about the highlights here but you've had some dark moments too we won't go into it they can go watch your channel what's your Channel's name again it's by the name Oliver brocon how do you spell your last name b-r-o-c-a-t-o okay I'll link everything okay super interesting yeah

so I kind of want to go into that what you touched on so is there anybody else you've learned from online by the way like anyone that you would notably read a book anybody you follow I would say like it was a lot of trial and error man like you know after the fidget spinner Trend like you know that exploded but then it also died just as quick and I made a little bit of money off the fidget Spinners and I I learned like Etsy and eBay but after that I was like all right like

now what do I do so I started knocking on doors and I ran like a social media management company but uh you know clients were constantly churning because they're like okay what Revenue are you driving you're posting on Instagram for me but like you're not driving any sales so then I moved into like social media marketing and then I tried Drop Shipping and that's Years bro I was in it and a lot of unsuccessful School of Hard Knocks that's what it was did you go to college at all uh yeah I went for a year

and a half um I went to the University of Michigan I was studying business at Ross which was a joke how did you get in um I come from a family where like education is super important my sister goes to Yale she was damn she was valid like she was salutatorian she was teachers Pat and then there I was I was class clown you know teachers would be like what the [ __ ] Ali bro My Name is Oliver people call me Ollie they'd be like Ollie Brook to Oliver brocato they're like what the [

__ ] is good right um but like you know I I don't want to do my own we're here but like my dad's a [ __ ] my dad's brilliant um he's in finance corporate guy my mom went to Harvard Business School she's brilliant God damn uh pedigree right here yeah dude I mean when I told them that I was dropping out to sell sex shop yeah imagine education is very important um you know that's a whole other story where'd you grow up what's uh Westchester New York New York okay so like 40 minutes outside

Manhattan um and you know I went to school freshman year was amazing right like uh it was during covid um too so like I lived in a house with like three of my best friends I was like developing tabs but it wasn't that intensive right because it was like it was over such a long period of time there was a lot of like waiting I don't know if you can resonate with that there's like a lot of waiting for stuff right like we couldn't start photography until we got I can relate until we got like

the package right and we couldn't get the packaging until we get to the design right and so like it was spaced out over 11 months but I wasn't like grinding on it day in day out I was like you know grinding I was like wait two weeks starting a process and then like the grand grand and then it's like wait a month to get the sample so like there's a lot of waiting and um you know like dude it was a [ __ ] you know it was a party bro online class which was a

joke pass fail you know uh living in a crib with like three of my best friends I was dating this this amazing girl um you know life life was life was a fairy tale in fact you know that was probably something like my happiest moments ever I look back on that why'd you decide to drop out then um the opportunity was bigger well then sophomore year happened and you know it was like more like it was like real school and um you know I was I was in this fraternity do you feel like you were

learning yeah no that's I wonder that's the biggest thing no I was I was not learning anybody any kid that's in college and your parents are saying go to school get a degree those parents did not grow up with the internet and where they could learn from the best people immediately dude it is so it is so out of date bro it is so sad and it costs hundreds of thousands it is so sad to see like an architecture student like grind their face off for four years and now there's like [ __ ] AI

you know that will like you can literally say like make a hundred different schematics and give me like 40 different variations in three seconds their college degree is completely obsolete were they teaching you Facebook ads or anything like that no [ __ ] no I took an e-commerce class the biggest joke in the world look I I I I was I did the website project on my own company tabs and the professor gave me a b he he ran this like website called like underground printing it is the most disgusting website I've ever seen in

my life it was like something like 2006 like Tumblr [ __ ] and this guy's giving me a [ __ ] BM I I mean like I'm not arrogant right but it's just like it was a joke and school was a joke in one of my Ross business school classes which was the second best undergraduate business school in the country we were playing with Play-Doh bro I kid you not you could not fail a class the worst you can get in a Ross cost was a b so everybody would just get [ __ ] up

and drink and smoke and you know the College culture it's a College culture and it's an all-expense paid trip by your parents by the government if not your parents you know I was very fortunate where my parents were paying for my education and they wanted to pay for my education my parents bought me tooth and now you know when I wanted to drop out um but you know that that wasn't my life I was living in a fraternity house with kids that would you know pass a bong around you know 99 of their waking hours

in a dimly lit room sitting it off so sitting on a [ __ ] couch in a dimly lit room passing a bong around 24 7. is that what I want to be is that where like is that inspiring is that like are you kidding me man like I I wanted to I wanted to get out I I needed to break free um you know I was told by some of my friends man like some of my friends in my fraternity you talk about business too much you talk about working out too much I mean

I got to get back into the gym because I put on a couple of pounds since uh but yeah I got told by some of my closest friends Ollie bro like you you talk about business too much like it's it's a little too much are you kidding me like these are the people that I'm surrounding myself with like you know I feel bad because like my dad like has like this vision for college right we're like like he's like an aerodyte right we're like you know you go to school and you get inspired and you

meet these amazing people and build this network and you learn and you grow that's not that's not what my college experience was mine was the most depressing time period of my life and I graduated I went through all four years [ __ ] that but it's so conflicting because we are told our whole life the story you go to school you get like get a degree and you get a good job and that's success right and so all these kids that are in that dark basement passing the bong around thinking they're doing the right thing

because they're listening to their parents and that's the narrative they're going to class doing the bare minimum getting good grades and so they're hitting like that was the validation that they're doing the right actions right they're going to class getting good grades now I can just smoke a bong and relax in reality there's no translation that you actually like accumulated that knowledge if you have a degree also like dude you're in your most pivotal years 18 to 22. your brain spent four years on anything spent four years on a business I promise you you will

be a millionaire by the end of those four years you stick it through you do those like if you spent those four years as intensively and you took that 250 000 and started Capital you will be I promise you you will be infinite leverage with the internet the bank will give you a loan for a student loan but they won't give you a loan to start your business how does that make sense um it's in my opinion it is a huge scam and it's really damaging to our culture because people are telling you the goal

is to get a degree the goal is not to get a degree so you also get good at something to become the best at one thing that you're interested in 100 and to be like a killer in that in that space I have this aha moment like a month after school I was in Miami right and one of my buddies who runs this super amazing this super cool design studio it's called our Bureau shout out Peter and it's like this beautiful space kind of like your space right here man beautiful like fancy incredible branded the

the furniture the vibe it's immaculating like 20 employees working Behind These like you know cutting Edge MacBooks and he invites me to speak to his team about Tick Tock tells me he pays for my [ __ ] Uber black he wants wants to pay me like you know a couple hundred bucks or whatever it was a couple thousand bucks and Consulting for me to speak to his entire team and I'm sitting there I'm like one month out of college you know being in a classroom getting lectured by a [ __ ] dinosaur right uh and

now I'm sitting here like and these guys whole entire team has notebooks out taking notes on what I'm saying and I'm like is this real right now I was like if I went to school rap I would be an intern grabbing these people coffees and instead bro I'm like sitting there like on this like you know big chair like there's a kind of cushy check like I'm on a [ __ ] throw like I'm a king and I got like 20 professionals adults that are scribbling down my every word asking me incredibly insightful questions and

I'm just thinking to myself like if I went that route I'd be grabbing them coffee and instead like look at where I am like and like now I look I look at where I'm at and I mean the non-dushy way I look at my bank account right like and it's it's surreal you deserve it though because you found that motivation to learn by yourself and you were interested in it I don't even know if it's the motivation because I think a lot of people have a similar motivation I think it's like going against what Society

is telling you because I think a lot of people have the same motivation yeah I think I think like people people are afraid to make that leap because everybody tells them that that's the wrong leap to make when I told my mom and my when I tell my family that I was gonna sell sex chocolate you know they laughed at my face and I don't blame them like if I mean yeah I don't believe it's a funny problem yeah it is when I told him like yo I'm going to sell a million dollars worth of

sex talk in my first six months people are like what the [ __ ] what the [ __ ] is wrong with this kid and then I did it you know in my first year I sold four uh this year I'm gonna do over 10. um it's not encouraged like it's not encouraged I was lucky enough to have an entrepreneur father and so I just see it firsthand every day and so obviously I had a more supportive system there yeah my mom really wanted me to go to college and I just see that narrative every

single like Day affect all of my peers thinking they're killing it right or I'm just like eat being eaten alive inside like this can't be right like this cannot be what yo so so here's the thing my dad's my dad's very successful my dad is my dad is my dad is super [ __ ] smart and when I grew up I had about it his name was Jack his dad was a [ __ ] multi-millionaire and my dad and his dad were on the same level like in terms of intelligence in terms of you know

professionalism like in turn like if you measured him up I would say it was pretty damn even maybe my dad was even smarter this guy was a multi-multi multi-millionaire I'm talking Lamborghini I'm talking McLaren Rolls-Royce and like they were like my second family to me and like I would go to their country club I would go on vacations with them I would go on there [ __ ] you know I'd go on a yacht with them and I saw like I took it all in and I saw like the only difference between jackstad and my

dad is that my dad is a corporate employee that will never make like we'll have a ceiling that will be capped out at X but I saw you know a [ __ ] multi-multi-millionaire and there was only one difference he owned his own business my dad worked in the business and I knew from a young age I wanted to be like that guy that's so important and I want anyone watching this that may be discounting him because he came from you went to a nice school or you came from a nice family there are so

many of our friends who are doing nothing like not making any money have a lot of problems well dude my dad doesn't make millions like I came from a nice family I was definitely privileged but like you know um do not let that be an excuse to yourself like oh that's why he's successful he took action he grinded he went against the grain and took a [ __ ] ton of risk right so huge prophecy for what he did like my parents were like yo if you don't [ __ ] hit the books we're gonna

take your business away dude like it was it was the opposite like I was I was forced to go down the corporate path you know since I was [ __ ] 14 years old right I was scared to go home if I got a beep or B plus I was scared I was scared to face my parents wrath that's the true privilege people who are pointing you and motivating you right right holding you accountable right right I guess sure sure but I think that those are the wrong values instead of instead of making it life

or death to get an A plus on the quizzes that's true they should be pushing you they should be pushing you to learn that skill instead because at the end of the day nobody was a [ __ ] that you got an A in algebra too but like like the kid that's like grinding on cameras it's more habit forming I guess sure yeah sure but the kid that's like learning a skill at 14 and then like seeing that scale through by the time he's 25 could be like the next you know Spielberg oh it's just

interesting like the whole education system Technology's evolved so fast and our parents are the one that we trust in guiding us through life but again they had to go to a library they had to go to a college to learn from someone who's the best at what they do now we can online and we can do social media and AI until these people even 10 years ago it's a whole different world than what they came up in and so it's so important that you're learning just firsthand and then trusting yourself that you have the right

information and to take that leap so was there like a point that you like were like hedging like should I stay in school should I take that leap absolutely yeah absolutely like when I first started tabs like I was like kind of like recruiting for like a summer internship and then I was like [ __ ] that I'm not going to get a summer internship and I you know I live I lived at home and I was working on tabs um you know and this was like when we were in production that we had no

sales and again there was a lot of waiting time and I had to face my parents wrath every single day what are you doing you're wasting your time you know you need to you need to be in a corporate environment you need to be learning you need to be in an internship like you know disappointment your disappointment so so I didn't drop out of school right um second semester sophomore year I went part-time student I took two classes uh and that was that then again I didn't drop out of school after that I decided to

take a gap Year I'm still on my Gap year right by the way right now oh yeah I ain't going back for sure I ain't going back and by the way I'm allowed to take up to 10 10 Gap years I believe of opposites I don't need to like drop out I don't need to be like a radical Dropout right I I've created optionality for myself and there's there's there is heads right there right which is like a safety that like [ __ ] hits the fan worst case scenario like I can always go back

and that's how I think other people need to think as well like school will always be there for you but like I have lightning in a bottle right now like my company is growing by like double digit percentages now I am making you know uh millions of dollars what gave you the courage to take the Gap year well it was the idea that like again what is the worst that can happen but here's the thing so I took the Gap year and I moved to Miami I moved in I moved from a frat house to

you know this apartment that I couldn't really afford in Miami um and the company was growing month after month after month but I was I was reinvesting every single dollar back into the company to fuel the growth and then July happened and [ __ ] hit the phone uh we started getting banned on all our social media accounts Revenue fell dramatically my co-founder and partner who was supposed to be contributing who was completely Mia told me hey Oliver I'm gonna go back to school despite my pledge to take a gap year with you to focus

on scaling the business and by the way I'm gonna go start other businesses too and I'm gonna do the bare minimum per our contract agreement and I think you should do the same I go oh [ __ ] man I can't afford the apartment that I'm living in I can't afford food really because I'm like again like all my money's like tied up into like buying hundreds of thousands of boxes and chocolates like in order to sustain it it like sales are falling you know I'm living in this this this this this Pet house in

Miami but I can't even afford to furnish it and I'm sitting there thinking what the [ __ ] did I do I can't my my academic advisor I say I need to I need to go back to school she goes Oliver you can't go back to school you didn't take an economics class which is a prerequisite in order to assimilate and you know and to to to to to enroll in Ross you need to take that economics class and you can't you can't jump back into Ross halfway through you can tell like a semester thing

Ross is like a very like particular curriculum you have to wait a year so I was forced in to like dyscapia and I ended up moving back home and I was incredibly depressed man you know I gave up like like my parents were paying for my education quite frankly they were paying for my school they were paying for my room and board I was going to be living in a crib again with like homies from school um you know and and life wasn't that bad you know at the end of the day yeah as much

as I can shift part though yeah as long yeah that is the dangerous part but as long as I can [ __ ] talk it right like my parents were paying for my food my room my board I'm living with friends their parties their girls you know it's a vacation get comfortable very easy to get comfortable and instead I'm in the last place I want to be which is back home with my parents and by the way my parents at this point moved from New York the Bumble [ __ ] Tampa like 40 minutes outside

of the middle of nowhere right and I'm completely isolated I'm completely alone the company's tanking my co-founder is back at school partying with his friends having the time of his life starting other business ventures and I'm sitting there with my dick in my hand and I'm like [ __ ] right you know I was it was like probably like one of like the lowest points for me and now granted like you know at the end of the day it's our perspective like I'm very lucky and fortunate that like I was able to move back in

with my parents and the feeling is [ __ ] you know yeah you don't have to sugarcoat it like the feeling the feeling was [ __ ] and uh yeah like for a little for a little bit I gave up hope stopped working out and like got a little fat like and you know I stopped seeing people like um it starts to affect your life like I wasn't like showering every day and like I wasn't like I was like I should be like you know what I mean like I started to like you know have

like more acne and break out because it starts like permeate into every aspect you know I got invited it's like with my family to like go to like this football game and see my cousins and even have fun and and I was like I'm not going I can't see him I don't want to see them I'm like this loser that like moved back in with my family and like you know I was I was supposed to feel so pressure dude I was supposed to be 2007 Facebook in my head in my head it was I'm

dipping school and I'm about to [ __ ] blow this [ __ ] up and be on a rocket ship I was in my head I'm [ __ ] Mark Zuckerberg like Facebook 2007 right like and this is the summer that's gonna change it all and instead I'm in the one place that is like you know the one place I don't want to be which is back home with my controlling helicopter parents that are you know in my [ __ ] year every day ah you should have gotten that job you should have been back

in school right like terrible but at the same time it also forced me to put my back against the wall and slowly slowly like I started to build things back and I started to build a team and I started to you know bring on like some Killers we moved into quarter four you know Black Friday Cyber Monday um Christmas holiday season um you know soon after Valentine's Day q1 and things started to rebound and explode and after July we have been growing month after month after month but we're not gonna be pushing over million dollar

months um and you know I I moved out thank the Lord I moved out um you know I now live um in first of all what I did was I traveled I traveled for a month and a half uh all over Europe um and I got excited about life again I was I I I I I went from a place was the business running still yes the business was running were you just waiting no the business was running the business was growing and like things were starting to [ __ ] move and I started to

build a machine I started to to build teams and people and like it stopped it stopped being me like carrying everything on my back and I started to build a business I started to work on the business instead of working in the business uh and I decided like you know I need to get excited about life again because you know here I was I was living in my parents house I wouldn't leave it and I wasn't taking care of myself and I wasn't seeing people I wasn't socializing I'm in this place for like [ __

] three months like I gotta get out so I booked a one-way ticket and I I backpack and and traveled around Europe and it was amazing I fell in love with a girl in Italy like you know like I started like dating this girl I mean dating yeah so I started seeing a girl in Milan and I started making friends and places and I started to get like high on life again and you know people will tell you like you know like your business isn't going well or your business is going well you need to

grind grind grind grind grinding like you need to school you know you need to go into monk mode and [ __ ] that if you're not there mentally how the [ __ ] are you gonna run a business if you if you don't wake up and you're not excited to tackle life and you're not excited about like living what's gonna what's gonna motivate you to run an econ brand right like like at the end of the day like what is like what's like what's the purpose right uh and so I kind of like rediscovered like

just you know my passion for life and for students and then I ended up like after you know my little episode of traveling and running the business I ended up kind of planting my flag down in Scots in Arizona and I moved into an apartment with two of my best friends they're both Ecom Tick-Tock guys which is amazing to be around um and you know here I am now um and the business went from sixty thousand dollars a month in July and now we're pushing over a million dollar a month it seems so impressive bro

and you earned every inch of it you went through those hardships and that's what got you here and that barrier to entry of making a good product taking a year is what's going to set you apart and why other people don't do it so absolutely you've made the right decisions and though it took longer it's paying off clearly so congrats to you but it's only the start for you you're [ __ ] 21. you're on a great trajectory and you're gonna see this thing through Great Heights I could imagine my friend I think it's really

important to focus on actually like the mental Health side that you said like not mental health like that's cliche but like if you're not happy like you're not going to make good decisions it's going to be destructive right so don't work yourself into the ground right like how are you going to be motivated to run an econ brand if you're not motivated to wake up in the morning exactly it's like people just need to think about it in Sprints like there are two weeks sure sleep sure it sucks and then there's like two weeks where

I can't do anything so I'm waiting on my shipment to come I'm waiting on things and so it's like all right I'm gonna eat healthy go to the gym make sure I'm taking care of my body and it's kind of just that's the balance and then you're on the roller coaster of Entrepreneurship highs and lows so what's next like you hit these numbers I guess really now that you've achieved success like people probably see this on the outside and like wow he's got it all now he's must be super happy he must have it all

figured out like how do you view the next year next two years of your business going forward that's a good question um in regards to tabs there are a lot of I leverage decisions that I can make that are going to result in a crazy amount acting Revenue in terms of the bottom line so for example right now we're only so like we only sell within the United States we're only sold domestically but more than 40 percent of all of our traffic is international so right away just opening up our product to you know International

countries will have a massive impact on our bottom line it's like that's a kind of like one big move that I'm going to make two is like getting is is diversifying from my direct to Consumer Shopify you know website right now like 99 of all of our sales comes from our d2c Shopify site I want to move or not I want we are we're actively and you know right now like we're making these moves we're moving to Amazon we're moving to um moving to Amazon we're moving to like Etsy we're moving to um Walmart uh

you know all these online platforms so I have a question on this yeah each one of those new verticals how are you going about learning each one of those bringing on Experts are you hiring them hiring advisors or yeah consultant advisor experts that are launching like those those platforms but like so right now like 99 of all of our Revenue comes solely from our Shopify website we're breaking out to online platforms like Amazon Etsy Walmart where we're breaking into wholesale and Retail right like um gas stations smoke shops sex shops convenience stores hotels have you

gotten deep into those locations not yet no no no like right now like not at all but like we're now like starting to kind of plant those seeds um and then you know I would say the other big move is like just increasing like like um is coming out with new flavors new experiences moods product lines there's so many different ways that we can take this and I think I spoke about this a little bit earlier but I'll just reiterate you know we could become like potentially like the the shroom the shroom chocolate brand and

the corner of that market we could become like the Delta a Delta 9 CBD chocolate brand we can Corner that market we can become the sex shop for Generation Z and quarter in that market we could be like the mood like the you know the the functional food brand that like comes out with like you know a gummy times relax or like you know a pre-workout times chocolate whatever you know so there's so many different ways where we can take the business and now it's about like kind of masterminding like all right we're now doing

eight figures a year in Revenue like what are the moves that we need to make in order to bring it to nine um right but you know eight nine time why not let's go for the B um but um so that's kind of like like where I'm at like where my head space is at for tabs um and in terms of like me personally um there are a couple other projects that I'm very passionate about which I can't talk too much about but it's gonna dip my toes into the software space and for those of

you that like don't really know this like on e-commerce typically you'll see a multiple on your ebitda on your profit your earnings before taxes right or adjust the taxes um you know like three to five x for SAS you're seeing an exit of you know like 10 to 20 x Revenue all right because it's mrr it's it's you know um and so I think that like tabs has been an incredible stepping stone for me now I do want to see it through but I'm also starting to get excited about like new avenues all together um

that I think like will create and build a generational world um yeah so and then lastly I want to point out I'm starting to really focus on building my personal brand so do not forget to subscribe to me on YouTube called action at um you know Oliver brocato b-r-o-c-a-t-o but I'm starting to take my personal brand incredibly seriously I've seen the opportunity and the the opportunities that have fallen into my lap from having 20 000 followers on Twitter a modest twenty thousand followers on Twitter right you know investors that want to throw cash at me

uh some of the craziest talent I've seen that want to work for me for free you know um parties events masterminds right like I've seen firsthand the impact that Twitter hasn't like like that my little social media following has on my life and I want to multiply that and so I'm breaking into YouTube um Tick Tock Instagram how many subscribers you have on YouTube right now 800. it's gonna be fun to watch you grow maybe like maybe like 600. I I I think like 600. that'll change soon okay so those like just the common verticals

do you really see yourself like you're talking about software you're talking about diversifying yeah is this because now you kind of separate yourself from the business it's like a well-willed machine and now you can start diversifying so smart absolutely so ultimately what's your goal like do you have like a why like I know people always talk about that but I think people say in business follow your passion I think but a lot of people that I've known as business is their passion business is my passion like people talk about like [ __ ] hobbies and

whatever like I love creating I love building and I'm addicted to like that feedback and you know the feedback is today creating an amazing brand and product with that that that leads to impact at the very formal and then also like money is like the scoreboard like and there's no cap on the sport yeah it's a sport it's a game like your life doesn't change from two million to 3 million nope like at all like at all at all but it's a it's a game it's it's a game and and you want to you want

to level up and you want to beat your high score um in terms of like my why right like I would say the guy for sure like had a chip on my shoulder growing up 100 you know what I mean like um hey like seeing like my friend Jack and like his family like his multi-millionaire dad and like and I see like my dad that would wake up and slave from like 6 a.m to like 9pm every single [ __ ] day and like my dad was like afraid of getting fired even though like he

was you know a top performer and by the way never did get fired because he was a top performer but like not just anxiety that's just not just the anxiety of a having a job and being in like the financial space right like when there's a downturn like everybody's Sweating Bullets but like you know I saw my dad like you know working working his ass off and it never being enough right like no it was never enough and I was like I can be that guy Why Not Me Why Not Me on top of that

like I would say like I always looked at myself like as a kind of like an outlier like dude I wasn't the smartest kid like in math class I was I didn't get the best grades but like I know that like I had I was destined for great things I know that like I had potential and I wanted to see that through and people slept on me bro like people people could not like relate people slept on me like friends slept on me teacher slept on me you know like everybody everybody stopped on me and

I'm a testament to the fact that you can create your own path you can do what people say you can't and at the end of the day the sky's the limit and you create your own reality um and I will say like I'm like kind of like a rebel too a little bit like I can never like work for somebody like I could never like follow orders or like or like be an employee and like I'm like I'm an outlier I'm an outsider man like um a personality trait it is a personality trait and like

I would get bored like doing the same like wrote you know repetitive task over and over like you know I need to like I love the game of Entrepreneurship I love the fire the stress the anxiety the intensity I live for that entrepreneurship is not fun but on the outside it looks So Glamorous you have to Bro differently something that I realized every successful entrepreneur has struggled like Battle Scars like you know what they say like you know all the scars that create Scar Tissue so that like yes like the next the next time you

get caught there's so much scar tissue that you don't even bleed right uh and like there is no successful entrepreneur without all those owls and without all those painful like you know lessons and and failures um and anybody thing that thinks that they can shortcut that or anybody thinks that there's like they can get rich by Drop Shipping you know right off the bat or like you know like they can go from zero to [ __ ] Millions I got I got some I got some sad news for you I didn't that ain't the case

and by the way [ __ ] all of those YouTubers and those gurus that try to perpetuate that lie so they could lie so they could line their pockets and they can make money selling you the dream selling you the course [ __ ] all of those guys like it's [ __ ] up you know they make a hundred thousand dollars you know Max right in Revenue maybe like ten thousand dollars like [ __ ] you know off their company and now like they're they're equipped to sell you this course of their rented Lamborghini and

I know these kids first hand they're not impressive they haven't they haven't really like they don't they don't know what it takes to run a business they don't run a business they run a lot where they tell the youth and they tell kids that hey just like you like just like me you can make money like me bro the only reason why you're making money is because of lies and because you're tricking people that don't know any better to buy your [ __ ] when in reality they don't have a [ __ ] leg to

stand on I could not agree more one Nuance or caveat I want to make is that people lump those type of course sellers to all courses right like college like equally as passionately as you are I would say that college is 10 times worse because college is six thousand dollars college is worse but these people that are selling these courses in their early 20s that just like made a hundred thousand dollars one time or whatever not even bro some of them dude yeah it's all fake like for sure let's break this down like I know

a guy that has like on his like Twitter about a million dollars in revenues it was a million dollars in Revenue over three years right so that's 330 let's say let's say 300 000 you know for simple math right per year I'd hit 20 margins right so that's sixty thousand dollars in profit per year right and then he's a business partner that's 50 50. homie was making 30 G's a year that's below minimum wage yeah it's not but they say they use Revenue right a million dollars in Revenue yeah irrelevant homie was making thirty thousand

dollars a year that's go go work at [ __ ] Shake Shack bro it's so funny okay go work at Shake Shack and you're and and now homie's pulling in I know he's probably pulling in over 30 000 a month off courses and people will say my agency makes 30 000 a month when their agency makes two thousand a month and 28 000 are courses but I agree I agree I don't wanna like it's sad because like these guys ruin the integrity and ruin like the game for everybody you're right bro there are for sure

um you know stats that are for sure like legends that have a that have a course or have a mastermind where like you know the ROI on that is immeasurable um unfortunately like those losers have kind of like ruined the taste for the rest of the people um and so like you know it's hard to kind of like stepping of a personal brand you know it's hard to separate though like the the people that are legit from the noise um and that sucks um you know but at the same time like I don't want to

like shot it completely because you're right like there are beasts that Inspire that teach that you know like that help people like build you know fortunes and it's not fair to shade the whole entire like space but what I will say is that like 99 of the space it's an influencer but the person if a person with a large following is selling a course you're better off second guessing it and making sure they're actually legit right but if you go to like master class or udemy like you got the CEO of Disney making a course

right and if you want to learn how like if you actually know what industry you want to be in or what business model you want to do the best thing you can do is pay thousands of dollars to learn from the best person absolutely it's your fault if you fall for this YouTuber that's a million followers and makes a vsl right like accountability there but here's the other thing too is that like there are people that I go to that Run 100 million dollar Brands like we're homies like home like my boy doesn't have a

course like I get on a phone call with him and he's giving me like strategic advice and tactics like so I don't know I don't know about that so then people's argument is gonna be if they're making so much money with their business why are they trying to sell a course right and which which there is a counter argument to like there's there's a lot of Leverage in selling a course like right now like well even if you're good at something you should want more people to be good at that unless it's direct competition well

that too but I mean like like for example um I do I offer Consulting like on the side it's like a side gig um it's and I charge like 300 for 30 minutes which is a lot of money and it's like seven figure eight figure brand I saw your Tweet on this yeah dude the reason why like it's not like because I need the money but I have like thousands of tweets coming in every day or sorry like hundreds thousands of DMS hey I got a question for you hey can you hop on a call

whatever and it's like that 300 is like kind of um P separates the noise from the people that are legit such an important right and so when I hop on those Consulting calls like I'm not talking to like real econ people that run seven figure eight figure Brands and they're incredible conversations oftentimes we become friends afterwards and I for sure give them more than you know 300 in value I'm plugging them with that adapt I'm for sure I'm talking because again when you're at that point all you need to do is optimize One Thing by

point one percent we're talking about tens of thousands of dollars maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars maybe Millions right so if they get on a call and I'm able to optimize one little thing you know they're seeing a hundred times where I was on that 100 times return and I I see the appeal of the course right like now I'm starting to like hop on quite a few Consulting calls where I should probably make it once exactly instead of instead of hopping on a 30 minute 30 minute 30 minute where it's like oftentimes the same

question exact same the same like now it's like okay wait a second might as well like make make a course probably make a mastermind and I this is something I've been debating because I don't want to be another NPC like Guru out there like the world does not need another one of those people but at the same time I for sure have like interesting stuff to share I have like a a different like voice uh and I think that I could provide value so it's something that I've been debating I think you should because you've

clearly proven that you walk the walk first and yeah people are going to lump you into oh he's just a core seller that's right because those people's opinions are irrelevant I don't know I don't know I don't know if it's irrelevant dude because like I look at other people and automatically in my head just because they sold a course I wouldn't not work with them but automatically like let's say I would like rate them a 9 out of ten because like I saw them and now I say they're selling a course in their bio maybe

they're a six out of ten it's not to say I'm not going to work with them but it's to say like they just drop two points in my book for sure do you want to help people absolutely how can you help the most people and then people think oh make the course free but then it kind of goes into the like a balance of is it worth my time uh then well these people actually take it seriously if you do it to free they won't even take it if they take it they won't take the

course they'll watch two videos and then [ __ ] on you publicly so you actually want to charge to make sure you're only getting quality people because if I make a course on how we use web3 in these big companies that does not apply to like any normal person starting out today they won't understand it so you want to charge higher to attract a higher audience that's like a luxury brand courses you're right same thing that applies you're right you're 100 right and so you know this is something that I've been thinking about and grappling

with um yeah but uh I mean we'll see we'll see where things happen there but like I mean like [ __ ] the money like I make enough money like for me like the personal brand has been just like invaluable in terms of like sure the relationships the connections it's access bro I got access to Cutting Edge information Cutting Edge tactic the top talent investors anything that I want is one person away so much more valuable I put out a tweet and I can literally move mountains yeah I think I can get in contact with

almost anybody I believe you and if but I want to go back to the course thing real quick it's like if I talk to Bill Gates he couldn't help me at all like he is so far above me 100 that it wouldn't even be useful and so you just need to find those people that are like one step under you so you can point the three things like your advice on The Tick Tock ugc guarantee makes me an extra six figures this year guaranteed just have this conversation right so there's value to that right but

ultimately there's so much value to a personal brand for every reason and so it's worth doing I think for courses one last thing I'm just in I just love this and I spent 100 000 on courses myself most value in masterminds most valuable thing I've ever done literally told me the exact Playbook how to think about things who to learn from but but for like the business model if it's for beginners needs to be free I have not I've never bought a course I have not joined a single Mastermind and like dude I'm getting my

information like straight from the mouth of like you know the top killers in the space uh how do you meet those people how do you get on a call with them Twitter man dude I just like since I started the company I've been tweeting about my thoughts Like My Philosophy my perspective and then just like sharing like what's going on in my life like my journey and tactics and trips tricks and hacks uh you know um what I do um and you can follow me if you do it bro yeah and you can follow me

on Twitter at Oliver Oliver underscore underscore B1 I'm on all other social media platforms at Oliver brocato b-r-o-c-a-t-o Instagram YouTube whatever uh but like you know I've been like just putting myself out there and it's unbelievable man like before you had leverage before you had results how did you get in contact with these people obviously you got lucky with this it wasn't it wasn't like it wasn't results like people are like oh like he made a million dollars he's valid it's just like dude I was like I'm myself like I was so authentic about like

My Views and like what I was doing and people started following me like just like be along you know on my journey and be along on the ride seriously yeah people were kind of like living vicariously through me you know like you know I'm a college student at the University of Michigan and I'm like tweeting about like how you know take a picture of my MacBook and I'm in a lecture class you know and I'm like doing product research and like dude if you have an interesting take and like you know you you you're unique

in some sort of like you know way we're like you're not just regurgitating the same [ __ ] that everybody else is hearing people start to take notice and over time tabs started to get bigger and bigger and over time my personal brand on Twitter starts to get bigger and bigger and I've connected with vocals bro you know people that run multi 100 million dollar Brands um people that run conglomerates like investors VCS um creatives like every anybody and everybody and it's a very small world it's a very small community I think you can you

can you can testify to that I feel like once you reach a certain point in our Ecom world you become known and you know like people know who you are you know who they are and like there's like you're like you're legit or you're not legit like there's a there's like an understanding it's like oh we have like eight different mutuals it's like I can like I can like background check you like that right like I can reach out to Alex right who's a mutual friend of ours say yo what's the deal with this guy

and then I could like so you know what I mean like your name and reputation starts to like carry a lot of weight start penetrating those kinds of circles and you start becoming known for something which is really important how do people talk about you just like your product right and I'm like I'm like The Tick Tock like organic guy okay that's like my personal brand like I'm like The Tick Tock organic guy and uh hopefully in this coming years um I'll be known for a lot more than that well my friend hopefully we can

have you back in maybe sooner than that and we can kind of get an update on what your Journey's been but I think watching your personal brand grow I think you're going to grow really fast like you have this down you're definitely credible so I think this was really insightful I recommend everybody watch this back two times at least because he dropped so much knowledge we should even internalize that and we talk really fast so definitely watch this again but go follow them on all social media you already know his name we gave like four

plugs but my friends right like actually to know you that was really inspiring I learned a lot I was looking forward to the next one brother cheers thank you