166: Ian Blair Built a $10M eCommerce Brand in Just 18 Months, Here’s How – 8FE

Imagine scaling an eCommerce business to $10M in just 18 months… 

Well, that’s exactly what this week’s guest, Ian Blair did. Ian is the founder and CEO of Laundry Sauce, one of the fastest growing eCommerce brands on the internet. Laundry Sauce produces fragrance-infused laundry detergent pods that make your clothes smell incredible. Before launching Laundry Sauce, Ian successfully built Buildfire, a no-code app building platform for businesses. 

But how did Ian transition from SaaS to eCommerce so smoothly? Which business model allowed him to scale to 8-figures so quickly? And how is AI transforming eCommerce? 

Find out in our interview! 

Inspiring Quotes

• “ eCommerce is one of the most scalable business models.” – Ian Blair 
• “ I don’t think I’ll be starting any eCommerce companies that don’t have a subscription component.” – Ian Blair 
• “People often pick a business idea without thinking through what it takes to scale. I see it all the time—entrepreneurs start with an idea first, then try to back into a business, instead of asking: What’s the most efficient business model?” – Ian Blair 
• “Entrepreneurs are willing to take risks and deal with the unknown. That’s what differentiates us from regular people.” – Ian Blair 
• “Ads are always gonna be the primary growth levers.” – Ian Blair 
• “When you’re the Rolls Royce of laundry, everything else is a downgrade.” – Ian Blair 
•  “I’m hell-bent on choosing businesses with a predictable consumption pattern—otherwise, you only get one shot to make money from a customer.” – Ian Blair 
• “I think there’s much more room to go up in LTV than there is to go down in CAC.” – Ian Blair

• 00:00:00 Intro 
• 00:01:25 eCommerce business model
• 00:03:35 Challenges in SaaS and eCom businesses 
• 00:07:23 Taking action vs. planning 
• 00:09:56 Laundry Sauce’s market and branding strategy 
• 00:16:32 Influencer marketing, brand differentiation, and paid ads 
• 00:34:53 The power of subscription models 
• 00:40:12 Product expansion 
• 00:44:05 Leveraging AI for data analysis 
• 00:50:28 From SaaS to eCom
• 00:54:36 Outsourcing vs. in-house 
• 01:06:19 Advice for aspiring eCom entrepreneurs 
• 01:07:42 Investing in personal growth 
• 01:09:14 Exotic cars 
• 01:12:21 Outro

Ian Blair 0:00
You have these, like, super high IQ people that have like, these amazing business ideas, but they will think through, like, every reason in which it can go wrong, you know, and then they don’t take action. That’s really what differentiates, you know, entrepreneurs from, you know, regular people. Like, we’re willing to take the risk. We legitimately have created the best laundry experience in the world. So, like, when you’re like, the Rolls Royce of laundry, like everything else is a down version. We might have gone from 300k a month like 500k a month, but overnight, generally, subscription businesses do better than like one time businesses. I don’t think I’ll be starting any e commerce companies that don’t have a subscription component to it. Congrats

Brad Weimert 0:33
on getting beyond a million. What got you here won’t always get you there. This is a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to reach beyond their seven figure business and scale to eight, nine and even 10 figures, I’m Brad weimert, and as the founder of easy pay direct I have had the privilege to work with more than 30,000 businesses, allowing me to see the data behind what some of the most successful companies on the planet are doing differently. Join me each week as I dig in with experts in sales, marketing, operations, technology and wealth building, and you’ll learn some of the specific tools, tactics and strategies that are working today in those multi million eight, nine and 10 figure businesses, life can get exciting beyond a million. Ian Blair, it is awesome to see you outside of the snow. Thank you so much for grabbing out some time.

Ian Blair 1:20
Absolutely a pleasure to be talking with you. And yeah, we had an absolute blast of bald face a couple weeks ago. Bald

Brad Weimert 1:25
face was ridiculous. Let’s recap that in a second. A little backdrop on you. You currently launched and run a company called laundry sauce, but your backdrop was a no code app building platform and built to 15,000 users, 15,000 customers, 30 million users across the platform, and you took about 10 years to do that before selling it laundry sauce. You built from zero to 10 million in 18 months. So I want to dig into all that, including your well, in addition your obsession with race cars. But let’s start with e com. What is the most overrated strategy in E comm that you see people doing right now,

Ian Blair 2:04
hiring lots of people? Yeah, because I think e commerce is one of the most scalable business models. I think there’s very few companies that you get like, that big of a point of leverage. You know, I was talking about Dan, actually. And I think it’s like e com and info products like those are the two where you can probably have like, the largest amount of revenue with the fewest amount of employees. I’m sure there’s other, like, niche businesses, but kind of like, broadly speaking, I think those are, you know, two of the most scalable business models. Because I think it’s pretty rare to see like software companies that are, you know, 1020, 30, 50 million in revenue with, like without, tons and tons of employees. E

Brad Weimert 2:39
com is interesting, because, similar to info products, you can jump in really quickly if you want to, or you can build everything yourself, and it can be a huge lift. Do you white label or do you build everything yourself?

Ian Blair 2:52
Well, I would say the majority of E commerce companies are probably using co manufacturers, and I think that’s pretty standard. I mean, there’s some guys that, you know, have in house manufacturing, and maybe at a certain scale, it does make sense, you know, depending on your product and, like, kind of the technical challenges. But yeah, we’ve, we’ve partnered with some outstanding manufacturers, and seems to be kind of like, standard practice. So because you can kind of approach e commerce a few different ways, like, you know, kind of the lightest left is doing something like drop shipping, where you’re effectively selling someone else’s product. And then once you start working with CO mans, like you are developing your own product, in the sense they might have some off the shelf stuff, but you’re typically designing something new or unique with your product, and then you can actually build a brand around it. Well,

Brad Weimert 3:35
I want to get back to that concept, because I think the concept of white labeling today as the world has gotten more and more fragmented and distributed, it’s been it’s more accessible and it’s easier to do that stuff, and they’re good and bad points to it. But the flip side of this is, the other end of your experience is SaaS. Yeah, what? Uh, what do people do with SaaS? That is that looks really attractive or seems smart on the front end, but is actually really stupid.

Ian Blair 3:59
Hmm. Oh. I think oftentimes people end up picking businesses without, like, thinking through, like, all the implications of, like, what it takes to scale it. And I see this all the time. It’s like, where people start, almost, like, with the idea first, and then try to back into a business, rather than, like, you know, what’s the most efficient type of business? And like, what are the characteristics of that? And then, how do I fit a product inside of that model? Inside of that model? And that’s essentially what I did with laundry sauce, whereas build fire. I actually started off white labeling, right? So I was fascinated by mobile apps, and, you know, just started building them, essentially, and then found another white label app builder that I, you know, slapped my logo on and built a couple 100 apps, and I was just really kind of fixated on that opportunity. And, you know, selling hundreds and 1000s of mobile apps is very difficult, right? And I’d say that was probably something I didn’t think all the way through, and it just made it a much more challenging business to scale, you know, compared to, well. 100 sauce, where I was essentially trying to play a bit more like Game Theory optimal, like, what are the characteristics of the fastest growing e commerce companies? Now I need to plug an idea into that, and then,

Brad Weimert 5:09
then it worked. Yeah, I love that, that I want to hear more about the path with build fire, because I knew that you had started with the white labeling side of things, and that decision tree over time is super interesting. I think you kind of have two different camps for entrepreneurs. You have the people that sort of fall into it, and then you have the people that seek it out. And a lot of the time when you ask people how they got into something like, Oh, how’d you get into that? 95% of the time, it’s, oh, I just sort of fell

Ian Blair 5:38
into it. Yeah. I’ll give you a perfect example. I was talking to a fellow at this this weekend. It was at thermal. It was kind of like a little group of entrepreneurs, you know, out tracking their cars and so forth. And this guy was in mattresses. And mattresses is definitely not something I would want to get into for E commerce, just because you buy a mattress and then when you’re gonna buy another one, like, a decade later. And that was exactly his thing. He was just, he bought a mattress online. He’s like, hey, like, this looks like an interesting business. I want to get into it. And then, you know, he said, in hindsight, he’s like, Yeah, I wish I picked, like, a an easier business. So, you know, because it’s hard to expand, like LTV, you know, with mattresses. So, and then he had some other e commerce projects that he was working on that had scaled, you know, significantly faster. So, but then, on the other hand, like I do have one of my investors in laundry sauce, like he scaled a mattress company from zero to 200 million in two years. So,

Brad Weimert 6:35
yeah, I have a, I have a good buddy in Austin, Ricky Joshi, who owns satba, and he’s also been on the show, but they’re, you know, multi 100 million dollar Mattress Company, but, but I don’t know the point of origin. I can’t remember how they dove into it or why, but, yeah, it’s functionally also, I mean, mattresses, for a long time, super heavy hardship commodity. You know, it’s like, it seems like it would be a race to the bottom in general, with that product. And like you said you buy one every 10 years. Maybe, yeah,

Ian Blair 7:02
yeah. It seems like brand is hard to defend there. I mean, well, I guess maybe you have, like, you know, the Tempur Pedic and stuff like that. It seems like you kind of have, like, the incumbents that, you know, have a tremendous amount of market share. I don’t know, definitely wouldn’t be a business that I would have gone and pursued, because it doesn’t kind of fit my criteria of, like, you know, generally consumable, high lifetime value products,

Brad Weimert 7:23
all right. So the other side of this coin is, if you’re a brand new entrepreneur, very often you get in your own way and you overthink things and you don’t take enough action. And so I kind of look at that and think maybe for your first company, it’s better to just fucking do something so you can get the wheels motion, wheels in motion, and learn, yeah, as opposed to trying to pick out the right thing. How do you, how do you look at that kind of the juxtaposition between those two approaches,

Ian Blair 7:54
I’ve always been, like, incredibly action oriented, you know, whenever I’ve done like, you know, disc assessments or stuff like that. Like, it always comes out and says, like, you know, I’m a quick starter, and that’s just generally, like, how I do things. And so I think it’s always better to index towards, you know, being action oriented than trying to, like, think things through. I mean, I was reading an interesting thread on x the other day where it’s like, you have these, like, super high IQ people that have, like, these amazing business ideas, but they will think through, like, every reason in which it can go wrong, you know, and then they don’t take action. So it’s certainly much easier, like, as a second time entrepreneur, because you’ve kind of gone through and, like, made a bunch of mistakes and, you know, you just go through the learning lessons. I mean, I even heard of, like, venture funds, where they will only back like multiple time founders that are above a certain age, which I think is kind of like an interesting strategy. So they’ve kind of really just nailed down on the fact that, you know, you see a much higher success rate when people have done it once or twice.

Brad Weimert 8:53
Yeah. I mean, it’s, I think that the another common narrative that I hear is you don’t know what you don’t know Sure, and at some point you have to make decisions with imperfect information and just do it anyway. Yeah,

Ian Blair 9:05
yeah. I mean, some you just got to do it, you know, at the end of the day, I think, you know, it’ll always be better to take action as an entrepreneur than just sit on your on your hands and like, that’s really what differentiates, you know, entrepreneurs from, you know, regular people, like, we’re willing to take the risk deal with the unknown,

Brad Weimert 9:20
regular people

Ian Blair 9:24
well, because it’s true, though. I mean, entrepreneurs have a much higher risk tolerance, you know, they can deal with uncertainty, you know, deal with the pressure, where a lot of people, like you know that aren’t entrepreneurs that they you know, definitely index more towards job stability, certainty, predictability, routine, and a lot of the stuff kind of gets thrown out the window when you’re trying to start something, you know, completely from scratch. You know, you have this idea and this vision for how the world should be, and then it’s up to you to make it happen and then convince people all along the way that this needs to happen

Brad Weimert 9:56
to that end, how much of your journey with laundry saw? US was you were very deliberate in picking the vertical how much of your journey was scripted and planned versus adjusted and accounted for as you went

Ian Blair 10:09
well. I think the market really fascinated me, because essentially, kind of what my criteria is for any kind just to be

Brad Weimert 10:17
clear before you go into this, your market is, is fragrant laundry detergent.

Ian Blair 10:22
Yes, yeah. So laundry sauce, for those that don’t know, it’s essentially like designer laundry detergent. We’ve brought high end fragrances to laundry pods, and we have like, dryer sheets, fabric softener, scent booster, etc, kind of like all the core laundry products. And we work with large fragrance houses behind, you know, some of the most successful designer brands that you would all know of, and our perfumers worked on, you know, brands like Tom Ford and so forth, and, you know, kind of bringing fine fragrance and laundry together. And I think we really have created the best smelling laundry detergent in the world and just created, like, a really elevated experience. But that wasn’t necessarily the business idea at day one, right? I thought laundry detergent was an interesting category to go after, because essentially, like a lot of these, DTC, e commerce companies have come in and, like, you know, premiumized, like all these, you know, like skincare or clothing, you know, you got like, Warby Parker, you know, you got, like, a way for luggage, like, all these kind of categories you got, like, Dollar Shave Club, you know, kind of created these, like, modern spins on, you know, traditional commodities, right? And it seemed like laundry was a market that not people, not not too many, like DTC brands have gone after, if they have, like, it has been, like the, like, really eco friendly angle. So the reason why I like laundry is because it’s got, like, predictable consumption cycle, and you can’t opt out. It’s like, it’s a non discretionary consumer good. So whatever happens in AI, or if we have robots in our house, you’re still going to need, like, soap and cleaning products, right? So I was like, Okay, this can’t go away. And then, you know, it’s a massive market, like, everyone needs it. And then I can go acquire a bunch of customers with paid ads, whereas, in like, software, you know, usually the rate limiter on growth is like, how many sales reps do you have? And then when you like, generate leads, like, which sales rep does it go to? Does it go to that rep or that rep? Because, like, the implied value of a lead might be different. Then you need account managers, and then you need, you know, a bunch of engineers to build the product and so forth. So I knew I wanted my primary growth mechanism to be paid ads, because you can just scale super fast, because if the unit economics are working, you could go from spending $1,000 a day to $10,000 a day to $100,000 a day. I remember just kind of talking with some other e commerce entrepreneurs, and they’re like, hey, like, hey, like, how are you going to differentiate this? And my business partner and I were like, We don’t know yet. Create a cool brand, I don’t know. And then we kind of just went and looked at the market where, like, Okay, well, no one has really brought fine fragrance to laundry. I think there’d be, like, a really opportunity, real interesting opportunity, to do that. And then, you know, obviously we’ve created a really exciting and high end, like brand identity around that too. And I think that the name lends itself well to creating that type of like experience and persona. Well,

Brad Weimert 13:10
one of the things that’s interesting to me about what you just said is you listed a bunch of brands that have some sex appeal to them, but yeah, sex appeal to them because there’s ego tied to it, right? Tom Ford or a Louis Vuitton or designer clothing is tied to somebody’s identity and ego. What laundry detergent they use? Maybe not so much. Sure. Why do you think that you know a designer laundry brand works, who’s your target market, and why do you think that it’s taken off the way that it has? Yeah,

Ian Blair 13:43
so we’re not, you know, quite, you know, the designer, like, price points, right? So, like, it is still a mass product. So, like, kind of what my idea all along has been like, how do we create, like, the Louis Vuitton shopping experience, but provide, you know, a mass product that a lot of people can resonate with and, you know, just create a product experience that, like, truly is, like next level. And it really the reason people love it is because, like, fragrance is, you know, a very powerful, you know, it’s the number one driver for why people actually like purchase laundry detergent. Or, you know, actually, how they believe their clothes actually get cleaned, right? Like, when your laundry comes out and smells good, you’re like, oh, it’s clean.

Ian Blair 14:25
So weird.

Ian Blair 14:28
I would say, like, most traditional laundry detergents, like your generic brands, kind of have these, like, industrial scents in a way, like it just smells almost like synthetic chemicals. So when you can have something that smells like absolutely amazing, you know, like your $300 bottle of Cologne, because we literally use the same types of ingredients that, you know, your 400 $500 bottle of like Bucha rouge, you know, has so, yeah. I mean, obviously it’s not like 100% because, you know, the same because, you know, you. Spraying it on you, versus, like, going through a whole wash cycle. There’s different chemistry involved. And, like, it’s somewhat technically challenging. It was actually much more technically challenging I thought it would be, because essentially, what you’re trying to do with a laundry detergent is remove oils and stains, but then you’re also trying to deposit scent at the same time. So fortunately, we have some amazing scientists that have brought some amazing technology to this category that category that we’ll leverage. But you know, the reason why people come back and buy more is just because the essentially the way it makes them feel right, it makes laundry day that much better. And laundry is typically a chore that people loathe. And you know, we get so many reviews where people are like, Oh, I’ve never been this excited to do my laundry in my life, like, as soon as I got laundry sauce delivered to the door, I did a load of laundry. And I can certainly understand that, because when I get new fragrances, like, they deliver to my door for, like, testing and stuff, like, I just go grab a load of towels, I’m like, Alright, let’s see what this

Brad Weimert 15:53
is all about. Do your friends think you’re weird because you talk about laundry all the time? Well,

Ian Blair 15:57
it was interesting. So I had like, 1,000% conviction on this business. Like, I just knew it was gonna work because I had surveyed, like, all my friends, like I did like, 100 customer interviews, like, essentially, with my friends, and, like, had them smell things and test it, and I got so much, like, validation out of it. I was like, Oh, this is gonna smash. Like, guaranteed. My My business partner, is a little bit more on the pessimistic side, and I’m like, kind of the optimist, and, you know, thankful that my optimism has, I guess, kind of come true. There’s always an opportunity to make money somehow, right?

Brad Weimert 16:32
Yeah, for sure. Well, you also, so you’ve got this massive space you’re competing in, which means that there are a lot of competitors competing, you know, anything that’s going to be commodity driven, you’re going to run into that you’re also now going into, it’s direct to consumer. So you’re going into e com competition in general. What do you think is going to happen with D to C brands in the next five years, with the robots taking over?

Ian Blair 16:58
Well, I think specifically with you know, being in a crowded marketplace, you know, I think most CPG products are commodities, right? And brand is like, the primary differentiator. You know, if you think about like Nike, I mean, it’s sure they have, like, some technology, but most of their stuff is like, commodities, right? So, I mean, you have, like Adidas, Reebok or, you know, so they’ve created these, you know, large brands, and it’s like, really a brand equity that keeps them, you know, as these big businesses, you know, maybe they do have, like, some, you know, distribution advantages. But I think a really interesting example to look at is liquid death, like, obviously, like, water is arguably the most commoditized product on the planet, and yet they came in with a highly differentiated brand and a different narrative. And it, like, deeply resonated with consumers. And they also, you know, they’re essentially like a packaging company, right? They put water in a really cool can, and now people want it, and then they’ve become, you know, several 100 million dollar company, kind of interesting. And most people probably would have said, you know, before liquid death had come along, like, are you really gonna be able to come in and create, like, that disruptive of a water brand? I think there’s always these opportunities, if you can create a brand identity and like narrative or story that deeply resonates with consumers, and it can be a little bit unconventional at times, like, we’re gonna start a water brand called Liquid death, like, that’s kind of nuts. And then I think to your next question, where is, like, where did DC brands go? I mean, I think ultimately you have to go omnichannel, right? You’re trying to get as many points of distribution as possible, and allows you to recoup more of your marketing dollars. So I think when you’re on shelf in retail, you’re selling on Amazon, you can be bought many different places. You’re going to generate more revenue for the same amount of marketing dollars.

Brad Weimert 18:40
Before we started, you talked about sort of the difference between scaling the app company, yeah, for a long period of time, and scaling laundry sauce really quickly, and you did so through paid ads. Are paid ads still sort of the holy grail for scaling e com right now? Or is there another strategy that’s super impactful outside of going full omni channel?

Ian Blair 19:04
I think ads are always going to be the primary growth levers. I mean, you look at like Google and meta, right? Like those are, you know, the advertising companies that could probably consume like, 80% or 90% of all ad dollars, right? And they’re, they’re massive companies, and the reason why, like, they’re that big and consuming all those ad dollars is because it works, right? So I don’t see it going away anytime soon. And ultimately, at the end of the day, like you need to let people know that you exist, right? And people are always going to forget about you. So, you know, advertising is kind of that way to, you know, consistently stay top of mind with people. And you know, ultimately, you need a you need compelling, creative that people want to engage with. You need to with. You need to have a product that people want to come back and buy more of. And, you know, people need but I don’t see it going away anytime soon. But obviously there are alternative distribution paths, and like affiliate being one of them. And, you know, we have our ambassador program, so this is where we have influencers that. Love our brand, and, you know, want to promote it, and, you know, it’s symbiotic relationship, but, you know, essentially, it’s just a different ad unit, right? So whether or not, like, I’m paying meta for the impression, or, you know, paying one of our ambassadors, you know, to get it in front of their audience, like, it’s kind of the same, but a little bit different, right? Yeah,

Brad Weimert 20:18
yeah, sure. I mean, are you paying for impressions with the ambassadors, or are you paying some rev share on the back end commission? So,

Ian Blair 20:24
so I guess we kind of split it on so we have our influencer program, and then we have like our ambassador. So Ambassador is more along the lines of affiliate, where influencer we’re essentially trying to buy like an ad unit on their profile, right or typically like white list. So you know, white listing is incredibly effective strategy for E comm brands, because, you know, you’re essentially borrowing their credibility as an influencer, right? They’ve established that trust and credibility, you know, with their audience, and you’re essentially renting that as a brand. And you know, especially if they’re authentic with the brands that you know they partner with, you know, there, there should be some authenticity there, and you know, you can still kind of maintain that trust with their audience. You’re not trying to, like, necessarily exploit their audience, right? But, yeah, I think it’s it. I mean, that’s effectively what you’re doing, is like you’re kind of borrowing their credibility and trying to get your product in front of their their audience and borrow that trust.

Brad Weimert 21:19
Can you describe the concept of white listing? Yeah, so

Ian Blair 21:23
white listing is essentially when you’ll have, like, an influencer will, like, essentially create an ad on your behalf and post it, and they can have it live on their profile, or they can have it as a dark post, and then you, as an advertiser, can use that post id and run it in your own ads manager. So we can run it to a broad audience or a specific segment, or we can run it to their audience. So if it’s a macro influencer that kind of has, like, broad awareness, if you’re doing it with a celebrity or so forth, you Yeah, you’re kind of borrowing their credibility. And then when people are scrolling through the feed, they’re going to see it come from your their profile rather than yours, and it looks a little bit less like an ad macro

Brad Weimert 22:03
influencers versus micro influencers, when and why? Macro influencers

Ian Blair 22:08
are essentially like a million plus followers. And it seems to me, it seems like we’ve worked with macro influencers. Scott Eastwood being one of them. He’s been a celebrity spokesperson for us, and also an investor in laundry sauce. And it’s been great. So it’s been interesting. I mean, even hearing some of his stories where he’s gotten out, like, at ballet and, like, obviously he’s been all these, like, crazy big movies and stuff, and then people are like, Oh, you’re the guy from the laundry ad. So I think our ads has done well for his career. But, yeah, I think with these, like when you do these high production value campaigns, you’re trying to create a kind of a moment in time, in a sense, I think macro celebrities, or macro influencers can definitely give you that little bit extra juice for it. And then, kind of your micro influencers, your, you know, 10 to 100,000 follower type of influencers. You can kind of just, I mean, there’s a lot more of them, right and, you know, partnering with the right ones that have the right audience, the right esthetic, kind of the right narrative, like, so when we partner with someone that, like, we typically partner with people that have, like, nice esthetic. They could be in the home care cleaning space and like, those things have performed super well. But there’s a lot of them, and you just got to sift through, kind of, you gotta sit through a lot of profiles to find the right ones. Unfortunately, we have a good team that helps with that. And, you know, it’s kind of like pay dirt for the business, in a sense, because they typically, you know, pay off, you know, in the long run. Yeah,

Brad Weimert 23:39
I think that the most entrepreneurs have seen some wild success stories around influencer driven marketing, yeah, and most entrepreneurs fail to execute on that well. And I think that there are a lot of reasons for that. One is that there are a bunch of different ways to approach it. Do you when you’re going about finding influencers to promote your brand. Do you do it through an agency? Do you do it by outreach directly? What is the approach that you use?

Ian Blair 24:07
Yeah. So, I mean, there are these talent agencies that represent certain influencers, and they’ll come to us, and we’ve done that occasionally, but really, we’re direct, outreaching to people. One of the things that is also interesting with influencers, you know, they are in the business of content creation, and they have a certain number of followers, like, clearly, they’ve been very successful at it, right? And you know, as an advertiser, you’re constantly buying content. So you know, whether it’s UGC, whether it’s, you know, from, you know, an agency where you doing like, a $50,000 $100,000 shoot, like, I’m buying that content, so I can run it as an ad. So when you’re buying content from these influencers, even, even if you’re not white listing it, you could just be buying it and, you know, running it as an app, right? And they understand like the trends. They know how to create like compelling edits that keep people like engaged. And I think that’s kind of like an underrated, you know, hack, because these guys. Guys know how to create compelling content, and you find the right influencer, yeah, you can make some magic happen, even stuff that’s like, you know, maybe a little bit more obscure, like, for example, like ASMR type stuff, like those people that are very good at, like, you know, tapping on the box, or, you know, playing with the pods. So, yeah, those, those can be, you know, executed well by the right influencer. Yep. It’s

Brad Weimert 25:23
weird world we live in.

Ian Blair 25:27
Cricket lit, right?

Brad Weimert 25:30
Yeah, for sure. So the outreach side of things, I want to get a little bit more granular, because, yeah, totally. Because when you look at if you think about this, like sales, and you say, Yeah, great, we just have our sales team call them. Okay. How did that conversion happen? Right? So you know, if you have Bob reach out to 1000 people on Instagram, what’s the response really going to be from Bob? Or if you have Susie do it, or if you do it from your corporate account, or if you do it from an owner’s account, what does that look like when you’re doing influencer outreach? What platforms? How do you approach it? Yeah,

Ian Blair 26:05
so we’re using a platform called grin for kind of, like managing all the affiliates and influencers. So it’s kind of like Salesforce for DTC in some ways. And then you can, you know, you get all the analytics data, like feeding into there, which I think is also quite helpful to see just kind of like macro, like how you’re doing. But, yeah, I mean, we, we run it like a sales team, like straight up. And, you know, there is some, like, AI automation that helps with some of this stuff, especially on Tiktok, because Tiktok is a bit more but like a spray and pay spray and pray approach, compared to like meta. And you know, you hear about all these people scaling like to crazy numbers on Tiktok shop. I mean, we got our Tiktok shop to six figures relatively quickly, just by like, you know, upping the amount of like, volume of our outreach, right where you’re sending, you know, 1000s of samples. And you know, eventually, like, you just get enough shots on goal to where it works. And then, you know, even with that, like, there’s tools like, you know, called Talk inviter, where, you know, you’re essentially going out and you’re doing this mass outreach. So there’s that’s maybe a little bit more on the spammy side, and but, I mean, it works, and that’s kind of some of the best practices I’ve learned from people that are doing like, you know, millions a month on Tiktok shop. But meta is definitely a bit more of, like, personalized outreach. And, yeah, we track, like, you know, how many people do we reach out to? You know, how many ambassadors do we onboard? And then also, like, what is like, essentially the implied value of each ambassador. Because, so say, I don’t know, you move $100,000 a month of or you have $100,000 in sales, right? And say, you have, I don’t know, 100 influencers, right? You got $1,000 a month, you know, per influencer, and, like, that’s how much they’re worth. So then, you know, what does it cost you to onboard those? And you know, you’re essentially treating it like, you know, a sales team. And there’s a lot of parallels, a little bit easier sale than you know, like B to B SaaS, so because you know you’re you’re essentially reaching out to someone saying, like, hey, like, I want to help you make more money, or like, I want to pay you, right? Versus, hey, Mr. Businessman, like, I want you to pay me for my service.

Brad Weimert 28:16
Yeah, and it’s probably easier with a sexier product at the same time. I guess it depends on the influencer, right? Some of them are like, Yeah, fuck it. I don’t Yeah, fuck it. I don’t know, give me money,

Ian Blair 28:24
yeah, for sure. I mean, and there’s just certain product categories that are just like, Absolutely blown out, right? Like, beauty is incredibly crowded, because obviously the margins are sick. And, like, when it works, it works. You know, supplements are another one. So I’m sure they get, like, reached out to you all the time. Where, like, damn, like another, you know, one of these types of products where, like, I’m sure there’s not too many people reaching out to them about their laundry detergent. And then one thing, one thing that we can kind of like, rest our hat on, is, like, we legitimately have created the best laundry experience in the world. So like, when you’re like, the rolls, Royce of laundry, like, everything else is a downgrade, you know. So it helps, like, knowing that we have the best product, and, you know, I think the values that our brand like represents and stands for and like our esthetic like helps, you know, represent them well. So, like, they want to promote products that letting help their brand as well. Yeah, did

Brad Weimert 29:17
you know Perry Belcher is? Yeah, Perry, Perry’s a buddy, and he was, he’s on the show a long time ago, but I’ve known him forever. And he said to me, and I think it was while we were recording, but he said, you know, what else people who buy porn buy? And I was like, what Perry? And he was like, toilet paper. And I said, Oh, shit. But the point is, laundry detergent is the type of product that you don’t have to have a super logical influencer to sell, because everybody uses laundry detergent. So like you said, people that are just doing weird stuff, that have niche followings probably also convert for you. Now, whether they convert as well or not, I don’t know, but you know me having. Being a race car driver promote easy pay direct is probably not as effective as me having an entrepreneur promote easy pay direct or an E comm person, right? Yeah.

Ian Blair 30:09
I mean, I think that’s one of the fun things about being kind of in a broad consumer category that everyone needs is like, you can have all these different people promote your product, and then, you know, it’s also at a price point where you can impulse buy it. So it’s not like, the super high consideration product, and you’re gonna have to buy it anyways. It’s not like, Oh, I’m gonna stop taking my supplements, maybe for a couple months or a year or whatever. Like, as soon as you run out of laundry detergent, like, oh, shit, I need it now, because you’re not like, you’re gonna wear like, basically the same amount of clothes each week, like, predictable consumption cycle. So I’d probably say, on average, people buy laundry detergent at least, like, four times a year. So you have these, like, I don’t know, kind of just macro, like, buying cycles that are just always happening, so you always have this opportunity to win the customer.

Brad Weimert 30:51
Yeah, I think that that’s a, I mean, that’s an interesting lesson for anybody that’s sort of shopping for what business to start is kind of your decision making criteria that you went through to start in laundry. And then the other is for people that are entrenched in an existing industry and and they’re way down the path and they’re like, this doesn’t apply to me at all. The question is, what other things are, you know, tangential or supplemental to the space that you’re in that do have a predictable buying cycle? And how do you, how do you broaden so I

Ian Blair 31:23
think you can, you can kind of choose two different paths, right? You can do durable goods or, like, consumption, right? You know, I know someone who runs a hair care brand, and he said this, he’s like, I just love, every time they use my product, it goes down the drain. So, you know, similarly, I mean, like, so those are the advantages of of, like, your consumables, like food, you know, being one of those that, you know, your durable goods, like manscaped, is a very good example of a durable good that’s scaled, like, massively. But on the other hand, like, they ended up getting into, you know, kind of wet goods, right? They have, like, their ball deodorant, like their skincare, right? Like, so all these products that go down the drain, so I don’t know, I’m trying to think of some good examples of kind of, maybe $100 AOV type of products that are durable, where they don’t have some, like, consumption cycle associated with it, because even, like, I don’t know, take, like, a home diffuser, right? Sometimes those can be a little bit expensive, but, you know, they’re trying to get you on that subscription to buy those, like fragrance oils. Like, every business kind of needs some consumption aspect to it, unless you have something that’s like, a really high AOV product, like, you know, furniture, for example. Like, there’s solid margins in furniture, you know, you’re going to buy it every so often. And I’ve seen guys do quite well. Like, I have a business, a business partner that, you know, has, like, a pool or he’s got a furniture company, and they’ve scaled it quite nicely. And I was talking to another guy this last week, and that ran a furniture company. So I’m pretty like, hell bent on like it needs to have a consumption, predictable consumption pattern, because otherwise, like, you kind of have, like, one opportunity to make money on the customer. I’ll give you. So one of my buddies who runs a company called Corporate underwear, we’re actually just going through this yesterday. So underwears, you know, especially for guys like you’re probably gonna buy, you know, you buy a bunch of underwear. When are you gonna buy, like, next time, like, couple years, year or two, right?

Brad Weimert 33:20
Probably more than that for most dudes, yeah, exactly.

Ian Blair 33:25
I think my brother, like, he’s probably the worst out of probably buy his underwear every like 10 years anyways. But like, when we’ve been looking at some of the other you know, brands like meundies or shinesty, like I was, kind of like looking through their product category, they expanded into all these other products. Like, they’re doing pajamas, they’re doing onesies, they’re doing T shirts and stuff. So, like, they kind of evolved, like they might have started as a, I mean, for example, meundies, it’s literally in the name. So they probably start off with underwear, and then they, like, kind of expanded down to all this other, like, comfortable clothing, where, just because, you know when people buy, like, okay, hey, I got it. Like, how many pairs of underwear do I really need? Because I can wash them, especially if they’re using laundry sauce, right? So, you know, they’ve had to kind of expand out into their product universe, universe to, you know, grow that customer. Because I think it’s just really tough to build businesses where you have, like, one opportunity to make money on the customer, and then typically, you know, those businesses where you are selling some widget, like, I don’t know it could be a Bluetooth speaker or headphones, where it’s like, you have this one hero product, like, if CPAs get out of whack, like, you’ll just basically go out of business. I think you can do a much better job at controlling, like, the LTV growth on a consumptive product by offering, like, a great product experience, a great customer experience, and like, continue to win that customer over, and then, yeah, versus, you know, trying to just win on reducing CPA as much as possible, I think there’s much more room to go up in LTV than there is to go down in cash. Well, that

Brad Weimert 34:53
introduces kind of an interesting question for me, because the you know, I’m in payments, easy pay, direct for. Fundamentally, because one of the criteria that it met for me, and I got into payments very deliberately, and one of that, one of the criteria, was residual, by nature, really nerdy, granular question. But how are you calculating LTV with something that’s a subscription? Because you fundamentally have people that are on it for many, many, many years, right? So how do you actually go about approaching that?

Ian Blair 35:22
Yeah, I mean, so on subscription, it’s relatively easy to calculate LTV because you can, just, like, basically look at your churn rate. But on one hand, you also have these certain decay curves that aren’t necessarily linear, right? So you might churn out a portion of your cohort, you know, early on, and then, like, the later than, you know, the people that are have separate for example, like the people that stick around after 24 months. Like your 24 to 36 month retention is going to be so much higher than your like, one to 12 months retention, you know, because it’s like a self selecting group. Um, but, I mean, there’s just amazing tools that are available in Shopify to do this. I mean, lifetime leads, a, you know, $100 $200 a month app that you can just install and get all your get all your cohort data, and then you can segment it by like, what products they bought as their subscription or non subscription, and you can plot that out. I mean, our finance tool does that as well, but that’s a very, very important metric to understand as an E commerce business, especially if you’re not profitable on first purchase, right? If you’re profitable on first purchase, you know, matters certainly a lot less. But you know, I’d say, like most like consumptive products, like you are taking a bit of a hit, so you’re underwriting that LTV, and you need to know those numbers, like implicitly, or else, you know, you could be in a pretty bad situation,

Brad Weimert 36:39
yeah, well, or else, you’re just throwing it against the wall, right? Yeah. In other words, otherwise, you’re just spending money on ads and not really sure how that’s gonna shake out on the back end.

Ian Blair 36:48
Yeah. One thing that’s interesting, because, like, you know, we work, you know, with fractional CFOs and so forth. And you know, some of these, like finance platforms, just for, like, e commerce companies. And I’ll ask them, like, you know, what are the characteristics of the, you know, fastest growing companies, or, like, the best e commerce companies, like, in, you know, that you’re dealing with, and they’re essentially all subscription businesses. That’s kind of what I’ve covered. And, you know, I mean, subscription you know, like, these purchases are just gonna happen in the background. I mean, think about how many, like, you know, some of the subscription products that you have, and you’re like, oh, shit, I meant to cancel it, but I reordered whatever. I’ll still use it, right? And then that just keeps going for a couple extra turns. And that could be the difference of being profitable and not as a business.

Brad Weimert 37:32
Yeah, no question about it. I just, I just, apparently, am a part of this private club in Austin for another year because of that reason? Yeah, yeah. Like, two months later, I’m like, oh, fuck, they billed me two months ago. Yeah, yeah. Okay, exactly. Okay, this is the interruption where I’m supposed to take money and let somebody else advertise on the podcast. But I don’t really want to do that, so I’m going to remind you that I also own easypadirack.com and if you’re a business that’s accepting credit cards or needs to beyond the fact that we can do a rate review to save you money, beyond the fact that we give you dedicated account reps, world class customer service, world class technology, and can actually optimize the way you accept payments online. You should understand why we have 1000s of people a year come to us off of platforms like Stripe or PayPal, and why they prefer easy pay direct. You can check us [email protected] forward slash b, a, m, that’s epd.com forward slash bam.

Ian Blair 38:30
Generally, subscription businesses do better than like, one time businesses, so I don’t think I’ll be starting any e commerce companies that don’t have a subscription component to it. To be honest,

Brad Weimert 38:40
I can’t even imagine that. To be honest, like the adding that difficulty in business, where you’ve got a whole bunch of one time sales is it’s an unnecessary element of business if you’re getting into business to design a profitable enterprise. Well,

Ian Blair 38:55
let’s take, for example, some of the hyper scalers in D to C, E, com, right? Generally, the one like, you take, like, all birds, like they scaled like crazy. But that’s like, I mean, the shoes do you have? Like, they wear out, you’re gonna need to buy new shoes. But like, those guys, like, had a lot of success early on, and then, like, they’ve just gotten smashed. I mean, they were like a billion dollar plus company at one point, and I think they’re maybe like a $50 million $100 million company now, something like that. I mean, it’s just massive. And there’s, like, there’s case studies written around it, one because they, like, eroded a bunch of gross margin and so forth. I mean, Warby Parker is kind of another one that I think scaled super fast. I had a lot of, you know, challenges further down the line. Because, you know, how often are you buying glasses versus, like, something like an ag, one like, that’s been a very, very successful business because I think it’s subscription, you know, I think if you’re just take, I think if you’re just separate all out all the hyper scalers in E commerce, look at the ones that are one time customers, like mattresses, like Casper mattresses, like, they went from zero to 300 million or. Or 200 million in, like, two, three years. And I think that was another one that got this massive valuation and just came crashing down later. So that’d be an interesting analysis. Maybe have deep research do it, you know? I’m sure there’s enough case studies online.

Brad Weimert 40:12
Yeah, AG, one is a super interesting one to me. I met Chris years ago. He kind of runs in similar circles, but he’s been around forever. I mean, Athletic Greens has been around for 12 years, or something 15 years, I don’t know, long time, but it’s also at a premium price point. And it was sort of a unique, unusual product. I think I say that a lot unique and unusual. It’s, it’s pretty much set up. It’s a unique product that was really expensive, that people didn’t know about either. So that scale surprises me, which brings me to another question for you, and I’ll use ag one as a jump off here. He had one product forever, and all he did was sell one product. Athletic Greens. In fact, it wasn’t until they’re at significant scale where they’re like shit. We should probably sell other products. Let’s rebrand this as ag one, and then we’ll sell other things under our umbrella as well, laundry sauce. At what point do you decide I don’t just want to do detergent? I’m going to sell the things around when you split your focus? Yeah. So

Ian Blair 41:16
when we first launched, we literally just had like, a white box and black box of pods, right? And it wasn’t till almost a year later, when we launched, like a female forward fragrance called Egyptian rose, and we launched our dryer sheets. And I don’t know, we might have gone from 300k a month like 500k a month overnight by like, introducing those additional products. So, you know, it helps unlock that incremental scale. So for us, like, as we’ve launched additional fragrances that’s created variety, and now kind of creates, like, more of a universe for people to participate in, because, like, Hey, I bought this fragrance. I want to try a new one, and keeps it like fun and interesting. Like, Dr squash has done a really good job with that. Like, they’ve created all these different fragrances, bunch of different collabs, and we’ll do like, limited release fragrances as well. I think, for, you know, for us, I mean, we, you know, we did, like wool dryer balls, dryer sheets, fabric softener, sand booster. We just came out with, like a Fabric Refresher spray. So we’re kind of staying in the laundry universe, like, we’ll come out with, like a stain remover, you know, things that, just like, generally make sense for laundry. But I think, you know, product expansion is really key as a as a CPG business, you know, for example, like that, meundies that I was just talking about, right? They start off with underwear, and then they expanded into all these other products. Because you need to be able to give your, you know, customers that you know, like you, an opportunity to spend more money with you. So I think it depends on the type of business, like how you know, out there, you need to get so, you know, something like clothing, I think you have to have, like, a lot of different, like, varieties where it’s something that’s like, very kind of simple in nature, predictable consumption pattern, like a laundry sauce, AG, one or something like that. You can probably get away with having less products, because people just need to come back and buy the same one over and over and over again. Generally. Like, once you build products, like, for example, like, I always use this, like, Jack Daniels has been selling, what, the same recipe for over 100 years, or something, you know, maybe they changed the bottle a little bit. So, you know, you you can build a great product, you know, like, for example, like the chemistry of cleaning your clothes, like, it’s going to continue to work now and 10 years from now and 20 years from now. So, I mean, we do have, like, some, you know, minor innovations on the formula or the formulation side, but generally it’s, like, the same product. I mean, I’m gonna be selling this, you know, white box of laundry sauce for a long time, right? And I love that, whereas software, there’s kind of like built in entropy, right? If you’re not continuing to innovate, like you’re effectively dying. And I think that creates, you know, a lot of challenges is the business, because, like, there’s no software company that, unless you’re maybe some of these, like legacy enterprise providers that you know cannot, like, really innovate on their code base for an extended period of time and still, like, remain relevant. And now you also have, like, AI that is getting more and more powerful, and, you know, maybe someone can knock off your business in a few prompts. You know, yeah,

Brad Weimert 44:03
yeah. Well, I think that the AI conversation relative to SaaS is a really interesting one. Historically, what we’ve seen in the software is the legacy providers stick there because they’re entrenched into somebody’s business operations. And so the stickiness of those products is really, really good to, you know, to rip out Salesforce from an org, that’s a choice, and that’s like a huge ordeal to redo that process. Now, like you said, with AI, maybe that’s going to change in the next couple years. I

Ian Blair 44:34
think what AI is enabling is like vertically integrated SaaS, in a sense, like, for example, one of the reasons why Tesla is so efficient is because they like, in house all their manufacturing and kind of like they created their own in house, like, custom software solutions to do everything so they can, like, take raw materials and output a car. So, like, how can you create those, like, hyper personalized for your business software solutions, and now AI might be able to knock that stuff out for you. So, like, I think that. Is potentially where things are going, rather than these. One size fits all, type of SaaS products for the enterprise,

Brad Weimert 45:07
March of 2025, what’s the best use of AI for E commerce?

Ian Blair 45:12
All right, I will let people in on this. This is a amazing hack. So, okay, what’s really neat and something like, what I love about this is, you know, maybe when someone is listening to this six months from now, this might be a, you know, completely different answer, right? So sure, as of a couple weeks ago, Gemini 2.0 came out, very, very powerful AI, and, you know, is at the top of LM sis for a while, which is like the AI leaderboard. And what’s really neat about Gemini is it allows you to have like, massive context window. So the context window is essentially like, how many tokens can you put in this before crashes, essentially. So like, Claude has like a 250,000 token context window, and you can only put in so much data. So what I was able to do is I took all of our customer reviews. So I took 1000s and 1000s of reviews. I took our annual survey data, so around 2000 responses with a bunch of questions, highly granular data, and then enrich data from our customer data platform and, like, smash that all in together. And I was about like, you know, I took it was roughly about a million tokens, and you can use Gemini AI studio, and you can upload CSVs and stuff, and then you can essentially query against that. So you can have it create, like your customer personas, you know, what is the type of language that people are using, you know, most frequently in our reviews to describe our product, and then that can inform your ad strategy, landing page strategy, to use, you know, language that you know your customers are using, or like, what types of emotions are people experiencing by using our product. So I think it’s just so wild, how you can take all this, like data that a human would not be able to sift through, and then in five minutes get, like, some pretty insane results. So like, I know exactly who our customer profile is and how they’re speaking about our our product, and then you know that goes into our brand identity. And so then when you’re working with, you know, agency partners and so forth, they know exactly, you know who your customer is and, like, what your brand is all about. So that’s a pretty quick hack. And like before, you know, I did that analysis with Claude, because Claude was really the only one that could deal with that much data. But you know, that was only 250,000 tokens, so I had to really trim down the amount of reviews that I was using, the amount of survey responses. So I just had to have a lot less data. And now that I have this, like, much larger token or much of the larger context window, I think I got a more accurate result. And then I was able to compare, like, you know, what was it before, and what was it after? And I think the after was more accurate.

Brad Weimert 47:51
Well, I love that. Love that as an idea. I mean, I think that the, you know, the data analysis side of AI is a never ending interesting conversation. And then the question is, what do you do you do with it? And how do you execute? Yeah, you know, the promise of agents, etc, is to take that data and then go do things with it. And right now, the analysis of the data is probably the starting point. Yeah,

Ian Blair 48:10
well, so an agent is essentially like an AI with additional context, right? That can do things for you. So when you have a really good overview of you know, what your company is like. So I have, like, a company overview description for AI is, like the base level prompt. So when you if I say hey, like write an email for laundry sauce, and I don’t give it that context, like it just barks out some garbage, give it that context, and now it’s effective, right? So if you, like, have a, you know, copywriting guide for your brand. You know, you have your whole Brand Overview. You have all your customer data and research, and now you set that as like the base level context, now it can output some pretty amazing works for you. So I think that’s how you effectively turn an AI into an agent that can actually do things that are useful for your business.

Brad Weimert 48:57
Off the shelf AI or trying to design something yourself, I think off

Ian Blair 49:02
the shelf is fine. I mean, for the most part. I mean, it really depends on, like, what you’re doing. And there are, like, for example, like customer support is, is something you can’t just use, like, a base level AI for, right? You can’t just say, like, Gemini now you’re my customer support agent and just do everything right? So, like, there’s a lot of, you know, broader context that it needs, and like, we use, I mean, there’s, there’s a handful of tools out there for, you know, Shopify brands, where it integrates with Gorgias, which is one of the most, like, popular like Help Desk solutions for for Shopify, so it can actually, like, train on your data and see all your previous interactions. And, you know, so it’s off the shelf, in a sense, but you know, because you’re buying it from a software company, but you know, it is customized all to your data, and they’ve spent a lot of, you know, time, effort and energy to make it so it can perform at that level. So, you know, right? A an email campaign. You could take just a normal you just open the chat bot, give the context and, say, Write this versus, you know, something that’s maybe a bit more like workflow oriented. And you know, needs to have, like, your FAQs, and, you know, access to your Shopify, where, you know what, because it’s like, some of the number one questions you get is, like, where’s my order, right? And that’s like, relatively easy for an AI to answer, but it has to be able to plug into the right data. So, like, that’s where the software solutions can become, like, quite useful.

Brad Weimert 50:28
We started by talking about the transition in your path, from build fire, which was a platform to build apps for people, to laundry sauce, which is a direct to consumer e comm company. Software is an is a nightmare to me, personally, as somebody that has an in house development team, but manufacturing things also seems like kind of a bitch. What are the what was the transition like between those things and what do you still find really difficult about a direct to consumer e com company.

Ian Blair 51:02
Before I even got into building mobile apps, I built websites, right? And I kind of just approached it with curiosity, like, how does the website work? How do you build it? Oh, what’s this WordPress thing? Oh, I learned how to build all these websites and so forth. Then, you know, really got deep in that how to build software. But I never built a physical product before, so that was, like, totally foreign. So one of the things that we did is, I use this service that basically finds you, like industry experts. And on our first call, we got connected to this guy named Kimball, and he’s now our mad scientist for laundry sauce, but he’s got a PhD in analytical chemistry. Worked at Unilever in the laundry division for a decade, like super sharp guy. And initially I was like, Oh, you can just like, buy laundry detergent on Alibaba, like, this stuff can’t be that hard. And so he educated us otherwise. So he was the one that actually got us linked up with all of our contract manufacturers. And I think it really was incredibly useful to have that, like, in house expertise, like someone on our side of the fence, you know, helping to do, like, performance evaluation and just like knowing, like, how this industry, you know, works, I would say, for anyone like looking into getting into a particular product category, no matter how simple it may be, like, find an industry expert that can help you, because even if you have to pay him just a couple grand, you know, for few hours of consulting like that, can go a long way. Yeah. So what’s interesting with with E commerce is kind of how it’s become, like, so modularized, like a decade ago, you probably had to have your own engineering team, like, building your your website now, like, it’s pretty easy to do it on Shopify, and you can even use themes, so like a ton of other platforms, yeah, exactly, Magento WooCommerce, but yeah, Shopify is, you know, the 800 pound gorilla, I think in DTC, e com now, but there’s essentially these abstraction layers where it’s just gotten a lot easier, and you don’t need to have these, like, technical, you know, expertise in house. And here’s, here’s an example of, like, a very simple abstraction layer is you have, like, your three pls. So traditionally, you’d have to have your own warehouse, you know, you have to hire your own 15, $20 an hour warehouse workers, you know, which is its own challenge. And, you know, having to manage all that, like, That sounds hard. That’s a dedicated business, yeah, so, and like, that’s why I think, you know, there’s so many three PLS, is because, like, most people don’t want to deal with it. So for me, it’s like, literally, like, just an API, like a physical server, where, you know, they need to move box from point A to point B, and, you know, like, we have a fixed cost per order, fixed pick and pack fee and so forth. So, I mean, it’s, you know, someone calls in sick. It’s not my problem. It still cost me the same amount of, you know, dollars per order to fulfill, and they’ve just made it, so we don’t need to worry about that headache. So we get to focus on, like, what we do best, which is, you know, essentially, product development, marketing and so forth. So, you know? And I think your question was, you know, what’s the most difficult part of it? So I think as a D to C, E, commerce company, your primary lever for growth is creative, right? And you’re essentially on this constant treadmill for creatives. Not only you can just produce this one ad that’s amazing and just last forever. I mean, some ads have longer shelf lives than others, but you’re essentially on this like constant, like content treadmill. So being able to continue to like source, like winning creative like that is probably the hardest part of the business. And then maybe the most frustrating part of the business is, you know, CPAs could be x1 day, and then they go up 20, 30% the next day. You’re like, what happened? Like we did. We’re doing everything the same, and now just jumped overnight. So

Brad Weimert 54:36
alright, let me so let me break down a couple things here and ask you questions about it. So first off, three PLS, for those that don’t do this, third party logistics companies. And the fundamental idea there is that warehousing products and shipping them out is a bitch. So like you said, having a warehouse is an independent business where you have a bunch of workers that are picking and packaging those things, and you have the ability now to just send them an API and that. Whole function just takes care of itself. The next thing that you said is that creative was at the core of one of the difficult challenges, because as an E commerce company, you need to keep creating new ads all the time. And then you talked about the actual cost of the ads, right, and how that changes all the time, and staying on top of that, those things are core to the business. But I know that you’ve taken a ton of pride in building this company through leverage. So how do you decide what stuff you need to learn internally or you’re going to trust an agency to create

Ian Blair 55:35
that’s a great question, because we have leverage agencies heavily throughout like the growth of this business, and I think it’s very beneficial to use agencies early on, especially if you haven’t done this before. And my saying is always like, buy nice or buy twice, so it’s just much easier to get it done right the first time. And I think it’s really momentum is really important in business, right? Because as you have more momentum, like it’s easier to attract top talent. Investors tell a different story. So the fact that we scaled from like, zero to 10 million so fast, like that made it, you know, much easier for me to kind of create this narrative around laundry sauce like this is a rocket ship type of company. And the reason why I think we had so much success so fast is because I brought in, just like, absolute experts in like, every area of the business. So fortunately, like, I had a lot of expertise when it comes to, like, running paid media and marketing. Like, that’s just, you know, it’s like being a technical founder in SaaS, right? Or, you know, being an engineer and knowing how to code. So for me, being a marketer, like it was, it was hard to be in, harder to be in SaaS, right, just because I’m not in there with engineers saying, like, oh, the product needs to be this or that, I’m more or less trying to run the sales marketing function. So, I mean, that’s the primary driver of growth and E commerce business. So, like, I think that was, like, a very helpful skill to have. But one of the interesting things about e commerce in particular is, I think it has an amazing agency ecosystem. So with software, you can’t just, like, hire an agency to go, like, run all your email marketing, because, you know, enterprise or, you know, software, email like, you have to know in depth. Like, you know, I mean, you still need to know who the customer is with E commerce, but, like, we just sell, like, much simpler products. It’s laundry detergent and simple, like, simple system scale, you know, or if you’re selling food, like, everyone has experience with it, but not everyone has experience with a no code app builder. And like, what problems we’re solving for those businesses, or why it’s, like, technically challenging to build your own app. So I think these, you can look at these agencies that are working with, you know, brands that you respect and like, and you’re essentially getting their like, broader expertise on the industry. So, you know, for our email marketing, like, we hired an agency for that, and they did a phenomenal job. They know exactly what all the flows are and, like, what’s working with their other clients. And you kind of get those like, get those, like, cross learning. So kind of one of the disadvantages that you have, of, like, in housing something, is you just don’t get that broader expertise. So like, if you have a agency running your meta ads and say, something happens and, you know, CPAs go up 30 40% in the day, you’re like, is that just happening to us, versus happening across the whole portfolio of brands, and they can look at 20 other ad accounts and that day and like, oh no. Like, it’s not your fault. It’s this is happening to everyone right now. It’s just a weird day because something happened. Like, for example, when the LA fires happen, CPAs got all out of whack because, like, that was just a captivating moment in time where everyone’s posting about it, and, like, people are not out buying, you know, stuff off internet, right? So, you know, like, you can kind of gut check things with an agency when they have that. And generally, I’ve had pretty good luck and success working with agencies. So yeah, I don’t know if I specifically answer your question, like, which ones do you in house? And like, which ones do you out so, like, which ones do you outsource? And I mean, I think you can still have both in house expertise and outsource it at the same time. Like, because you could have a paid media manager that manages maybe one or two channels internally, and then you might use an agency for some other channels, or they might help you with creative and also maybe give you some oversight on the ad account so it doesn’t have to be entirely binary, like in house or agency. It can also be a mix of both, depending on the function. Yeah,

Brad Weimert 59:29
no, I think, I think that those are, I mean, there’s tons of good takeaways with that. One of the things that I heard was that it made me think of was you were talking about the specificity of the agency and the benefit to them having a ton of experience in your specific space. When I hire made me think of the hiring process for sales people. And when I interview sales people, the type of sales that they’ve done is tremendously important, and that’s true and on every possible level and the. Are people out there that say things like, business is business, or sales is sales, and I think that that’s bullshit. Like, I think there’s some truth to it, but now, but look, if you’re good at selling a B to B product with a long sales cycle to enterprise clients, that is completely different than a direct to consumer product that has a quick sales cycle, totally different. And similarly, when you’re looking for sales people, or similar to that, if you’re looking for marketing agencies, you need to look at the track record of the exact product they’ve sold. And probably an E com company that’s done or a marketing agency that hasn’t done subscriptions is going to be different than one that’s done subscriptions through and through, right? Or they’ve done low dollar amount versus high for all the reasons that you’ve said, right, you’ve got impulse buys that make sense or they don’t, and that alone could be the difference of your ads being effective or not.

Ian Blair 1:00:56
I couldn’t agree more. Yeah. I mean, like a $5,000 AOV product versus $100 AOV product, high consideration, low consideration. That’s almost like a B to B, like enterprise sale, or, like a low ticket, you know, high velocity sale. So, yeah, you know. And I think you know, for example, if you have an agency where all they do is email marketing, they’re probably gonna be pretty good about at it, like they have a lot of institutional knowledge. And you were essentially, you know, renting that or borrowing that. When you work with these agencies, and especially early on, I feel like it’s good to work with an agency that has that particular institutional knowledge or expertise in a particular area to at least just get it set up right the first time, and then if you want to backfill it later, at least you sent the bench set the benchmark. So when you hire someone internally, it’s like, Hey, you got to beat this right? And I think that’s a really valuable tool. And what I absolutely love about e commerce is how everything is measurable, like when you run a split test, which one actually generated more revenue, it’s not which one generated more leads, and then which sales rep did those leads go to? Right? And then you’ve got a 90 day sales cycle, so it takes so long to understand, you know, the actual like implications of that, where I just know this one generated 10k more revenue than this one, or something like that. And it’s just, it’s very easy to measure, so everyone can be measured in it, like, I guess, on the email marketing topic, like, you could say, Hey, you could test two eight agencies. Like, hey, you do three emails that are campaigns, you do three emails that are campaigns, and we’ll just run them, and then we see who does better, you know? And you know, you could actually split test every single one. So, yep, well,

Brad Weimert 1:02:25
as somebody that has, you know, a long sales cycle, conversion process, I’m jealous. Yes, yep, I’m jealous. The last question I have on that, though, is, when you have a bunch of money, it’s easy to say that when you’re young and, or new and or bootstrapped, do you still think people should pay for the expensive agency first and at least set that benchmark and roll the dice or not? It depends what type

Ian Blair 1:02:57
of business that you’re trying to build. You know, if you’re trying to build a one, $2 million a year lifestyle business, then yeah, you should probably try and save every dollar. But it depends if you have, like, you know, a savings mindset or an abundance mindset too. You know, I’m not here to build, you know, two, $3 million year e commerce businesses. Like, I’m here to build, like, 100 million dollar plus e commerce businesses. So I think the decision criteria that I go through is, like, a lot different, because I have a much bigger vision. And then I think also playing in this space, like it’s a big space, like, it doesn’t make sense to play small for me, so I certainly index towards bringing the best and brightest in. And you know, if you don’t have the money, like, there’s plenty of people that like if you have a legitimately good business idea and you have enough traction, like, people will fund it. So I think you’re just take two types of businesses, like, ones that don’t take funding and the ones that take funding, the ones that take funding, like, in aggregate are much, much, much bigger than the ones that don’t like. It’s very rare to hear about companies that become incredibly successful, totally bootstrapped. It absolutely happens, but it’s definitely a lot rarer than, you know, ones that go raise institutional capital. And I think if you go look at a lot of the VCs, you know, in in DTC, E, com, or, or SAS, I mean, those are, like, the big companies, right?

Brad Weimert 1:04:16
Yeah, I’d be curious to know, to see those stats side by side, bootstrap versus VC back, because the success rate of VC backed companies is horrific, but when they win, they win.

Ian Blair 1:04:28
Yeah, all depends on what stage you’re investing at, right? Because, like, if, because there are some that you know, like growth equity probably has a much higher batting rate because it’s much more like private equity, because it’s like they are only investing in, like, companies that have 30 million in revenue, or something like that, versus they’re already established, yeah, because, like, angel investing, yeah, like terrible, like, hit rate, you know, it’s like one in 21, in 30, that actually really work. So I think it’s, it kind of depends on the stage in which you’re, you’re getting in at, right? Yeah, that’s, that’s a

Brad Weimert 1:04:56
good point that makes sense, but it depends how you define success. But I would. Say that, I think it goes back to your point, right? The outcome that you’re after is really what dictates that choice. But there is probably a higher percentage of people that establish and hold on to small businesses that sustain their lifestyle and create a lifestyle for them. Yeah, over time, I would think then the funded ones that go out and take a bigger swing, but that’s probably pretty logical anyway.

Ian Blair 1:05:24
Yeah. And you know, maybe the businesses that take on funding are much bigger, right, but the founder might not make as much money if they stay small, right? Because, like, there’s that trade off because you are

Brad Weimert 1:05:34
that’s very real. Yeah, I think that there’s an illusion for people, and I talk about this quite a bit, but I think there’s this illusion with somebody that’s like, oh, yeah, I’ve got a $50 million company. And so people think that they’re making a shitload of money, and it’s like, no, no. They diluted everything, and they don’t take anything in distributions, and they have a relatively moderate salary, yeah, and they’re hoping for the sale, but even on the sale, they’ve diluted so much that they’re not going to make a killing when they sell. Yeah,

Ian Blair 1:06:00
yeah. It all depends on what type of business that you’re trying to build, right? And some businesses lend itself to being a big business, and some don’t like not every CPG product is able to be funded by venture, right? Because venture is looking for these big, outsized returns. And if you can’t go build, you know, 50, 100 million dollars plus a year company, then they’re just not interested. A

Brad Weimert 1:06:19
newer entrepreneur that’s just getting into e com. What advice do you have for them?

Ian Blair 1:06:25
Hmm, seek wisdom and expertise from others. Makes your life a hell of a lot easier, because one you know, but

Brad Weimert 1:06:33
what if you’re arrogant and you already know everything?

Ian Blair 1:06:37
Good luck. I think that that was probably one of the the biggest like strategies that we had, is like, from very early on, we brought on our first advisors are the guys that started a company called raindrop, and they, they’re the branding agency behind like, all the DR squash videos, and helping to scale Dr squash into, like, multi 100 million dollar your business. So actually hired like, and people are willing to sell their time, like, relatively cheap, to be honest, like, relative to their impact, all right? So you could pay someone a grand or two a month, and like, they’ll give you a couple hours like, that’s and those hours can be so impactful. And then they’ll also open up their Rolodex, and you kind of get this, like, whole compounding nature. It actually turned out where they loved our idea so much they became our first outside investors, and then they created our first like anchor videos. And then that, like those videos, like told our whole brand story, which then made it much easier for me to go off and raise capital from other people, because I could say, Hey, watch this. Like, Oh, I get it, you know. And kind of back to that whole thing of like, momentum creates momentum, so

Brad Weimert 1:07:42
invest in wisdom from others. Yeah, what’s the best investment you’ve made in yourself that has directly paired to growth of the company?

Ian Blair 1:07:51
So I, I started off, well, I’ll get to that. That was how it paid off. Um, so I started, like, the first entrepreneur group I participated in. One was called yuc. It was like, founders under 40 had to do over a million in revenue, and I was part of the community for a little bit. And they had the snowboard trip up at Powder Mountain. And I was like, you know, what, if I don’t go on this trip, like, I’m not gonna, like, really get much value out of this membership. So I went and met some amazing friends that are still my friends today. And it’s like, maybe a decade later. And, you know, I participated in, you know, Dan Martel’s mastermind, and then, you know, that got me the invite to bald face later down the line. That’s how we met. So, you know, participating in some of these, like, networking groups can have, like, a massive dividends his sometimes it’s just like, if you go and you leave with one or two friends from these trips, like, they can be incredibly impactful, and then you get this whole network effect. Like, all you need is, like, one or two nodes that give you this entry to, like, all these other nodes that you know, then all compounds, and you can get a lot of value out of networking. So I’d say that’s probably been the highest ROI, like, investments I’ve made in myself is just participating in some of these groups, these entrepreneur groups, because you learn so much from other people, and entrepreneurs are generally willing to share and like help other people, right?

Brad Weimert 1:09:14
You know, it’s super interesting to me how open people are, and all the groups that I’m a part of, yeah and, and I couldn’t agree with you more the I think that relationships drive everything else, and unique experiences drive relationships. And if those unique experiences also cause some sort of heightened emotional engagement, even more so. And I think that’s one of the reasons that something like bald face yeah is so engaging because you’re out like, you know, doing ridiculous jumps off of cliffs, hiding around cats in the middle of nowhere, trapped together, yeah. Do you see a parallel there with owning exotic cars and racing them? Yeah?

Ian Blair 1:09:55
So I’ve always loved exotic cars. I bought my first McLaren when I was 20. Six and I joined a club called Fast Lane drive. When I was living in San Diego, I happened to just know someone that was in it. They’re like, Hey, you should join. And, you know, be around all these other super car owners. I was like, Oh, I’m totally down. Like, this sounds super exciting. So I joined, met amazing entrepreneurs. The social experiences were tons of fun. And you know, what’s interesting about cars is there’s a lot of different ways to make money. So like, when we, you know, at bald face, it’s a lot of, like, software guys, info product guys, maybe some e com guys, right? It’s kind of the, you know, the general theme, right? And I found that in some of the other masterminds that I’ve participated in where it’s kind of, like a lot more narrowly focused. So, you know, with exotic cars, like you might have doctors, lawyers, people in finance, construction, real estate, etc. So a little bit broader group of people. So I was living in San Diego at the time, and COVID happened. I’m like, I get to get the hell out of California. So I ended up moving out to Arizona. And the founder of Fastlane was like, Hey, you should start a chapter out in Arizona. And I’m like, brand new to the area. I don’t know anyone, and, yeah, kind of hard to start a car club when you don’t know anyone. So I got linked up with a few other guys, and, like, Fast Lane has ultimately become, like, the basis for my whole social life. And now it’s like three and a half years later, and you know, we have like 140 members here in Arizona, and then we have, like, now, 18 chapters across Fast Lane worldwide, which is just unbelievable. So, you know, I get to, you know, be around like these hyper successful people all in Arizona, and we do an interview process for everyone that joins and like, I just get to, you know, kind of hop on like this, and have just super cool conversations with people that you know, have sold their companies for hundreds of millions. Or, you know, you got guys that just bought their first supercar. But, yeah, the that community is, is very interesting, you know, and people are generally a little bit extra, you know, when you’re buying, you know, three, $400,000 cars, you gotta have a little bit of a screw loose differently than most. And like, that’s what I love about entrepreneurs is like, we just see the world differently. So it’s been a massive component to my success. I think participating in these communities, and, you know, I think cars, yes, they’re expensive, but I think the value you can get out of them through the communities, like far away, is the cost of the car.

Brad Weimert 1:12:21
I love that. So you’re going to take me for a drive, right? You’re going to let me drive sometime. 100% we’re going for a drive. Yeah, I love it. Ian Blair, I appreciate you carving out time, man, if people want to find out more about you, or laundry sauce or Fast Lane,

Ian Blair 1:12:34
yeah, so you can go to laundry sauce.com, and choose from a wide variety of sense, it’ll be the best laundry experience in your life. You can connect with me on Instagram at Ian Blair 44 and then if you want to see we’re doing Fast Lane, it’s at Fastlane drive on Instagram, you’ll see a bunch of cool car content.

Brad Weimert 1:12:53
Love it, man. Thank you so much. Until next time, that’s a wrap. For today’s episode, please subscribe and most importantly, leave us a review. It takes like 30 seconds, and it makes such a big impact, it helps other people find us. Also. You might not know this, you can watch over 100 episodes of beyond a million, with guests like Grant Cardone. Wes Watson and Neil Patel at beyond a million.com.