From $0 - $100m - Yosef Martin, Eric Siu, Stormy Simon, Scott D. Clary

Welcome to success story the most useful podcasts in the world. I'm your host Scott D. Cleary the success story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network The HubSpot podcast network has other great podcasts like marketing made simple hosted by dr. J. J. Peterson Marketing made simple brings you practical tips to make your marketing easy and more importantly make it work now If any of these topics out interesting to you, you're going to love his show how to write and deliver captivating speeches How to market yourself into a new job how design can help and potentially hurt your revenue and how to create a social media ad strategy That works if these topics hit home in their things that you want to learn about go listen to marketing made simple wherever you get your podcasts Today, you're going to hear me live at inbound 2022 embossed in Massachusetts. I bring on Joseph Martin Eric sue and stormy Simon on stage where we spoke about what it takes to bring a company from zero to a hundred million dollars What's going on HubSpot? How's it going today? How's everybody doing? We're great. Good. Good. Good. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for sitting down today I brought three of my really good friends and What we what we titled this session was zero to a hundred million and I'm going to walk through all these incredible people and what they've done But what I want you to take away from this and as I I have to back up. I got excited. My name is Scott Cleary I host success story. I host a podcast obviously part of the incredible HubSpot podcast network Where I speak to some of the most incredible people and I impact their life their playbook everything they've accomplished the highs the lows the wins and the losses Now what I want to achieve today the zero to a hundred million It's not just for somebody that's building something from scratch It's to learn the lessons of all these incredible people what they've uncovered at the various stages of their businesses And hopefully if you're a founder if you're a side hustler you can apply that to your business But also if you're an employee if you're looking for weird and land next You can see what good business looks like and you can make more educated choices So that you don't end up wasting your life and your career So I want to introduce these incredible people so just to my left I have Yosif Martin Yosif was a founder of boxy charm now boxy charm is an online subscription beauty service Boxy charm made inks Think 500 list is one of the fastest growing companies in the nation in 2018 2019 in 2020 and in 2020 he sold boxy charm for over 500 million dollars to ibsi To the left of Yosif Eric soon now Eric is the founder of the ad agency single grain He hosts the marketing school and leveling up podcasts. They have over 65 million downloads He also invests in incredible companies like eight sleep better meant lime and synthesis And then to the left of Eric. I have stormy Simon and stormy is the founder CEO of the recently launched mother ruggers Now that's a new venture in textile, but a previous to that She spent 15 years of her career for the e-commerce retailer overstock.com. She began here tender as a Temp and eventually rose to the position as president of the nearly two billion dollar company in 2013 So first before we kick this off. Let's have a round of applause for these incredible guests So i want to i want to break down this segment into three three tranches zero to one million One to ten million and ten million to a hundred million and the strategies and tactics They you will deploy at each stage of a business So i'll pass it over i'll pass it over to Yosif When you're taking something from zero to one when you're getting something off the ground What are best practices? What do you have to think about how do you make sure that that thing has a little bit of Runways you can take it to the next level So my experience building my first business before boxy charm getting from zero to a million was kind of like Exploratory matter where you don't really know anything So you start learning how to code build a website Marketing byproduct stock to people you pretty much go without any organized pattern and you try Million things that worker don't work eventually once you accomplish the first million by dental ready You have got like a little pamphlet in your head all the do's and don't do's and From there you can scale the business to ten or twenty or a hundred million dollar But that first phase is got like where you build your intuition for your business all those little I would say unformed Moves in your business until you start forming or strategies later on Eric what about you? Yeah, I'll keep mine brief So it's a lot of hand-to-hand combat in the beginning and you are to Yosif's point You're trying to figure things out as you go and some people are like yeah, you should focus But I think in the beginning you really are the rings we get you gets to wall to see what sticks and you're looking for something That's repeatable and once you have that Then you start to really ramp it But if you do the math on it, it's it's 83k a month and let's say you're running a services type business You have eight clients paying you ten grand a month or you could chop up the numbers however you may It's actually you'll get there sooner than you think it actually do think some people do get Some people kind of fall into the first million which some people get fortunate some people take longer And stormy you have a special circumstance because when you read overstock you weren't building it from scratch You came in they were at 18 million I mean, it's it's not not impressive that you went from that to two billion while you were president there But now you're starting again. Yeah, so you're living it So so Yosif Yosif had an exit Eric is is he's already built things and it's running and it's good You're starting from scratch. So when you started something what's your take-to-market from zero to one? So it was very different as an entrepreneur So I just want to say to all the entrepreneurs out there even talking about is an entrepreneur went through overstocked that whole thing all fancy As an entrepreneur I am sweating my ass off every day It's a completely different game So kudos to everyone out there that does it because zero to a million is some of the hardest pennies You will ever scrape together. I'm in it right now. I'm doing every single thing myself And I think by getting that grit your hands dirty keep and I'm dirty and knowing every step and every penny that that company spending Um is the only way to get to zero to a million at least for me so far. So I'm like $11,000 right now thing It's huge to me And another thing the most important thing when you're getting a company off the ground is to get your first few customers So a combination of having a great product. Let's assume we all have a great product But sales marketing Is it reaching out to friends and family? Is it like what's the strategy to get your first say 150 customers so that you can prove out that whatever your building has some Samless the product market fit For me I did a lot of market research before I entered into these rugs because it sounds really boring But they're quite exciting. They're all machine washable. I know what percentage of the market is machine washable I know more about rugs than I ever would have thought in my lifetime I know about the backing the weave the machine every single thing about it I spent one year learning. I flew to turkey. I understand everything about these rugs And that's how I know that the market is ready for it and I'm secure and confident And if I go to investors I'll be able to show them exactly what they need to hear as to why it is special Um If I hadn't done that I would be less likely to take the risk 100% knowing that there's daylight in the market So helpful Yeah, so for me, it's How do you create that no-brainer offer and so you know, for example, let's go back to services because We've grown our the agency to eight-figure business and it's like okay How do we start in the very beginning? It's um let's say I went to Yosef I wanted a you know, let's see he's operating boxy charm So instead of like every other agency out there We're just like oh you Joseph uh can you buy our services and we do x y and z and here's a laundry list It's like hey like we saw this this and this here's a video of it And by the way, we'll do it for you for free. You don't need to pay anything and we can talk about it later That's a lot easier for him to reply to you versus like what everyone else is saying So it does go back to a lot of hand-to-hand combat though Yeah, so selling makeup imagine I didn't know much about makeup when I started selling makeup But I found out that in order for me to succeed wasn't doing a market research which probably should have Was more tri-film but felt very fast and just modify based on complaints that you get I would get lots of complaints at first if people didn't like certain products and every time I start learning Kind of like the space how to do it for boxy charm at least right um the first clients are the most exciting ones Eventually you find out that the first clients are not the first client that you actually wanted because we have to change our entire business concept The iteration of boxy charm went about two times But it was literally something that I took from a previous company Open two companies the first company I just learned search engine optimization marketing and all that So I use all that knowledge to kind of create awareness and what I did learn is that when you want to create a product market feet You get to know when you heat the mark when when people are excited over your product once you okay that was it Now that is a box that are excited about you cannot get a perspective between between the two It's kind of getting a non-dairy non-sugar ice cream versus sugar dairy ice cream You know what is the right ice cream I need to tell this is the right ice cream right it is the same with us So we would modify ourselves based on what good is and then we had perspective to move on Okay, so now that's the one million one to ten So now I have to figure out how to scale up everything probably bring in some really great people So whoever wants to take it away Building from one to ten what are best practices next steps I can start You know when you start to go to ten Ten and up it's a lot of it is is operational right so You know working off on entrepreneurial operating systems such as traction that that's one or you can use another one called scaling up But at least that's an operating system to run on your your business on right so there's a weekly cadence There's a quarterly cadence. There's an annual cadence Just so you can catch up and it set goals and then people talk a lot about culture right You know when you're zero to one million you don't think about culture In fact, you think culture is stupid at least I did right culture is stupid It's all about look at all the things I'm doing I need to realize cultures everything and then I'll talk about people after because that's where But that here's the funny thing even at eight figures even up to 100 million plus I did an event last week and we're just talking with with a handful of founders and we're like you know At the end of the day forget all the tactics forget all the marketing stuff and it's just like it's all about people But then nobody wants to hear the talks about people, but like it's all that matters. Yeah Well, I mean like if you I think that what's going to increase the momentum of you getting to ten million a hundred million plus Is how quickly you adapt and and internalize the idea of finding great people Finding a culture that works and we can even define what culture is and what culture isn't and then making sure that that's going to You know subsidize your skillsets elevate your growth But Joseph when you're when you're bringing to ten million you bring company bring company ten million What do you look for like we spoke about operations people aren't for and obviously? What's your thing? So for me it was very simple very similar to what Eric said You want to increase yourselves increase yourselves force and it took me a while to understand that I learned that okay, I need to actually build a team that can be functional and it was about the operation It was about building a small business size operation that can sustain the marketing the input of requests and then output of product That was literally what it took and it took me years to figure it out But once you do you scale from one million to ten million right away was about two three years To make it but the transition took some time to actually get it in your head out to actually perform and then let's talk about people Who is the best person to bring into the organization at that level? Um, you want to go? I I think that one to ten million or you know when he talked about Doing that in two to three years so zero to one million is grind like you're like climbing up the hill pushing the snowball up the hill one to ten you've got you're gonna run because of the quickness you're catching speed you're gonna be doubling So you've got to think of that staff Almost interchangeable you know even from the twenty mark when I entered overstock There were different needs at different times for different people and you still don't have the luxury of having a big staff You know your money's going back in your business at that point So it's very different to say who it's hard to say who's the right position at the right time because that's a moving target Don't get attached to anybody your early grunt grunt the grinders like the hustlers getting your hands dirty in the beginning They love that but they may not be the ones to be your executives at five million But they might be the ones that bled for you in the beginning in different skill sets So it's tough to say could I add something real quick? So one thing that I found helpful especially from one to ten million is the concept of a task prioritization chart So you know, what am I doing that's ten dollars an hour hundred dollars an hour thousand dollars an hour up to a hundred thousand or a million dollars an hour So that might be M&A right but ten dollars an hour might be like me. I'm taking out the trash for Yosef right So every quarter what I used to try to do is try to delegate Create a new list of responsibilities because that's what a job is right then try to delegate 15 to 20 percent but But I think the point is there's no there's no one clear cut um and you and you obviously you're taking on your highest value tasks as an Autorator founder and everything else that is potentially a lower value task that isn't that you know that hundred dollar per hour task That's what you're finding somebody for could be gig economy It could be hiring internal and Yosef I'll let you answer for for people as well But I also want to flip the script and understand when employees are starting to look for start-up opportunities And they're starting to go into companies Potentially what are some of the red flags? They should look for that maybe founders are exhibiting where they shouldn't land there because that's not gonna be helpful for their career I think when you walk into an office you can tell the vibe that's the first thing the second thing is you need to see if the company Is growing you're allowed to ask questions you're interviewing the company the same way they interview you and that's actually It's something I like to see from people because they know the worth They're about to go and put the best hours in the day the best years of their life in that company And they want to make sure that there's a vision and it's okay to interview whoever you Speak to what is the vision from the company? Do you have any pillars? What is the main goal for the company? It's important about those questions What about for hiring hiring the right people when you hire the right people you'll get experience I don't think those two minutes that we have are gonna be enough to learn But I think learn one thing if they're not good fired and faster than your competition If you retain the the wrong people in your organization longer than your competition Then you're gonna lose so make sure you do it faster In time you're gonna learn what's good. You'll have perspective Okay, so now we're scaling from 10 to 100 and then we're going through these very quickly We only we have a whole bunch of questions. I thought we were just gonna do the the 0 to 1 1 to 10 to 100 But we have some time so I'll go through some other stuff after so lessons from 10 to 100 So now we're truly scaling up. We have operations. We know what works. You know what doesn't so what do we think of? In my case Everything was the same from say 10 to 50 million, but it was more from 50 to 500 million That is a complete different organization Well, I'm telling you yeah, I mean, I am showing up. We did 500 million itself The reason it was different it's because There was almost the same amount of employees when we were 10 million to 50 million It was a completely different organization from from 50 to 500 We had to hire many more people. We had to have offices all over the world. We had to have A location of fulfillment location that we built that size of 12 football fields It was just completely different. It's an enterprise and you have to get Uncomfortable to rebuild your business all over again, and you have to find the right people But that's in what he said You want to bring a person that have been in a business that has transformed from say 10 to 20 million to a billion Person that have seen the transformation is a person that you want to be next to you that can tell you This is the time when you actually change it up. This is what you do now So once you find that person It's a lot easier for you to hire corporate people with experience of a startup as well Very good. So Eric from 10 to 100 Yeah, so you know interesting when we're in the speakers lounge a little bit ago We're talking to a friend and you know, he bootstrapped his company right and you know now it's doing nine figures a year And the playbook literally that I talked to you guys about is is hiring people that have been there done that And here's the thing like you know when I talk to a lot of people that have done that It's like no, it's still a crapshoot right? It's still you're still lucky if you're 50 50 if you get 50 percent of them right and so Like I mentioned earlier It's all about People right and then when you when you hear like a yosa for any way that's taken a company to a billion plus or so They just talk about people and culture and you hear the same thing But it's just not as sexy to hear anymore But literally that's what it is and here's the thing you if you're the year to see or you're the founder You're the best recruiter and so like you know a lot of the irons that I haven't in the fire right now like these are people that you're gonna pay four five hundred six hundred seven hundred thousand a year and then add on bonuses on top like here's the thing when you're paying This people this much actually at the end of the day you find that the quality does get better At least that's what I found It's storming one would hope yeah, I would hope so too if you get six hundred thousand a year you better do a name good job Was it oh ten to a hundred million Outrageous growth like I would I would think during that time for me at oversight There was so much focus on the details on the dollars that you're spending like I can't stress that enough Those pennies when you're at a hundred million and you can tweak something out of your customer service cost that slight percentage You'd be surprised at the payoff that gets and out those were some of the wins um that I was able to do in our early days was just find that little piece that you might Turn the knob a little and bring in Just a couple pennies per motion per transaction whatever it is But those start adding up at a hundred million so in addition to finding your people Your operations that you're setting up now become extremely important those things you were like Oh, yeah, David does that out in the warehouse David does it you better go get up and David stuff What exactly is David doing because before you know when he's doing the job of five people because the business isn't there and then all of a sudden It's worthy it happens quick and Those pennies I'm telling you I did half my success stories were Literally digging in an Excel spreadsheet and going there it is if I tweak that A bunch of stuff in the whole system Will come out and that system starts getting big at a hundred million bigger at five hundred million founders Can't look at everything at that time So setting those operations tight Focused making sure that every step is the one you want to take the shortcut Not the extra employee not that this guy needs a job your shortcut This is the other thing that happens is you have to get cut for those same people But um that's an exciting time you hit one hundred million that's the happiest thing ever Ten millions the best but hundred million is some good times So say we go into a few different business topics and I want to So I'm going to go into marketing and sales I'm going to go into people I'm going to go into bizzops And then I want to pull out some trending topics in each and just get your opinion on on these items Okay, so for marketing and sales I want to go a step further than social I want to go into community I wanted to I want to go into community building because I think darn master speaking about community the other day It's a very trending Concept but I think it's a very hard for somebody who's in a marketing organization to figure out how to build it properly So what does community really mean? How does it go a step further from from social media and why is it so important for your business? How do you build it? How do you leverage it? So a community is a group of people with the same interest in the same space Activating together. That's how we formed our community. That's how we decided to look at this There was a way where we said okay, we have a community, but it's coming organic. Can we actually engineer it? so the space mostly today you'll see it in Discord groups you can find Facebook Facebook groups that's a digital space and then the next phase for that is going to be Let's do meetups So once you do it you have to think that in a community in order for the community to be passionate It needs to be not how many people are there. It's how passionate the people are there I might rather have a group of 50,000 super advocate That don't stop talking about my company versus six million that knows about me So that's a community. How did you how did you build yours for boxy charm? I was breaking my back for many years what what it did was in 2017. I found out that There are Facebook groups and they talk about boxy charm every month So I joined them and I told them the founder. I'll let you know before anyone else What's going to be next month in a box? Everyone wanted to join those forms and I ended up supporting them also on our channels But what I ended up doing was I would Join those forms and let them know that anyone that would open and organically their own fan page on Instagram or Facebook group I will do live with them. I will help them build their community and every month about three times a month I would jump into those communities and it was a big event for them because there was some Information drop about next month and they're always the first to know and someone would always go viral And I would always make sure that their activation would be go search for boxy charm at that time I would tell them to more 3 p.m. I will let you know somewhere What's going to be in a box? So at 3 p.m. Eastern time everyone would search boxy charm You'd have about 300,000 people searching boxy charm and we would trend you would literally go on Google Google trend and you would see within the hour the spike for boxy charm in anyone that would say anything about the company would go viral Which would create a hell of a because people said well every time I talk about boxy go viral So people kept talking about boxy charm in that credit calica a hell of effect oversharing the community itself good. Okay Eric Um to me communities of the retention mechanism who here actually owns an NFT Show fans anyone own an NFT one person one person Okay wrong conference. Well, let me give you an example So I we launched an NFT project maybe a month ago or so and Here's how you break it down. It's it's product led growth but for NFTs right It's so we launched a free NFT and um, you know our discord one to 8,000 people right So imagine launching something people want to keep it and then um now we have a vibrant discord with 8,000 people that are engaging And the way I look at it is if you're trying to keep people the name of the game is retention right I think a lot of us are here are in subscription right and if we want to keep people here people buy your product But what happens at the end of the day is they actually end up staying for the community which is actually what happened with With boxy charm So that's how I look at it. I think um if you want to you know extend you want good net dollar retention or whatever it is You have strong community Starving Well your commute communities are interesting right now right because we start on social media Then we all found each other and then we can hashtag to find each other So it's like we can participate as consumers and all the communities that we want So for like you know mother ruggers how am I going to build a community? Well first of all you have to be a mother rugger which I can tell you guys are You know these are rugs that you live on live with how do you build a personality for a rug? I'm actually struggling with this right now But we're starting to find our stride like how do we do it? Well, we'll probably not have to these babies like we have really cool ideas But the community For something like you know, I don't have a subscription box um Is trying to create a brand and get people interested and once they're interested They can learn about how we make them and why it's good and how you know Mindful we are of the universe and what we're actually doing um, and that's where I'm coming from is like to build something of value that attracts the people versus Go to the people first and I think it's finding those people and continuing to serve them right? Yeah, I mean hashtag ruggables. That's where I'm going 100% yeah, that's you know That's that's where you go. So you find those people that are engaging in other like-minded places and make yourself known Let's move on to people so we we already spoke about Hiring finding the right people different people for different stages of business One thing again a buzzword culture and I think it's confused and I think people don't really understand what it is and what it isn't So what is culture what isn't it and how can you use it leverage it because Eric even you mentioned That's one of the most important things. It's overlooked especially when you're starting out How do we use it to improve our business? All right, go um So you know early days when you talk about cultures like oh, what are your mission? What are your vision? What are your values? So um core thing is the core values right everyone talks about those but like really don't just Early days at least what I did was I just copied core values that sounded good So I might go copy box each arm or overstock and that doesn't work because those aren't true to you But those are what you hire and fire on so just Joe talks about hiring slow firing fast right, but if you have you need an operating system for that And culture really to me at the end of the day is what people are talking about when nobody else is in the room and how people are acting at the same time Well, I think that culture built over time and within your organization and If you want to build a good culture start by make sure you don't hire assholes That's the easiest part and from there things will fall into place How do you know that they're an asshole? You fired him fast Before they know because I eat no matter how good you are if you treat other people horrible in the organization There is a debt. There is a culture debt that's gonna come and hunt you So I'm not if you're a rockstar and you're just sitting in the found the computer You happen to be an asshole, but there's no one else fine But if you work in a group a group would always outshine one individual So it is very important to first nick those out and make sure that you have a good A good balance and then eventually if the company has Yeah, okay, I think this is important to say okay. This is nothing political But what it is is I found out when you bring a group of people from different diversities That particular group would outperform a particular group that they all look the same So and the reason is you can appeal for consumers from different backgrounds So if you can have let's just say in Asia and Hispanic Israeli like me something like this all sitting in a same group I represent the Israelis. I know how they're gonna buy you can Israel you can represent Asians We can attract a much better group of of buyers instead of just Asians for example you would only attract them because you happen to hire higher only people Like you and you just having a culture of just Asians and then no one else is gonna feel comfortable going over there So come like diversify make sure that no one puts everybody That are just from the same school or so on. There's only people from my school All friends or my neighborhood or my area Anyone that loves football is gonna be in my team. This is not gonna work You want to make sure that it is comfortable for everybody to be in that place and then eventually if you hired the right people That have the technical skills the company would grow and that's gonna be a good vibe and people would be happy I remember when culture might you just got a ping pong table It's like how we have ping pong we serve lattes on Friday and beer on Thursday and I was like oh my god It's the best place ever and those were the early dot com days But now the millennials are teaching us math lessons They dictate when our culture is gonna be it's gonna be independent You know, I noticed this big shift of actually the workers coming and letting you know what they're willing to do That's a great culture When you have employees that come in and say you know what I'm really good at this and I'm willing to do this And I do it so well. I'm gonna bank on that. That's a good culture You know what we found was Creating the environment where people got to be themselves I had a rule that if you gossiped about someone you got fired even if it was true Don't talk about your co-workers Have the respect it doesn't matter what background they come from when you shop to work you have a common goal and there would be Nothing where someone wouldn't be able to be themselves because that's the unique Thing of every employee you have like Joseph was saying that culturally different group If you suppress ideas or ideas aren't good. It's scary to raise your hand In your group That's a bad culture. You know, you don't need a ping pong table. You need people motivated and happy They'll work all work for less if I'm happy every day If I can walk in and be motivated and like hey, I'm so happy to see you or hey I had a really bad day or hey, I'm late today and not have that fear of Why are you late? What did you do? You know those those overmanagement moments I found really opened up, you know a more tenured Um employee that is like all kinds of things changed with just saying you know what you can be late like we trust you We trust you. That's the first step if you don't trust them Fire him fast and also the last thing is I think it's very important and then we'll wrap up for today But I think it's good if your employees build the culture with you and everybody in your organization takes part But anyways, I just want to wrap this up. I want to say thank you to stormy Eric Yosef. I want to I'm going to drop their social so at stormy Simon at Eric Osu And at why a film Martin if you want to go follow them And if you love this type of content success story podcasts.com. I appreciate all of you for coming today I hope you got a lot out of this give a round of applause these incredible business leaders Thank you Scott. Thank you so much for coming