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Get a Demo“Scale is not going to fix your problems.” What separates a hundred million dollar ecommerce brand from the rest? Sean Frank (CEO, Ridge), Matt Bertulli (CEO, Pela Case & Lomi), Jason Panzer (President, HexClad), and Mike Beckham (CEO, Simple Modern) break down the eight rules to build a 9-figure ecommerce brand in 2026. No theories. Real growth strategies from real DTC leaders. Mike breaks down why Trevi chased profitable unit economics for a year before scaling. Sean calls reorder revenue the ultimate cheat code, and explains why he built Ridge around chasing it. Jason closes on hiring rigor, where a LinkedIn check now decides every offer. Powered By Fulfil https://9ops.co/fulfil Richpanel https://9ops.co/richpanel Northbeam https://www.northbeam.io/ Saras Analytics https://bit.ly/9OP-Ytdesc Postscript https://9ops.co/postscript Aftersell https://9ops.co/4i3bb5 Operators Newsletter https://9operators.com/ Chapters 00:00:00 Meet Gravy the Puppy 00:02:34 Rule 1 Sell Everywhere 00:09:07 Rule 2 Unit Economics 00:13:17 Rule 3 Your Finances 00:16:21 Avoid Predatory Debt 00:21:15 Rule 4 Sell to Rich & Old 00:23:06 Rule 5 Recurring Orders 00:27:15 Rule 6 Huge Market (TAM) 00:33:52 Time Your Market Entry 00:40:19 Rule 7 Ruthless in Hiring 00:46:08 Rule 8 Attention Engine
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Okay guys, we are gonna talk, uh, just the top 8 things, top 8, okay? No fluff of what you think is most important for going from wherever somebody's at to $100 million in revenue in e-commerce, in retail in 2026. I know you've prepped and today we're gonna waste no time. Are we good to go?
Let's do it. Let's roll.
I'm groggy. I have a puppy. I have a puppy that's in her second night and she woke me up every hour last night, guys. But I'm going to bring it. I'm going to soldier through it. I'm here to bring points.
Why are you stuck dealing with the puppy?
Well, it's in a crate in our room, so my wife is too. But the first night it actually did pretty well. And last night it was like on the hour.
You have another puppy?
Yes. So we got our first puppy. And like, it's, it's this adorable Cavachon biscuit. And one time I was showing him to some people and they were like, man, it would be great if you had a second one that was named Gravy. And I, I told, I told my kids this, which was such a huge mistake. And Gravy became like this almost mythical figure that like, we have to get Gravy.
It's such a perfect name.
Literally just the name made it where we had to get the second puppy. And we've talked about this this dog for like, I don't know, a year and a half. And we kind of convinced him it wasn't going to happen. And then we surprised him 2 days ago with Gravy. Gravy's in the house, great dog, but still a puppy. And so it's kind of like having a toddler around your house again, which is like an adjustment for me because my youngest is now 11. But anyway, I'm there. We're with you, Sean.
I've kind of like in solidarity, You guys are crazy, both of you.
Well, I'm having children, so I think there's no other way around it.
But yes, are you implying that's harder, Sean? Come on.
Oh no, Mike, I was just going to recommend, okay, you need to get a night nurse. You need to get a nanny.
There are levels to wealth. And the point where you have a night nurse for your puppy is like, I don't know what level of wealth that is, but I'm not there yet.
Oh, Mike, that's your level of wealth. It's just, it's just a question of ego and stupidity.
I wanna staff a 10-year-old.
All right. All right.
Let's go.
Okay.
Uh, I think I just wanna roll into these things. So we're gonna go 1 through 8. We might have a couple bonuses. Let's see how we do. Sean, why don't you start us off, man? What is number 1 for you?
Okay, so today's episode is the 8 most important rules for building a $100 million brand in 2026. And my number 1 tip is something you've heard me say a lot, and If you look at the new cohort of fast-growing 9-figure brands, what do they all have in common? They are channel agnostic. They are selling wherever there are customers. And typically what that means is they're TikTok Shop first and they use TikTok Shop as their growth engine, but they also have a Shopify store because that is what hooks up to their TikTok Shop. That is where they're going to capture all that search demand. They're listing on Amazon early and They're just trying to hit as many surfaces as possible. You see these people going to walmart.com early. Today, it was just announced that Based, which is a TikTok shop, like men's grooming brand, is nationwide at Target. So it's like, sell everywhere. If you want to make a lot of money, you have to give yourself as many chances as possible. And that just comes from being as many places as possible. Point 1, sell everywhere.
Don, I love this point. I love that you brought it up because we talk a lot about cannibalization and being a D2C brand versus retail versus Amazon. I mean, for years people have been asking me, oh, should I sell on Amazon? I mean, I think that's finally like a dead question because it's crazy not to, but how do you, how do you feel about cannibalization?
It's not real. Look into your own life. Do you ever try to buy something on Amazon and it's not on Amazon and then you go to their website? And I would say I do that maybe half of the time, right? You would get the sale if it was on Amazon, but I think over half the time people are just gonna buy the knockoff that's on Amazon, so.
Yeah, I think Jason, there's a pretty strong argument to say that different people shop in different channels so that you're not getting like, it's not like one person who is a D2C customer is, Now going to be a Walmart customer? You know what I mean? Like the, they're probably not the same cohort of people.
Yeah, I'm a big believer in go where the customer is. So I'm agreeing with you, Sean, but you know, there's that. I think I agree with you as well on your point about cannibalization. I don't think there really is cannibalization either. I just wanted to hear you say it and your rationale for it because it's a conversation that we have. And frankly, you know, I think if you're worried about cannibalization, like you're going to lose, like you should just be selling where the, go where the customer is.
Oh, can I add to this, by the way? Uh, there is like, I have absolutely seen P&Ls and numbers of brands where they started out DTC, they went to retail, retail massively overtook and cannibalized the DTC business, but the business got much bigger and more profitable.
So do you care? Yeah, ultimately that's the point, right? It's like, is the pie bigger? There will be some cannibalization, there's going to be some cannibalization, but as long as the pie gets bigger.
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I know.
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There is some cannibalization, but the new user acquisition that you get by being in additional channels far outweighs it. And what you pick as those channels and the products you sell and the pricing you sell it at really matters. If you're selling a product for $50 online and then you go into club at $25, you may have some problematic cannibalization. But if you are in Walmart at $50, uh, I, I don't see how that's problematic. I don't see how that's anything but net additive because ultimately you have to acquire customers affordably and your ability to hit a desirable CPA when you are acquiring through many channels is way easier than when you're acquiring through one channel. Because there's just more shoppers. So from my perspective, there's really no way to scale into the millions of customers without eventually diversifying into physical retail and wholesale. And that it's very difficult to keep your customer acquisition costs under control if you don't have multiple channels over time.
Let me just add that, yes, going to club and undercutting yourself will lead to cannibalization, but that's a merchandising decision. It's like, Then don't go to club and sell your product for half off, right? Uh, it's like pretty, pretty easy to not do that.
Yeah, that's my exact point, Sean, is that it, it gets cannibalistic. I think it gets more cannibalistic when you start grasping, when you're like, oh, we gotta, we gotta unload this inventory, or, you know, we gotta get the sales number this quarter. And so yeah, for sure you can get yourself into trouble, but in general, like I'm probably the most omnichannel, uh, of our brands and I am a huge advocate for it. And one other thing I'll say is that Um, the upside of being in multiple places is it's kind of like diversifying your portfolio because you have multiple channels. The swings aren't gonna be as big on the upside or the downside. So like when you're digital only, like I was, I was reading, um, Zane made a pretty good article about TikTok Shops and he was talking about the top 50. One of the points he was making is you see even within the top 50 people that are plus 80% month over month and people that are negative 40% month over month. I mean, that, that's crazy swings. And so like, yes, TikTok Shop's very important. We're looking at at it as a channel. But obviously if you're living and dying based on your revenue from TikTok Shops, like you're not gonna be able to build much enterprise value. Target is like the opposite. We can look at the first week of data for a set in Target and we can project out pretty much the entire year within 5%. And you can't do that digitally anywhere. Like that kind of predictability really takes the portfolio of your business and makes it much more plannable.
All right. Sell everywhere. Number 1. Uh, Mike, wanna go next?
Absolutely.
What's yours?
Point 2, make your unit economics work before you scale. The number 1 problem that brands have today is they try and bet on the future and their strategy is hope. They take unit economics that aren't working today and think maybe scale will fix this. Narrator said it never does. The Scale is not going to fix your problems. You have to operate— scale induces stress and it creates negative drift on things like customer acquisition cost and unit economics. Usually, sometimes they get better with economies of scale, but in general, it gets more expensive to acquire customers as you grow. If you don't have positive unit economics early on in a channel, there is no reason to believe that those unit economics are going to get better as you scale. And so my advice is you have to find a core channel where you are profitably acquiring customers, where you like the unit economics and you scale the entire business outside of that. I've talked about it on the pod, what we did with Trevi. Our core channel is Amazon. It took us probably about 13, 14 months to get to the point where we could profitably and scalably acquire customers in that channel. And now and only now are we looking at going much bigger, not only in that channel, but going to other channels. So get your unit economics in order, In your channel, then apply the gasoline. If you do it right, it's like a fire in your fireplace. You get a spark, you get the kindling, it's going, and then you can get a nice big fire in your fireplace. If you do it wrong, you burn your house down. You just, it's like pouring a bunch of gasoline on something that you don't want. So what you need to start with is really understanding your numbers. This is, you gotta understand your landed gross margins. You gotta understand things like returns. If you're in wholesale, you oftentimes you'll have things like RTVs. I was just talking about this with a brand that we're all, friendly with. Sometimes you have to give the retailer money back. Well, you know what? You better count on that on the front end, or you're gonna be pretty surprised about your margins when you have to write those checks back. As a funny example of this, you contractually, a lot of time with retailers, you'll have amounts that you are supposed to pay if you don't hit certain sell-throughs or if certain conditions aren't met. And sometimes they won't actually charge you that amount immediately, but then they'll pay auditors to go back through their books 12 months from now, 24 months from now, and you'll have a $400,000 Or unwanted guest show up in your, uh, invoices. So had, had that happen just last quarter where a $400,000—
Really personal money.
Yeah, that's, it's quite a kiss, right? You know, when you just lose $400,000 from a quarter because, uh, of an invoice for something that you thought you weren't going to get charged for. So you just have to really understand your economics and not even just the recognized cost today, but the unrecognized costs that may come. Like returns, uh, like, uh, return to vendor, uh, like markdowns, that kind of stuff. Once you have that in order, boom, get after it, scale, go to other channels like Sean's suggesting. But first, get your economic house in order. Really know your numbers.
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I know, I know. You're kind of— it does. Should we go into it or do you want to wait?
Yeah, let's do it, man, because I think it goes— they go together.
Yeah, they go together. Yeah, look, if you want to scale a business, you need to have your financial house in order. And of course, Mark's point about having good unit economics, I mean, that's table stakes, right? That's product-market fit. I've seen a lot of companies that have gone to retail that were, I think they went there because like their customer acquisition cost on .com was actually getting high. I don't know that retail solves that problem, but when you could run retail profitably on top of D2C, I think that's a huge win. But my point is more general about getting your financial house in order. If you wanna scale to $100 million, you're gonna need financing. I mean, you're just gonna need it. It doesn't have to be a lot of financing. You know, at that level, we just had a line of credit. You know, we had like a couple million dollar line of credit, but boy, was it useful at certain times, you know? Yeah. And we even did things like Wayflyer and stuff like that. And some of those are easy because like they just plug into your Shopify and pay you. But, you know, if you want to deal with like real banks and real investors, you know, having an audit really, really early on is huge. And having your systems created properly from the jump. is huge. You know, I remember when I first got to HexCloud and they were, you know, $19 million in revenue and they had no idea what their inventory was. And I know that rings bells to Sean Frank probably, but like literally the, their, their accountant out in the Valley on Ventura Boulevard was like literally guessing what the inventory was. He was like, here's how many containers we brought in and here's how many units we've sold. There was never a single count of inventory until I got there. And the first thing is I did, I went and said, okay guys, we're going to get an audit. You know, it was like, it was really, really hard. But ever since then, you know, we have 6 or 7 years of audited financials at HexCloud, right? And like, that's just bulletproof, right? Anyone, if I want to talk to a bank, if I want to talk to anyone, the first thing that they're going to ask for your financials. So like, have them ready. And then you look like a pro too, right? You just like look like a pro. It's like, oh, I've got all my financials in order because you're just, you're going to need to finance a business as it grows, right? There's P&L and there's balance sheet, right? And you're going to need balance sheet to grow your P&L. And so it's, I'm not just talking about audit. I'm like having good systems, even, you know, going in early on knowing where all your data is. All these things are just going to make it way easier to scale. And What will happen is if you don't have those things, you'll start to scale and then you're going to get bang, you're going to get slapped in the face. And that's the worst thing you want, right? You don't, that's the worst thing that could happen is like when your business is doing really well and performing well, but like you've got this whole mess behind the scenes. So just like get it clean at the beginning.
People taking 15% debt, that almost never ends well when you take this debt where like at these kind of crazy rates. And I know that you've talked some about that, but that was one of the points that you kind of alluded to, Jason, that we're hearing more and more questions like this from people that are getting themselves into these predatory— I don't know if it's predatory debt, but they're just like, they can't get out of it. And then I wanted to make a point about the other reason why you get audited financials is not just to try and sell the company. It's so people don't steal from you because I know a bunch of people that have literally gotten stolen from by employees.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
All right, Sean.
Uh, okay. I'm responding to Jason's point. Well, Mike, 2, 2 great points there. Um, yeah, Jason, we were in the exact same boat. I mean, when I, when I joined Ridge, I mean, we, we didn't do an inventory count for like 5 years 'cause we're like, yeah, we basically know what we have. We have the Shopify reporting. And then when you actually do the count, it's like, oh no, they shipped 10,000 of this thing and we actually had a bunch of this stuff stolen from us. Right. And it's, it's, you don't, you don't know that until you actually dive in there and start doing the reviews and the audits. One reason to actually speedrun doing the audit financials is to get off of merchant cash advances, be that Wayflyer, Clearco, Shopify Capital, those, that isn't traditional loans. What they are is cash advances, so they get paid first. And what ends up happening is the rate is very, very high, right? I mean, 15% would be a generous rate there. Typically it's in the 20s. And the way it's structured is they take out money every single day from your Shopify. So unlike a bank where you have a payment due at the end of the month and you can, you know, Do what you have to to make that happen. If you have payroll or a marketing thing you want to invest in, you can't because they get paid first, right? And then you've seen these death spirals happen a couple different times. One, it's less reliable capital. So like, unlike a bank, JP Morgan has unlimited money. Like, the government will give them as much money as they want. So you have to kind of mess up your business to get your loan pulled, right? There has to be a change in like top-level management. Decisions to get that pulled. Wayflower could pull your money tomorrow. And there was a capital crunch 2 years ago in e-com that pushed a lot of brands to bankruptcy because you had a $20 or $30 million line of credit you thought you could pull on and actually, no, it's gone because it wasn't actually a real loan. And then the second thing is it is expensive, it's predatory, they're taking their money first and they are kind of the lender of last resort in this industry. You want to move over to a traditional conventional loan as soon as possible. To do that, you need audited financials. So that's one reason to listen to Jason here.
Entrepreneurship is hard enough when you're trying to produce a positive return on your money. If you take money from somebody at 25% interest, do you have any idea the return on that money you have to generate in order to just pay it back? You have to generate like 30-something percent return. And I don't even know that I'm confident I can do that all the time. So it's just, you're putting yourself totally behind the 8-ball. The other thing I love about what you said, Jason, is that the reason why you need to have audits is because people will steal from you. They will steal from you. And, you know, like I've, I've seen friends of mine that employed family members that stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from them. People will, inventory will get up and walk away from your warehouse. Somebody in accounts payable will start sending money to their cousin. Like, it's, you, you have to kind of create a system where people are incentivized to be the best version of themselves. Because unfortunately, if you don't, a certain percentage of people will just steal. And so the way I think about it is part of good leadership is that you have good systems that incentivize good behavior. And if you don't, like, you're going to pay the price eventually. Eventually somebody that you don't expect is going to steal from you.
Last thing I'm going to say on the topic is it's like lazy not to do this stuff, right? It's like, you know, it's the dirty work that you just need to do. to be a really great business. So you don't have to do it yourself, you know, find someone to do it. But like, just like you're focused on product design, just like you're going, you know, deep on marketing funnels, you know, you just have to do this. Like, just, it's gotta be done.
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I'll go number 4, sell to rich people. It is just easier to be upmarket in any category than it is to be down, especially if you are younger. You will have more margin to acquire more customers. You will have more channels to sell in. You will have more markets you can sell in. Rich people tend to be tastemakers. Everybody follows rich people. They are the trendsetters most often. There's exceptions, but most often people with money are what everybody else would like to look up to and be, right? Every product and every service that you guys use, that we— I use, everybody uses, eventually at some point started off as something that rich people did, right? Uber was simply the commoditizing of private drivers. Private chefs, DoorDash. Rich people started out with the first dishwasher. Rich people started using the first car. Like, it is where everything starts in consumer, and you're just going to have an easier time. Jesus, look at longevity. Although, you know, Bryan Johnson with his disease is not a great example at this moment in time, but guy was spending $2 million a year on longevity. And now what do you see? Like, just a litany of companies coming out with $200 a month things and $20 a month things. So I just think you should really try to have products that sell upmarket. Does anybody disagree?
If I could just add a 4B, it's easier to sell to old people. Old people tend to be rich.
Old rich people.
I totally agree.
Yeah.
Like, especially like just in, in the modern era, old people have almost all disposable income, especially for, you know, our category. So dude, you know, embrace a boomer today is what I'm saying.
I love that. That's, uh, that's a, that's a, I would never expect that of you, Sean. That's, uh, it's not a cool thing to do is go sell to old people.
It's the Ridgeway. Find, find the old people and sell to them.
Sean's new customer avatar is, is Grandpa Jim.
Yeah.
Sean, next.
Okay. Point 5 to making a $100 million brand as fast as possible is sell things people reorder. Do not do what me, Jason, Mike, and Matt have done.
All of us did.
Don't do that.
Like, you know, it, it's, it might sound paradoxical. It's like all you guys have 9-figure brands, all you guys are successful, cool entrepreneurs with great hair. No, no, no, you do not want to be like us. You want to find something people reorder. You want to be like Will from IQ Bar or Jordan from Instant Hydration or Zach Stuck or any of the Titan series. They have a huge advantage over us. I have to be good at acquisition and I have to go out there and win in the bloodbath of Meta CACs every single day because Yesterday I acquired 5,000 new customers. Today I'm gonna acquire 5,000 new customers. If even 20% of them were reordering, my life gets maybe 10 times easier, right? 20 times easier because it stacks on top of itself, right? I mean, I have a cohort business now. Mike has seen the power of Trevi. Just the money, the money shows up every day automatically for free. It feels like a glitch. So experience that. Sell something that people reorder.
I mean, look at all these beverage companies too. Like, look at all these beverage companies, you know, all these other consumables. Like, a bunch of them have popped off deals like in the last year, right? And it's like, well, there's a reason for that. There's a reason why these big bev companies will just go out and buy these, these new brands, right? Because they just, they need that growth engine. And it's just like, yeah, it's a, it's just so much easier.
Yeah. And I think hybrid can work also. Like, one of my favorite examples from our friend group, Kitsch, started out selling hair ties, and that's very much a thing that you don't have to reorder. But then they saw that what you really want to be doing is selling shampoo and conditioner and things like that, because you do have to reorder those things. And it was very complementary to what they were doing. And I think that that's probably, I think probably things that you reorder has become the majority of their business, although I don't know their P&L really in depth. I just know that it's gone really well for them. So I like that idea. It, It is possible if you are selling people, uh, hard goods to also find a way to sell them something that they can reorder with it. But this is also the reason, you know, you guys have heard me talk about it. I think everything I'm going to do from this point on is going to be something you can reorder. That's kind of my directive on any new brand. I don't want to do things that you can't reorder.
There's other things that are hard about these categories. Like nothing is easy, but what Sean is hitting on is just like the, once you figure it out, the financial side Well, they're even more competitive.
I think the market always competes in the places where the rewards are the biggest and the rewards are always— this is why like everybody wants to start, you know, like a ready-to-drink beverage company and you don't do it. You'll get murdered. It's just too hard. You know, like you're going to literally— Coca-Cola is like the mob and they will come after you and put you 6 feet under. So like, I think you have to be realistic about your skillset, your capital as an operator, and where you can compete. But for sure, it's going to get more competitive as you get into consumables unless it's a nascent new market. But that's also because if you can get it to work, man, the business is so much better.
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All right, Mike, you're next, dude. While you're on a roll, what's yours? Number 6.
Yeah. Number 6, sell into a huge or quickly growing market. It is hard to become the number one person in a market. It's almost impossible statistically. You're going to have to come in and either totally create a market or you're going to have to unseat a competitor that has head start on you and has better distribution and has a ton more capital than you. Your odds are not very good. A much easier path to a very big company is that you just pick a massive market where you can pick a piece of that addressable market and win there. This is a great example. Drinkware is a huge market. There's room for a lot of 9-figure brands. Electrolytes is a huge market. There's room for a lot of 9-figure brands. And the reality is that my odds, even as an operator, are not very good of ever becoming the top person, the top company in a category we compete in. I wanna be in categories where I can be number 8 and have a huge outcome. And there are a lot of these categories out there, just like we talked about before with things you reorder. The, the bigger the category, the more competitive it is, but also the more different angles and the more white space you'll find to be able to build something. So get into the places where people are already buying a lot of it. Or that are growing really rapidly and look like they're turning into a really big market. Easiest way to build a really big company.
This, Mike, has been one of the most contrarian things for me in the last 5 years. I've, I was of the mind that you had to go like find a new niche or new category or something new if you wanted to be built big. And then when I heard you guys talk about this, I was like, this makes so much more sense. Like, where is there momentum in the market? And just go there.
There's a total rant coming, Matt. If you, I was, I taught entrepreneurship at the university level for several years. And if you look at how we teach entrepreneurship in this country, basically step 1, come up with a problem that nobody is solving and that you can solve. Here's my problem with that thought process. If you really come up with a product that nobody else is selling, there are 2 possibilities about why that is. Number one is that you're just the smartest person out of billions of people. Nobody's thought of this. You are just that gifted and you came up with it and Congratulations. But you know what's far more likely? The reason why nobody's selling it, it's a bad idea. It's a bad idea. And probably people have died trying to sell the thing that you want to sell. And so the vast majority, 99.9% of successful entrepreneurship stories in this country or in the world are people who are entering an existing market and just providing a service at a great value and people are buying it. Something people already wanted that's already been established. And, you know, to kind of elaborate on this point, even the companies that we think of as very innovative, like there was a point where it's like, man, Netflix is so innovative. Not really. They're still selling movies. That's been going on for a long time, right? They're just, they just packaged it differently. And so like, you've got to find where there's already demand. And you've gotta compete in those spaces. If you're really trying to create from nothing is just, it's just such a like 1 in 100, 1 in 1,000 kind of crapshoot in my mind.
It is amazing. It is amazing how many people like pitch their idea to me and it's like so niche. There's no market, there's no addressable market. And it's like, you know what? That is such a cool little thing, you know, but it's like never gonna be a business. And, uh, it's, it's just, it's interesting to me, like how, how people think. The first thing you should be thinking about is like, how big could this be one day? You know, otherwise, like, what's, what's the point? Unless you wanna, that's called a hobby. Otherwise it's a hobby.
Yeah, that's right. It's a hobby. One of my favorite quotes about this is that every startup needs at least one miracle to work, but you do not want to get in a startup that needs multiple miracles. And if you don't know if people are gonna want to buy what you're selling, then you need a miracle just for people to want to buy what you're selling. And then you need several more miracles to get to product market fit. And So like finding a market where, you know, every day people are buying a lot of this thing and there's a ton of demand for it, that knocks out one of your vectors of risk. And in general, guys, what entrepreneurs get paid to do is to provide services to people that they need. It's, yes, it's solving problems for people, but primarily it's solving problems that they know they have and that they're trying to solve today. And you're just trying to solve it a little bit better than it's been solved.
I'll put it another way, Mike. The, the reason that this one struck for me and the reason I like it so much is building a company, like no matter what, when you build a company, you set out to build a company, it is hard. There is like low probability of success. So if the probability of success is low, then why don't you build it in a market that's big enough where if the, then the upside is actually just larger, right? Like you're gonna do the work, you may as well do the work towards something that might be bigger. It's the same amount of work. It's the same amount of risk. Just pick something where the upside is much larger. When I think that's what you're saying, Jason, is like, that's too niche. That's a hobby.
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Your life is way easier if you're in a market that's already growing 100+% right? Go back to Amazon and Jeff Bezos. When he had the idea, he heard about the internet and he is like, look, this thing's growing 10,000% every year. It's going to be big, right? You know, if you're trying to launch a protein brand right now, I think you're screwed. I think protein has been like, you know, done to death, right? But peptides, everyone's excited by it. Peptides are probably going to grow this year alone 15,000% versus last year because they didn't really exist last year. So if you're trying to make money, that is where the ball is going, right? Imagine trying to sell cigarettes right now. It'd be like, look, it's a shrinking market, right? But Zyn pouches are exploding, probably going to grow another 300% this year. So just understand that The form factor or the product you choose to go after, you're kind of dictated by the market. It'd be very hard to launch drinkware right now. Drinkware is not a growing market this year, right? I would say cookware is not a growing market because it grew a ton in 2020 when people were locked in their houses. So, you know, I'm not saying don't compete with us. If you want to, go ahead. But you want to find where the trend is going and I've listened to a lot of podcasts. Venture capitalists talk about you want to invest in things that are coming around the corner, right? And everyone's trying to invest in AI inference and new AI chatbots and AI eating software. That is actually not what's around the corner. That's the current game on the field. Those are going to end up being probably bad investments because you don't know what's going to happen in 2 or 3 years, right?
My favorite Andreessen quote on this, Sean, is that he said after like 20 years of running a16z, he's basically come to the conclusion that they don't see bad ideas. just see ideas that are too early or too late. And I think that that's a really interesting idea when it comes to this market growth, that it's like, what we're really saying is if you're too early on an idea, you can have the right insight. I mean, go look at the 2000s and a lot of these Web 1.0 companies that had huge IPOs and then failed. There's really successful versions of them that came 10 years later, 15 years later, the infrastructure just wasn't there. So you can be too early. And then like protein's a huge market, but like you said, Sean, we're kind of at the point where it's now fully saturated and you're probably too late. You've got to kind of time it where you're, you're not too early and the market's still growing really rapidly, but you're not at the saturation point either. So timing your entry is a big part of this. Yeah.
You want to be in markets that like the people in the know think it's over, but the greater market doesn't, right? Like GLP-1s is another one. Like, yes, everyone knows what GLP-1s are. They are still going to grow 200% next year. You can make a lot of money in a market growing 200%, right? So, you know, protein is flat, right? Drinkware is flat. Like, you can't make any money in a flat category. But even if a category exploded last year, there still is a lot of momentum to make money this year and next year. So—
There was a crazy analysis I saw that if you had bought Walmart in 1985 at a 250 PE ratio, you still would've made over 10% per year over the last like 40 years because the growth was just that amazing, right? So even if you had gotten in Walmart 10 years in and you'd paid just an insane price, you still would've done amazing because of the underlying dimensions of the market, which is what you're saying, Sean.
Mike, I don't, I have a better one for you. If you were the very first check in Google and you sold at IPO, you had a worse return than if you bought Google at the IPO until now. Right.
Yeah.
That one blows me away actually.
And that, and that's, and it was so much riskier, right? In fact, the first check at Google is, it's kind of crazy if you hear the story, they talk about it on an acquired podcast, but the dude didn't even give an amount. He didn't ask for valuation. He's just like, yeah, I'm going to give you money and drove off. And they were like, what? And then it's just a check showed up later. But like, it's, it's a really good point that your risk-adjusted return at the very, very beginning of a market is bad. The venture capital seed investing, Sean, you've talked about this with seed investing. It's like seed investing is like the biggest crapshoot of all time. It's like, this is either going to be like a home run or it's most likely a zero. And so like in the same way with markets, there's a timing thing where it's like the market's proven itself, but it's still early on enough where there's a lot of room to grow. One of the things I tell people all the time is it always feels late when you get into something, but it's usually not. So when we got in the Amazon marketplace in 2014, 2015, I was like, man, we're so late to the game if we'd been here 5 years ago. But now you look at Simple Modern and you're like, of course you guys made a lot of money. You started selling on Amazon in 2015. Like you just were in the right growth channel. And so like, this is not just true about market product categories. This is true about channels. Like if you were early to Facebook ads, you printed. If you were early to TikTok and really going after that strategy, you printed. And there will be other things like that. So you can also approach marketing channels this way and you can approach like sales channels this way that if you can find them early on, not when they're nascent, not when there's no proof, but when they're early on and they've got a lot of growth ahead of 'em, you can do really well.
And I'll just, I just wanna jump in the last word on this. It's still early for Facebook ads and TikTok Shop.
I was gonna say it's still early.
I did a million dollars last month in TikTok Shop and I was the biggest hater. I think it's still early for both those markets. So guys, don't sleep on it.
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Number 7, be ruthless in your hiring as you scale. Be ruthless. Like, people issues are a total nightmare. They're time-consuming. They're— I cannot tell you how many people I speak to that, you know, they just like, they tried to scale their headcount fast and they hired the wrong people and now they're like, what do I do? I mean, don't be in a hurry. And Mike has said this a bunch of times, not Mike, sorry, this was Matt, slow to hire, quick to fire. I know you guys all say this, but like, It's really tempting because there's so much work to be done to just go out and just start hiring people. But it's going to be a problem. Be ruthless. Don't trust anyone or anything. LinkedIn, look at everyone's LinkedIn, look at their social media, see what's going on with these people. Look at what they're doing in their personal time. Like, there are a lot of maniacs out there, guys. Like, you know, you don't want emotional people, you know, you don't, you know, like, don't trust anyone or anything that you— referrals often suck. Okay. Like, you know what I mean? Like someone's trying to get someone a job, that doesn't mean that this is a good person. I mean, I've been burned like multiple times on this stuff. And I talk to people who've been burned and the bigger you get, you're trying to scale. It's like, you don't need this in your life. Do more work yourself, but get people to do more work. The contrary to this is if you find a really smart person who's a really good person and you don't think like, oh, they don't fit a particular job, hire smart people and figure out to do with them later. As long as you can trust that emotionally and culturally, they are going to fit. I mean, the stuff that I see in people's LinkedIn, you got these people bouncing around for— they never held a job for more than 2 years. If you've never held a job for more than 2 years, I don't want to hire you because you're not going to stay with me because there's something wrong with you, right? There's something wrong with a lot of people out there, and you need to really find the best, and you need to be ruthless about it.
Yeah, Jason, I got 2 points to add to this. The first is we have a rule now at Ridge. I do not want to hire anybody somebody else knows because the odds that they are the best person on earth for that role are zero, right? We have an open role right now. Someone's like, oh, you should hire my cousin. I'm like, I'm not hiring your cousin because I have the whole world to hire from and there's no shot your cousin's the best hire, right? The second rule is, Treat everybody like a gardener. And what I mean by that is if your gardener showed up and started telling you about his problems, you'd fucking fire your gardener. I'm like, I don't want to hear about your problems. You're my gardener. Do your job. Right? And if, as the CEO, if somebody's making your life harder, if they're complaining or they have whatever, you need to fire them. Like, I'm like, I don't care if you're good at your job or whatever. Your job is to take stuff away from my shoulders. You don't think I have everyone's problem on my shoulders all the time? I have to make enough money to pay everybody. I'm like, You don't get to show up and complain about this person or that person. And if I hear that, immediately fire.
So yeah, I call those people talented terrorists. Uh, they still gotta go.
And so it's so true.
I think like your contribution as a worker is something about your capability, your competency, your motor, and then it's like reduced by minus like how much handholding How emotionally draining are you? You know, how much internal kind of politicking do you do? Like the easiest, the, one of the reasons why I think we were really successful is that we had such an aligned team that we spent all of our time running the business and externally focused. But as companies get bigger, and this is kind of what you're saying, Jason, it's so easy for like 20, 30% of your capacity just being used on managing things internally. I think it was the AppLovin CEO did an interview with Sinra where he just was like, You know, I basically eliminated the HR department and then I looked at all these open positions and I'm like, yeah, we're not filling any of these. And he just kind of got pretty ruthless about team size. And so that would be the other, like my, my addendum here is like, I just would really challenge everybody that the multi-hundred million dollar brands of the future are going to be smaller headcount. They're just gonna be smaller headcount and you've gotta find a way to hire extremely judiciously. So part of that's who you're bringing in. And part of that is how many people you're bringing in.
You know, Mike, the, the, every single person in your company, every single person, including you, creates 2 things, value and brain damage. And the point is to reduce the brain damage.
That is it.
If your, if your company is under 200 people, like you as the, as the CEO, you should look at every single hire. You don't have to interview them all, But at least have your HR people get them your LinkedIn, look at their LinkedIn. I mean, that will tell you a lot about that person. If you look at, did they bounce around? You know, what other stuff do they write about? You know, what are their interests? Like, you don't have to meet everybody, but just no one gets hired at HexClad anymore without me looking at their LinkedIn. And that's a— I instituted that policy 6 months ago because like, I just kept seeing, and you know what, I've shot down a bunch of people. So, you know, it's not that hard. This is too important. This is like CEO duties. Look at everyone's LinkedIn. Don't let anyone get hired without you feeling good about it.
Geez, man, I, this is good.
I like this.
Everybody's fired up on people.
Jason's the goalie. All right, Matt, you have 5 minutes. Take us home.
All right, let me, let me take it home. I think number 8 is you have to build an attention machine. We've talked about this so many different ways. The game in consumer is distribution, right? And I firmly believe that attention marketing is not a fricking department. It's the entire business. So this is everything from creative supply chain to creative management, to PR, to cultural moments, to paid media. Like your job, if you want to scale, is to be omnipresent. And that is not just channels. That is not just markets. That is like literally as much attention as you can possibly get. It is why Ridge is so damn good. They're fricking everywhere. Right? Same with HexClad. They're everywhere. So I think you just have to understand like what business you're actually in, you know, and you don't outsource this. This is the business.
Hell yeah, dude. Great way to end the pod because I think, I mean, you know, it's been said ad nauseam at this point, attention is everything. We are in the attention economy. It's not slowing down. It's like, It's 12-hour news cycles and it's like you have to stay top of mind. The biggest ad budget wins. So go out there and spend, spend, spend, spend on AppLovin, spend on Meta, spend on TikTok, spend on Operators Podcast sponsorships. Go ahead and hit up Aaron. You can sponsor the episode.