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Get a DemoHelp an Operator Out (HAOO) is a series where real business owners join the podcast with live questions. In this episode, Christopher Francis (Founder & CEO, Home Plunge) brings the hardest problem in year one: growing without doing every job himself. He turned a personal need into a $1.4 million business in a year and a half. The conversation covers pricing and offer strategy. It also gets into Amazon, TikTok Shop affiliates, and AI support. Sean pushes for a sale structure built for a high-consideration purchase. Mike frames the manual support work as margin compression Christopher isn’t tracking. It’s the same problems most seven-figure founders eventually face. Powered By Fulfil https://9ops.co/fulfil Postscript https://9ops.co/postscript Aftersell https://9ops.co/4i3bb5 Richpanel https://9ops.co/richpanel Northbeam https://www.northbeam.io/ Saras Analytics https://bit.ly/4a3gzVv Operators Newsletter https://9operators.com/ More from Operators Operators Newsletter https://9operators.com/ Operators Portal https://portal.9operators.com/dashboard Chapters 00:00:00 Meet Home Plunge 00:06:38 Nearly Going Broke 00:12:42 Find the Right Avatar 00:19:43 The Wholesale Reality 00:26:27 Make Partners Money 00:32:43 Permanent Sale Debate 00:40:29 Landing Page Strategy 00:46:02 Cracking TikTok Shop 00:53:11 Pricing by Channel 00:59:29 AI Support Holdout 01:03:20 Hidden Margin Cost 01:06:43 Founder Email Trick
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Welcome to the Operators Podcast. I'm Sean, one of your amazing, beautiful co-hosts. We're here with Mike, my other amazing, beautiful co-host, and today we are helping out a fellow operator. We have Christopher here. Christopher, what's the business? What do you need help with?
What's up, Sean? Mike, thank you so much for having me. I'm the founder CEO of Home Plunge, which is the first cold plunge chiller that converts any home bathtub into a cold plunge. And so where we are in the business is that we started January of last year. And in that calendar year, we did around $744,000 in revenue. This year we're doing great. We're up 125% year on year. In the past 18, 19 months, we're around, um, $1.3 million. And at the end of this year, we're aiming to do somewhere between $1.2 to $1.4 for the calendar year.
Beautiful. It is a great product. We have 8 awesome questions we're going to get through and try to deliver you the most value. Thank you for taking an hour to be here and thank you for helping our audience learn. along with you. Let's go, guys. Let's help this operator out.
So I'm super fired up about this conversation. You know, you can't see my lower half during the pod. I'm always sitting in a cold plunge. So it's a big part of my life. I try and do every pod while submerged in freezing water, and I'm really excited to learn how I can up my game. But in all seriousness, like, I'm super excited. I built a sauna in my workout room when we moved into this house, but like, we weren't We needed an in-between solution. And so, I don't have a cold plunge solution in my life. And I think the product you've made is super interesting for somebody who wants a really good solution but doesn't want to have the crazy machine in their house or whatever. So, awesome product. I'm ready to get going.
Let's talk about having a cold plunge in your house and why I think your product is such a good idea. We have a friend, Jeremy. He has an amazing sauna built in his house and then he spent literally $5,000 or $8,000 on like a crazy custom-built cold plunge. It has a wave machine built in, and now he doesn't even go in it anymore. He doesn't like cold plunging. So he just like, he put a lot of time and effort and money into this thing. And I think yours is a great in-between because it's storable, portable, uh, and turns your existing bathtub into a cold plunge. So how'd you come up with the idea? Maybe what's your background?
The idea came really from a personal need. My background, first of all, is in engineering, and I spent most of my career in sales, however. But at the same time, I played soccer my whole life. So since I was 10 years old, I'm about to turn 40 in September, I've been a soccer player. I had my ACL, the whole trifecta, meniscus, everything blown out in college when I was playing. And so I had the surgery reconstructed, it was great. And then the past 10 years, my left knee has just been dying. And so I still play every week with a group of older guys and we have a blast, play for 90 minutes. But it got to the point where the next day, these stairs behind me, I'd have to walk home or walk down the stairs every morning and do 2 feet per stair holding the rail. Like, what is wrong with me? Like, I'm not even 40 yet. This is crazy. And this was 5 years ago. So I was 35 at the time. And around that time is when I started hearing all the podcasts talk about cold plunging. I mean, even the business podcasts, like All In was talking about it. Rogan was talking about it. Huberman. And so I was like, all right, there's gotta be something to this, which is more than what I'm doing with just the bag of peas on my knee the next day. And so I took all the ice outta my freezer and I dumped it into my bathtub. I filled it up. It didn't get that cold. So I started throwing the peas in and everything else. And it probably got to like 60 degrees. Again, not that cold, but I got in, I stayed in there for 10 minutes. And I have to say that the recovery effects were 10x anything I'd ever experienced. And that's the moment where I was like, I have to have this in my life. It, it wasn't actually the lightning bolt moment where I thought I'm gonna make a bathtub cold plunge, but it was the moment where I knew, I knew I needed a cold plunge. And so it was only when I realized that I live in San Francisco and I have nowhere to put a traditional cold plunge, that's when the moment happened. I was like, oh, well, I'll just, I'll just find one for the bathtub. And it didn't exist.
Okay. So let's talk about actually going out and making that then, right? So you're an engineer by trade. Did you just like, Go on Alibaba and start hitting up people who make cold plunges and like try to be like, hey, can you make my thing? Or what actually, how'd you reach this point where you're actually selling a product?
Uh, no, I had no idea what Alibaba even was at the time. And so what I did, it's a super intimidating thing to just even imagine what does it take to build a hardware product. So I literally went to Google and asked Google, how do I make a hardware product? Because I had no idea. Even though with the engineering background, I had no experience building mechanical things, and so it was literally starting from scratch. The process was I sort of pieced together, I couldn't really find anywhere a complete holistic blueprint, so I found step by step, just here's what it might look like. And it started with an industrial design firm, and then I learned about Alibaba and I started talking to sourcing agents and then the manufacturers themselves. And, uh, I mean, at the end of it, once I had a proper design, one of the most fun parts was I had 3 or 4 manufacturers kind of compete to build the best prototype. And so I ordered 3 to 4 prototypes, chopped it down to 2, then chopped it down to 1 and found the one I work with.
Yes. I mean, it is very intimidating building a hardware product, specifically a large electronic, expensive hardware product like this, right? I mean, this is— it's a serious device. This isn't just making widgets on Alibaba, right? Like going on there making stuffed animals or whatever, right? Where there's 8,000 vendors, it's soft goods, it's like, you know, cut and sew. I mean, there's parts, there's software, there's all these things coming together. So it's really amazing this is bootstrapped, that you've done this yourself and you're a team of one. So before I move into the question aspect of this, Mike, any questions?
No, I just, I, the comment I'd make is, man, a lot of the great entrepreneurship stories are you're solving a problem for yourself and then you realize you can sell it to others, which is awesome about your story. And something you said, Sean, that I think I've learned is like when we're doing something overseas that something close to that has been done before, um, it's, they're, they're awesome. And when you do something that's really bespoke and new, like It's an order of magnitude more complicated. So I really respect anybody who's really done something. I think you've won a bunch of awards. You might talk about some of those awards that you've won, Christopher, because you really did the hard work of bringing something new into existence because it solved a problem for you.
Yeah, thank you. And I will touch just quickly on the bootstrapping part. It's the irony of it is that when I initially had the quote for what it would look like, like the very beginning before even anything was on CAD, I was quoted, hey, to bring your product to market, it'll probably cost about $60,000. And I was like, man, that's really expensive. That's more than I would ever imagine paying. And 'cause I had no idea, right? And I had no idea that that was actually like super low to the bar. And then 2 years later, you know, half a million dollars later, it's just like, Oh, I wish it was $60,000. But if I were told in the beginning, the honest truth that it would've been what it was, the cost, I would've never have done it because that would've meant early on I would've had to make that early decision. Oh, I'm going to have to sell my house. Oh, I'm going to have to liquidate my 401. Oh, I'm going to sell all my stocks, all my savings, which I did. I nearly went completely broke, like to the point where, I mean, I had maybe $5,000, $10,000 in my account before I started selling products. So Yeah, it's a scary process and I barely made it out.
Dude, the audience wants you to win. Okay? Like, we love these stories. So if you're listening, you can go to Home Plunge, you can buy one of these things, help support a fellow operator because we love hearing people who go all the way. And look, you're at a great inflection point. Like, a million-dollar business is nothing to sneeze at. Like, I was there, Mike was there. I think this thing can easily do 8 figures. You know, your competitors in the space, I don't remember the exact name, but like the ice barrel company, like they got to like $40 million a year. Right? Like, and that is, they're still on a $500 barrel you just put ice in. I think your product is more elegant and a better solution. Fulfill is the ERP built specifically for D2C and e-commerce brands. Inventory, purchasing, warehousing, financials, all in one system built for the way your operation actually runs. There is not an ERP on this planet, not one that has more direct 3PL integrations than Fulfill. They integrate with over 400 3PL locations globally. And most of you listening to this right now are either running your own 3PL relationship or you're about to. And the second your 3PL and your ERP aren't talking to each other in real time, you're flying blind. You don't know your true landed costs, you don't know your real margin. You're reconciling spreadsheets at 11:00 PM trying to figure out where $40,000 went. I know because I am on Fulfill. The visibility we have now versus what we had before, it's not a marginal improvement, it's a different game. Fulfill is the only ERP I've seen that was actually built from the ground up for D2C and it's not some 5-coded piece of crap. Believe me, those exist. Fulfill isn't one of them. Go check out Fulfill, tell 'em Sean sent you. Some questions we're gonna get through today. The number one question is, how do I break my dependency on paid social? So what's the background behind this?
Background behind this is that when I launched Sales in January of last year, I thought that Meta ads meant boosting an Instagram post. That's how much I knew about e-commerce. And then people started telling me, oh, you have to set up a Meta pixel. You have to go through the Meta business, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, I'm doing it. I'm boosting the Instagram posts. It's fine. And eventually it wasn't until April last year where I started talking to an agency and they introduced all of it technically to me. Started to make sense. Finally started to click. And I hired them to do it. Fast forward to this year, I've relinquished myself from every agency from Google to Meta to Klaviyo, all of it, and I've replaced it with AI systems. And it's been great to understand it, but at the same time, I'm seeing that my business is dependent on those services, right? That is where my revenue comes from with the addition of organic search this year, which has been great. And so I'm starving for information and guidance on how do I get more into B2B? How do I get into hotels, luxury property? Where else can I sell this thing so that not all of my revenue is generated from paid ads?
Welcome to e-commerce. So you're going to live or die by Facebook ads right now. At your size of business, I do think you can bring on additional channels that will be helpful. One thing I would look at if I was you is like the HSA channels, Right? Like those are like sneaky big if you can get approval. I think you can get approval very easily. Like the wallet we're getting approval on, and if the wallet can get approval, your device can definitely get approval. And the reason why that's a good channel is like there's 3 or 4 marketplaces, and I'll have my person message them to you which ones they are, but like they do just drive volume. You will be there. People have HSA dollars, they have to spend them. And at your size and scale, it'll probably be $1 million a year, right? Like I think that is an easy add-on there where It'll take you maybe 40 hours worth of work and then you probably get $1 million in sales just every year as like some sort of annuity. But going back to like the core of your question, you are going to have to get good at ads, right? Like ads are the attention machine in this economy and we can kind of put ways to grow into a couple buckets, right? So there's paid ads, then there's organic content. You already said you're doing SEO, but this is a great product for organic TikTok or organic Instagram, organic YouTube Shorts. Like you haven't an exciting product that you could make good videos about that will naturally get views. And it's basically the same thing as an ad, right? Like either you're either paying for attention or you're putting in the work to make good content that gets the attention. And I would, if you have the time, I would take a Sunday and every Sunday I would just film a bunch of TikToks of you getting in and out of the bath, you throwing things in and out, you like doing tests versus other stuff. Just because each one of those videos, I think if you did it for 5 Sundays in a row where you spent your whole day doing it and each Sunday you produced 8 to 10 videos, you would get a video that got a million views, right? And that would drive 4 sales or something, right? So I would think about doing that. And then the third bucket is, you know, sales, right? So I think Mike could talk about the wholesale business and talk about like what does B2B actually look like? And maybe I'll kick it over to him.
So my first recommendation, Christopher, is that you try and find an avatar for your company, somebody who kind of created a new product, Larger price point, real health benefits, scaled it up. First one came to my mind would be Eight Sleep. That's an example of selling a product between $2,000 and $3,000 that there wasn't really, I think, a comparable product in the market fully. And you have this kind of combination of long consideration periods, awareness building, health, being on a general like health and wellness trend, and they've obviously done a great job of it. There's some others out there for sure. I mean, maybe Whoop would fit in this category because of the subscription. It ends up actually being a pretty expensive product. But I would try and look at some of those companies and say, well, what was their playbook? What seems to really work for them that I'm not doing? So, you know, like I think what Sean's getting at is one angle. One of the things you're trying to do is find an arbitrage of some way. Like if you're paying market rates, it's just always going to be really hard, like on customer acquisition to hit costs that you like. So one way to do it is you've got to kind of become an authority in the space personally, or have some people that are kind of more viewed as authorities that are like recommending your product. Because one of the problems you have to do is you have to build awareness. The other really tangible thing I would say is that I wonder what the physical kind of gatherings of people are that you could show up into and sell a material number of these. There have to be conventions that would work for you. I'm not sure what those would be. Are those bodybuilding conventions? Are those longevity conventions? Are they athletic conventions? I don't know. I mean, and I think that one thing that I would kind of wonder about is who is the kind of the profile, the avatar who you're usually selling to? And like, I know that the expenditures that parents are putting into sports are at all-time highs. So, man, I bet nobody really owns selling cold plunges to teenagers that are wanting to maximize their performance, for example. Is that a lucrative market? I have no idea. I know that a bunch of parents around me are spending a ton of money on sports. So, I would start trying to think outside of the box in those ways of where can I— how can I online build awareness, generate credibility, kind of expert persona that people are looking to? And then, 'cause you've gotta build awareness around the category, and then also simultaneously, is there some ways that you can physically get this product in front of people and sell enough to make the numbers make sense?
I just wanna add one thing. You're selling for $26.99 right now. I would probably take it to $28.99. I think $26.99 is just a bad price point. Either be $24 or just like push $3, and then Mike just said like something that I think we're gonna brush over that is actually genius. It's like you are a great dropship affiliate plugin for the Whoops of the world, the Eight Sleeps of the world, the Hyperice of the world, the Equinox Shops of the world, even the GovXs of the world. Like all of those are great companies who have some sort of affiliate or dropshipping model tied to them. Like, you know, I have Eight Sleep. The biggest problem with Eight Sleep, they sold me one thing that was really expensive one time, and now they're trying to upsell me. a pillow. It's like, it's never gonna be a meaningful LTV driver for that business, right? But I think you could do a version or a plugin and just be like, hey, I'll give you $1,000 if you just send an email to the email list for every one of these you sell, right? I think they could move meaningful volume and you should look at stuff like that, right? You know, the other thing is, are there wholesale accounts that actually can carry this? Probably not, right? Like, just the reality is there's just not like Home Depot, I guess. It's like, where, where, where does this plug in into the wholesale landscape? But I do think those affiliate deals are actually a meaningful thing you can plug into a lot of different people.
I wonder if Costco would work with this product, Sean, like Costco sells saunas. So that's not necessarily, and now I think saunas are probably a little bit higher on the kind of adoption further along on the adoption curve. But it is interesting, like this might work in more of a mass channel, but it might not be yet. I really like the idea, Sean, you were saying of like, hey, can you partner with— obviously if you can partner with other companies that are selling things that are hundreds or thousands of dollars that people are buying around their health, that audience is going to be the most likely to buy, you know, a $3,000 cold plunge solution. So I think that that makes a lot of sense. And that's one of the reasons why like Whether it's partnering with them or watching where they're fishing, I think you can get a lot of insight from that.
Yeah. The Costco point, they are the number one sauna seller on earth, right? And then, you know, I do have somebody in my personal life who sells saunas for a living and there are like sauna meetups or whatever. Like there are like conventions, so I can get those intros for you and I'll send them over. But yeah, just be the only guy there selling cold plungers.
Yeah. Sauna conventions are great because it's a complementary product. To just like, it's a complementary product to like something like Nate Sleep. It's complementary. Like I think everybody who, I don't wanna say everybody doing cold plunges is also doing sauna, but I would say there's probably really high overlap between those groups. So I like that.
If you're doing cold plunges, you're doing sauna, but if you're doing sauna, you're probably not doing cold plunges quite yet. Right? I think that's—
That's accurate because the demographic for cold plunge so far in my experience doing this is that It's heavily skewed male. So it's like 80, 90% male. The age range is 35 to 55, maybe 60. And within that male category, it's probably 1 to 5% of men because it's just, it's a difficult thing to do. Like it is not a comfortable, cozy thing to do to get into a sauna, which is the reason why I'm now developing a sauna to have the contrast therapy to fill that gap. I just want to touch on something you said, Sean, about the learning ads earlier on is that it's, it's been a blast. Like it's in, I initially want to stay completely away from it. Uh, I joined e-commerce groups, mentor groups, and I kept getting advice over and over again. You need to do your own ads. Don't have an agency for that. And it's just, it's like learning something new, you know, learning Google Ads, Meta Ads. And now I love it. Like I'm in there every single day looking at it, creating new content. And it's the best time ever to do it with AI. I've, in terms of the big box stores, I've seen larger products fit into Dick's Sporting Goods, Best Buy, and I've tried reaching out without success. So I'm not sure, like even having done sales for 10 years of my life, like I'm not sure the best way just to get into some of those companies.
You're still too early. I mean, like, you know, they, you need to validate the idea at a larger scale before they're going to be convinced that, It can be meaningful. I mean, I've said this before, but the wholesale game is like real estate and they have all this real estate in the store and they just have to maximize the yield or the rent on that real estate. And so it's not that you wouldn't sell any in DSG or Academy or whatever, it's that you have to sell a certain amount for you to kind of really justify having a spot in their store. And you're going up against things like apparel that are really moving and turning big dollar amounts. Now, the thing you have going for you is Like you're selling something that's $2,800, so you don't have to sell nearly as many. But I think that there's probably a point where it makes sense, but it's probably going to correspond with you getting to something in the 8 figures, mid-8 figures before they're going to start saying like, okay, we see it, we see it on the, like it's showing up on our digital trends reports. We need to be represented here. And that's where if you're positioned as the brand, Like, you know, it's, it's counterintuitive that sometimes getting to $10 million is harder than getting to $100 million. But this is one of the ways that it can be true is that if you position yourself as the leader and then the market adoption kind of catches up, then all of a sudden when all the big boys do want it, they're all coming to you and, and you're the solution. But I, I would say that's gonna be in the next kind of phase of growth, probably.
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Yeah, I would say totally forget about DSG. Like that is as corporate as it comes to deal with those people. Like you're gonna wait a long time. Best Buy would place an order, but I think that actually might put you out of business. So let's not deal with Best Buy right now. The only retailer that I think you could even consider, so the first question you have is how do I break my dependency on paid social? I think you're gonna be there and we could talk more about paid social. The second question was how to get into B2B channels, like, um, non-wholesale. I think we talked about that a little bit, but on this wholesale piece, I would— I'm happy to introduce you to Shields. I think Shields is the best retailer in America. They only have 30 doors, okay? And each manager who runs the store can place their own POs. But like, to what Mike's saying, the store might buy 2, you know what I mean? So like, you know, the beauty of this business right now is that like you're a solo founder and I think you could scale the digital channels to 8 figures. So like, I don't want you you to get distracted chasing down what could be $10,000 a month, right? Which is good money, you know what I mean? I love $10,000 a month, but like trying to like, you know, package up and ship things to Shields, right? So I think the biggest opportunity in front of you is, is you learned ads. This thing should scale more on ads. Like 3 or 4 pieces of viral video content I think can scale your ad account 3 times or 5 times bigger than you are right now. You just need the perfect one of probably a mom like running a bath, but it's for her and she jumps into it and it's cold, right? Like, I think that is like a beautiful angle to try to get out there and hit.
So you would go after more women, Sean?
Well, I think for the viral ad, you should probably put a woman in it.
Yeah, it's weird. When I looked at the data, there was a period where my— I had men and women in the ads and the one with the male was just crushing it. And so I immediately assumed that the male ads were the winners, but then I used Claude to do like a historical backlog the last 12 months and it was pretty split. In fact, some of the times the ads with the women would take over. So it's sometimes, you know, the guys want to see the hot girl in the ad, but also the guys want to see themselves in the ads. Ultimately, it's a guy buying the product, so I'm still trying to figure it out.
Yeah. And look, that's like classic. Like, I mean, we can go back to traditional advertising and why they always put hot girls in race cars, you know what I mean? It's like, it's like, I think, I think there is, there's an angle there, right? I think men do want to see themselves in it, but I think a viral piece of content would just be getting, you know, everyday people using this in a non-threatening, easy-to-use way, right? I, I do contrast therapy, so like I'm going to a place that has a hot-ass sauna and a cold, cold plunge, and I'm going back and forth between both of them, but like I think we talked about this. I'm like, yeah, it costs $250 every time I go and it takes a long time. It takes me hours. It'd be so good to do it at my house. Like, so how do we get in touch with Whoop or Eight Sleep or whatever? They're going to have affiliate managers, but those are typically people who pay affiliates to post about them. Approach them with the reverse deal. Like they're going to be on LinkedIn. You're going to have their emails. Just be like, hey, look, we'll give you $1,000. Let's do a collab email. You don't have to say how big you are as a business. Just be like, look, we're the number one cold plunge. We have all this, this good stuff behind us. Like it works. with any house, like you have the perfect audience and I'm going to give you a $1,000 commission. Ridge would send that email, you know what I mean? And maybe you can't afford the $1,000 commission or whatever, right? But like, there is a thing with these businesses where your list, like you've extracted all potential value out of your list and you have to find new ways to plug in. Like, you know, when you like, sometimes Amazon will like send you an offer for like Paramount or something, you know, there's, or like Macy's does this all the time. It's like, hey, sign up for Netflix and It's all just, they're all just like backend affiliate deals because they've considered you that they've extracted all the value out of your email subscriber. So you could be one of those deals that plug in.
I think for me, there's huge value to that because I actually have partnered with one of the brands that you named earlier. And it was, it ended up being more one-sided to where I was promoting their products without the reciprocation. And I think that was because of the fact that I didn't lead with them getting more of a benefit first. Like we were saying, $1,000 per sale. I didn't lead with that. I didn't offer that. And maybe that could have made that relationship more successful if I did.
Yeah, dude. And like Huckberry is a great retailer. Like I think like they would love to do dropship with you. And if you offer them that sort of margin, you're going to be in their emails, you're going to be on their website. And like, it's probably a million a year, like, or maybe, you know, it's maybe it's $300,000 or whatever. Like you stack it up with those and like your business has doubled again.
Christopher, a good point on that is that What actually makes your business successful is finding a way to get all of the 800-pound gorillas wanting to push your product. And the thing that does that is making them money. So very often I realize that entrepreneurs don't think about this enough. Like you should be thinking a lot about how to make other people money counterintuitively, and that's how you make more money. I think Sean posted about this recently. I've talked about it, but If you can get one of these big corporations, some of these big companies to really decide they want to get behind your product, it makes your life so much easier because they have so many built-in advantages and audience that you don't have. But the only way that's going to happen is if there's a real financial incentive for them to do it. That's very clear to them. And that's your job. Your job, part of the sales process is to help everybody that you're selling to understand how, like, This is going to help you make more money to really go all in on me. And the roughest stretches in our growth with Simple Modern have been when we've just been thinking through the lens of like, how do we make more money? And when instead we just kind of come at it from, okay, how do we help Target make more money? And when we do that, inevitably our numbers grow as well. So anyway, that would be my advice as you're thinking about these partnerships. I think you're kind in real time going through that realization of that deal that you did in the past. Like if I was gonna approach one of these other companies and be like, I wanna make you a bunch of money. Um, and I think that if I help you win, I'm gonna win in the process. And here's how I'm thinking we set it up. Uh, that's one of the reasons why, uh, commission deals are like one of the clearest win-wins. It's like they have to generate a sale, but they know they're getting, you know, X number of dollars every time they do.
One is I would probably raise the price even higher than I said earlier, right? I, I might even take this product to $3,500. just so that you can then give $1,000 off as like an evergreen offer, right? Like, and look at Eight Sleep. I think the Eight Sleep now is $4,500 as like an entry price for the latest model, but they're always running some sort of get $800, get $500, whatever. And then to tie it to Mike's point, this product, because of the high price point, is just very compelling from a commission standpoint. Like this product actually might work on TikTok Shops because Would you, would somebody rather try to sell literally 1,000 Ridge wallets or like one of these? You know what I mean? Like you may, you like, they'd have to sell hundreds of my products. Right. And you know, your thing, especially if you're gifting one of these or you give them like a sweet deal to get in, I think you can just make amazing content with it.
To keep going with that thought, Sean, we had a product earlier in the year that just went kind of nuts on TikTok Shops. And we were trying to understand why. it went nuts 'cause it wasn't selling a lot in other channels, but it was just kind of blowing up. There was so much content being produced about it on TikTok Shops. And it basically went back to one per— person posted a video and sold like 10, and then a couple more people posted videos and one of them sold like 50, and then there was a person that sold 100. And what our theory is, is there must be some kind of software or, you know, chat groups or something where when somebody hits one of these and is like, hey, I just made, you know, $3,000 selling this product, they're letting the listserv know, or like everybody's looking at some kind of a software and then it just exploded. So like, but it just kind of illustrates like, if you're a creator, you're like, I am not, this isn't a nonprofit. Like I'm doing, I'm using my time, I'm doing this so I can make money and I'm going to go and post about whatever I think can make me money. So when you've got something that has such a big upside, like you make a video that pops off and you can make 2 grand off of it for selling a couple of cold plunges, like that's That's really big leverage. So I think Sean's right. Like, I think that the high price point both works for and against you, and it could be the, the very thing that helps you to kind of lure some creators into spending some real time pushing your product. If you're scaling an e-commerce brand today, ads alone aren't enough. AfterSell focuses on the one moment that every brand already owns after checkout and turns the post-purchase moment into more profit. Monetize every order with post-purchase offers and thank you page experiences without disrupting checkout or hurting conversion. Enterprise-grade tech used by Gap, Ticketmaster, Macy's, and Target, now driving results for brands like True Classic, HexClad, Ridge, and Jones Road. I would know. This is the reason I ended up buying 3 pans from HexClad instead of 2. AfterSell has already generated over $1 billion in additional revenue for e-commerce brands, revenue that doesn't require more traffic Or higher CAC. So check out AfterSell and tell them that the operator sent you.
Go, Chris, go ahead, dude. We're gonna keep talking if you don't jump in.
Yeah, I know. I've got a couple questions about that. The price point is definitely one I'd love to kind of dive into a little bit more because I started selling the Home Plunge, the original product. Now we have 2 at $2,500. That's how I launched in 2025. Really not much room to run any sales there. And so then it didn't take long where actually the tariffs happened last year. So I panicked, raised the price $1,000 to $3,500. That was in April of last year. I sold zero. It was also when I had just turned on Google Ads and I was still boosting Meta. So like, I don't really know how much that's connected. Now I've played with the price quite a bit with offers. The reason why it's at $2,699 now is because before that it was $200 off. When you go to checkout, tax gets added. The price, that, that first digit turns from 2 to 3. I don't really have the data to prove this, but my intuition tells me that when they get to checkout, they see the 2 turn to a 3, it ruins the sale. And that's why I've started doing the $300 off. So, um, I'd love to have like some sort of guidance. And what you're telling me right now is great. Raise the price $1,000, but then give $1,000 off. Is there any more strategy to how you can really nail in what the offer should be? Which is, I think, probably the next question on the list.
I have a friend, Kyle, who has a company that sells Murphy beds. Again, this is like a $2,500, $3,000 purchase. And we were talking about it recently. He, they had like basically a perma sale that they ran and they wanted to get away from that. that strategy and the kind of TLDR is like, it just did not work. Like the perma-sale strategy really works when you get at these really high price points. So I think that's probably going to be part of the offer. I think when you're selling out thousands of dollars, you want to feel like you're buying at the right time because it's hundreds of dollars of impact. So now that isn't whether that means you're on sale all the time or planning to get all of your conversions when you kind of announce a sale and you're kind of like rolling those. I don't know, but I don't think that's uncommon to you. And, you know, like it's just as you get bigger and bigger, like the other thing, you are kind of capped on the top end by like there are solutions that are $5,000, $6,000, $7,000, right? That are like more permanent. So you do have some bounding. The other thing here is like, I really would be curious how scale can get your costs down because that could meaningfully impact your business when you're creating a new product that has not been manufactured at scale. What's your landed COGS on it?
Well, this year, unfortunately, the shipping tripled. There's this new oversized weight, but we're working through that. Assuming I get back to the original landed cost next month, It's, it's around $1,300.
Okay. So, uh, you, my guess is that that can go down $300 or $400 with real scale. Um, just based on my experience, maybe, maybe I'm wrong, but, um, and that, that's meaningful obviously in your economics. So to me, that's always the, the trade-off that you're having to think through is like, is getting more scale and getting my COGS down, is that the lever or is going up in price, taking my unit volume down, but taking up my nominal profit per sale, is that the better strategy? And I've seen it be either answer depending on the brand. But I think that that's where your judgment as the founder CEO is going to come in. You need to kind of figure out, hey, which of those levers is going to drive more over the next year or 2's growth? Is it going to be getting more efficient or is it going to be just like, I just get my margins up on the sales that I do have?
I'll just say on the permanent sale, why is every mattress store always going out of business? Why is every furniture store always going out of business? And why is there a Toyotathon every single month? Right? And it's It is just when you have large infrequent purchases, you have to make every customer feel like it's a good time to buy. And it's just the way of the world, man.
I love that you're putting this because it was actually just maybe 2, 3 months ago where this concept occurred to me. I was seeing some of my competitors running perma sales and I just thought, I don't want to be I don't want my brand to have the sort of cheapened effect of always being on sale. But then I realized that, wait a second, people aren't coming back to buy another Home Plunge. Like, this is a one-time purchase.
This is exactly why the perma-sale thing works. The long consideration periods and the lack of awareness about the market is exactly why that strategy works. Like, you can't run a perma-sale on milk, you know, like it doesn't work that way. But on like very illiquid markets, it really works because, you know, I have, I may not think about cold plunge prices again for the next 9 months. You know, like it's just not a thing that I'm thinking about daily. So if you're like, hey, this is the market, but you just so happens that today is your lucky day, you know, it's 25% off just today, then they're gonna be like, well, great. How lucky am I? Right?
Yeah. And also because you're dealing with low conversion rates, anything you can do to boost those conversion rates really matters. You know what I mean? Like, you know, Ridge, maybe 2% of people are going to buy a wallet who land on my website. You might be 0.02%. It just takes, it takes way more effort. I mean, we talked about this. I had an Eight Sleep in my cart for 5 years or whatever, right? Been like, ah, do I want to spend 4 grand? Like, I guess there's a sale. So I do think it's just, it's a way of the world. And that's why, like, you control your site. You look at your site way more. I, it's really just experimenting with how high you can go and then how much of an offer you can have. Right? I do think there is like the shift between two and three is big, right? Two thousand bucks, whatever. Three thousand bucks. It is. That's obviously more money, right? But I do think we could we could just work on that. And then to your question is how do you figure out the offer? Always be testing the offer, right? The offer is after product offers everything, right? Like offer informs ads. It informs landing pages. It informs everything. And like the offers. I can't over— like, we talk about ad creative way too often, I think, because like, that should just be always on. You always should have new ads. Like, you're always gonna find new ads and those ads are gonna die out. They're like flowers blooming. But like, the offer, one good offer can 10x your business with enough scale.
And can last for a decade. You know, like, there are businesses where like, we were actually talking with Trevi about this yesterday. There's a great article, the 4, Horsemen of LTV that Bill Gurley wrote years ago. And the point that he makes in the article is that like every business, their financial model comes down to like 4 or 5 kind of variables. One is how many users are you acquiring? What is the revenue they're spending? What is the margin? What is your customer acquisition cost? What is your churn? It's kind of some combination basically of those things because that gives you LTV and it helps you to understand how the P&L flows out. But the The picture that he gives is imagine these 4 horses are all kind of almost like a compass facing different directions and they're tied together by ropes and they're all pulling in different directions. And so when one horse pulls in a positive direction, it's going to pull another of the horses in a negative direction. So what do I mean by all that? Well, like if your LTV goes up, usually what that means is your cost to acquire also goes up. Or, you know, there's some kind of, or retention goes down or whatever. Like, like a lot of times you have to trade off one of those things to get the other. And that's what offer is. Offer is kind of trying to find the balance of these things that's best for your business. And ironically, with Trevi, we had a point where we were trying to sell 28-packs at $19.99, and we did all of this testing on a bunch of different things. And all it took was us introducing 20-packs where one of them was $9.99 and the others were $14.99. And Totally unlocked the business. But it's so crazy how nuanced this can get, I think has been my big takeaway that like the right offer that's, you know, just a little bit more insightful sometimes can double your business. And it's so counterintuitive, but that's what we're really dealing with is psychology here. So especially on big purchases, it's all psychological. Like if you think about it, it's kind of like you're a starving person that's gotta catch a fish. And when you see a fish that is kind of like looking at the hook, you've got to get them on the hook.
Yeah.
book because it's just so important for your business. So anyway, I think Sean's right. I would ruthlessly, relentlessly test on offer. I would try everything. I would not be afraid to try extreme things because any advancement in your understanding of offer will probably disproportionately power your business. And like, if you get that in place now, then when you scale, scaling is so much easier if you've got the right offer.
I'll just add, because this recently was a discovery that's been working as well, is that for anyone else that's looking at or is doing high AOV products, when I was having my ad traffic go to the PDP and they would land and they would see $3,000, my bounce rate was 95%. And this year I've started to shift ad traffic to my homepage where they get more of the education and benefits first before they go to the PDP. And it's counterintuitive, right, for e-com, But it's actually been wildly successful. Bounce rate is down to 70%. Conversions are up.
Well, and you know, there might be a room for counterpositioning here. Like the question is, what are you comparing this to? And it's like, well, if I'm comparing the cost of this to the cost of a knee surgery, right? Or then like, well, all of a sudden $2,500 looks really different when I'm thinking about spending $5,000 to have my knee replaced or, you know, and then all of the physical therapy or whatever. And I don't know what that is. You know, I don't know if that's like a realistic thing that you could claim, but what you're positioning it against, I think really matters in terms of how people think about the value.
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Once you find the offer that works, you'll feel it in your entire business, right? Like, and unlike ads, ads are literally like doing crack. It's like, it's like a little hit every single time where like the offer is gonna be durable and last for a very long time. So, so, so find that offer. And then on the counter positioning, I think you fit at the perfect place in the market because the cheapest way to do a cold plunge is you put ice in a bath, right? And like there's, there's the people selling buckets are $500 or $800. And what don't you get there? You, you don't get control. You get it, like the, the mess, the cleanup, like it's, it's outside, you have to be outside, right? That sucks. Um, and then the most expensive way is you compare it to knee surgery. I think it's a great one. I think that's an amazing angle that you should definitely look at. It's like, look, it's going to be cheaper than, uh, throwing your back out when you try to pick up your kid. But also going to a spa or sauna clinic or whatever is, it's $200 a pop. So this pays for itself in a month, 10 sessions, right? And then the custom machines are $5,000 or $8,000. This, this is bringing the custom machine comfort into your existing bath. I think it's an amazing angle that I think you could really take to the moon. So I love that you brought up conversion rate going up, landing people on homepages. Yeah, you should have dedicated landers, right? So like, yeah. And video sales landers, right? VSLs come from traditional old school affiliate marketing where they're landing on a very, very long landing page. And like there's a video from you explaining why you built this, why you got into it, taking them on the journey before they see the price, right?
Like you're auto-playing that video at the very top of the lander. We did, we did this way back in the day with Quibids, and at one point it was one of the top 10 most visited sites in the world for like a week or something. We were pushing so much traffic, but it was like you hit it, immediate video that auto-plays, and that is kind of the very introduction to what's going to happen next.
I love that you guys are hitting on this right now because this is so like, so many people have been bringing up IMH Strategy this year because they're the big dog this year, right? And they're running so many different creatives, but they have an ad budget that just blows my, blows the roof off of me. And so at what point, what budget can I start doing exactly what you're saying, a different lander for every different problem to solve?
Yeah, you don't have the budget for that right now, but you should definitely have a lander. Right? You should have, you should have, uh, and, and so homepage versus lander, that's the first test, right? You can set up that A/B test pretty quickly. You've already done homepage versus PDP and you've realized homepage is better. And now it's just to do homepage versus lander. And then let's say homepage wins. Great. Homepage versus new lander. And you already have that ad budget and like, it's gonna, it'll cost you $1,000 to figure out which one's actually gonna drive, you know, better results, lower bounce rates, higher conversion rates. And then it's just those incremental improvements. Every week trying a different move, the lander, right? I think Mike's painting you a beautiful future where you have tons of ad budget and we're gonna have the female-focused one, the other one. But like, I know your business, you're only spending $1,000 a day right now, right? So it's like, look, we can, we can take some time to, to get these learnings. You don't have to jump into 'em right now. But eventually we'll get to a place where the lander is outperforming and then that, that is another doubling of your business, right? You have an offer, you have a lander that actually works. That alone is $5 million a year. The beauty of only doing $1 million a year right now is there's so many ways to win, right? Like you only need to do one of these strategies and now your business is 5 times bigger.
Can I just quickly ask you, going back to your TikTok comment, Sean, the last time we talked, you had also mentioned TikTok Shop and I haven't done it because maybe I'm thinking about it the wrong way. I simply just can't mass seed my product. Like it's too expensive to mass seed. So is it still— I haven't done the research. I really haven't even looked at it. Is it still possible to do it without mass seeding the product on TikTok to creators?
Yeah, you definitely can, because it would just be people doing like green screen voiceover being like, hey, I got into cold plunging. Here's all the benefits. Here's a way to do it at home. Right. And then they're just showing your videos. It obviously would be better if they have one and getting into it, but you're right. You can't seed this. That's why I would have you film videos every Sunday. And it's like you're setting up the camera, you're getting into the cold plunge, you're showing how it works. And now that is also B-roll that your affiliates can pull from, right? Or it's stuff that, um, your own account can post, right? The, the brand account should post, uh, sales videos. And we get—
Sean, Sean, you're right on, on this. You're right on. And you prove you can sell it. You prove you can sell it, Christopher. And then you go to the affiliates and you tell 'em, hey, I can't, it's too expensive for me to seed it to you, but Um, I will, you know, like you work out something where they pay it back through their commission on their first one or two sold or something. You kind of find some way to finance it maybe, I don't know.
Or you let them buy it for cost, right?
Yeah, that was the other thought, yep.
Yeah, you'll sell some of 'em. Like if you're, if you're there posting, I think, uh, this is a great product for TikTok, just the viral nature of it. The fact that it's a no-brainer that you just like, it works inside your house. Like it is the perfect thing that kind of goes well there. The problem, the obviously the massive price point, right? Like they're gonna expect be $800 or $400, which is like, can't exist.
But I think you just helped me realize a missed opportunity that I've been passing up on, which is I get at least one, but usually multiple UGC creators every day that message me and ask for a product so they can create UGC. But 9 out of 10 times, they're super small, they're just getting started. I think what you just suggested is something that I could at least try, which is say, hey, you could buy it at cost, create the content, and then And then, you know, pay his health back and see how that works out.
Yeah. And once you start posting, you're gonna have people in the fitness community who want these things, right? And just be like, yeah, hey, look, these things cost me $1,500 to make or whatever. You can buy it and it'll be the best price ever. And just please post about it and tag us. And you could probably sell 1,000 a year just doing that. You know what I mean? It's just like, it's a pretty good business. Okay. Okay, we went through how do I break my dependency on paid social? Not going to happen. We went through how do I get into B2B channels, non-wholesale? I think we had some good ideas around affiliate. We talked about how do I get into big box retail wholesale? I think the only place that's really going to work is Costco. I'm happy to make the Shields intro, but Mike's right, Costco's the way to go. And don't waste your time with Best Buy right now. It'll end up just bankrupting you. One thing you asked that we didn't talk about is, should I sell my $2,700 product on Amazon? So expensive product on Amazon. Mike, what are your thoughts?
There's a bunch of different ways you can use Amazon and you can use how Amazon is set up to benefit you. Uh, this is not a product that you're going to ship into Amazon so that they can FBA it. And typically when you sell on Amazon, you want to use FBA because they give you preferential algorithm treatment and, you know, they take care of the fulfillment or whatever, but Like this makes no sense here. And in fact, the one way that this could not make sense for you would be if you sent some of these to Amazon because like the storage fees, like you have to sell them, whatever. But if you set up on Amazon as a fulfilled by seller, what that means is that you don't have to send them any inventory. There's basically no cost. Okay. So like there's no downside if you're set up as fulfilled by seller. So now the question is, how would I use Amazon? And this is kind of a sneaky way that you could use Amazon. Maybe you use Amazon not to try to sell any, but to establish a market price. It's on Amazon and it's $3,999, but I'm going to somehow reference that on my website that here it is on Amazon. It's got 10 reviews. They're 5-star reviews. $3,999. But today it's $2,700 on the website because the perma-sale idea, what you have to do is anchor them to an idea of what's the value. And the thing that's great about Amazon is Amazon is shorthand for kind of like the public ledger of like, how do people think about this? What's this thing worth? So that might be an example. I'm not saying like necessarily like that's the answer, but that might. And if you sell some at $4,000, all the better. But like, Amazon for you at this price point is likely any sales you're going to get are going to be a derivative of your brand. And so I actually think the most effective way to use it short-term might be that it's a, as a framing for your website. Or you might find that just putting it on Amazon at the exact same price point as your website, that you start selling some because some people are like, if I'm going to spend $2,700, I want to do it through Amazon where I I can get my refund easier, or like, I trust that this is legitimate. Like, I just feel uncomfortable giving a website I've never been to $2,700. But the great thing about being fulfilled by seller is that you can change your price basically as much as you want. There's no inventory in there, there's no risk. And so it just kind of gives you a public-facing billboard where you can tell the story that you want to tell. And that's how I would think about it at this stage of the business. But personally, I really like the idea of using it to kind of establish, hey, the market price for this thing is way up here. And you're going to need to get some reviews on Amazon. So you're going to need to think about how to do that because you need like some evidence that people buy this thing and like it. But once you have that, it's a pretty valuable asset. And it's never obvious to me why Amazon can't be part of a successful solution of selling any product, even if you're not trying to do a bunch of sales on Amazon.
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It is very common for brands To sell for different prices in different channels. And there is a reason why brands do that because it's advantageous to the brand. And like, I think that people really under— people really overestimate how aware customers are of what you're doing with your pricing in, in general, but especially in different channels. Like, I don't know what Ridge's Best Buy pricing strategy is compared to their website at all. Like, I know Sean, we talk about Ridge a decent amount. I have no freaking clue. They could be charging 50% more in Best Buy. I have no idea. And this is the way the customer is as well. Like they're just going to be, especially in something illiquid like cold plunges, they're just not going to really have any understanding. And in general, like almost all brands are kind of cluing into this idea that unless you have a really, really, really mass product where the awareness is so high that people start to kind of expect it to be a price, that different channels have different price points that work for that channel.
Yeah. And one of my hesitations is also just, I don't think I've ever purchased anything that's over $1,000 on Amazon. I'm curious to know what you guys' take are and if you know people that have, but I just, I guess my sort of, again, intuition is that maybe people aren't shopping for high AOV products on there and it just wouldn't even appear because of the lack of search demand, but I could be wrong.
I think there's another explanation, which is like, you just don't buy many things over $1,000 on the internet, period. Like, are you doing a bunch of over $1,000 purchases on independent websites? Probably not. You know, like it's, it, and that's why this is hard is it's just, it's very rare in your life that you spend $2,500, $3,000 just in at one time on a thing. And like, that is, that is going to be challenging no matter what. If you go the other side, like I think trust matters more the higher the price point gets. And so you either have to, like, one of the ways that Amazon can be great is Amazon does have high customer trust. And so like there's strategy where you're putting things on Amazon for the same price that you're putting 'em on your website. And I would bet that you would pick up sales. I guess the way I would kind of answer this question the best, Christopher, is by asking you a question. What would you see as the downside of using Amazon as a tool to grow your business?
It would be the bigger margin But as well as, and truthfully, I've really only ever had like one bad review that came through my review system, but the lack of control of reviews, those are my 2 big things.
I think the review thing is real that when you get on Amazon, you're the one kind of vector that you do have to manage is you have to make sure that you're keeping that review up. But there are ways I think to do that that are not excessively heavy lift.
And can this, uh, this is a great time to actually segue into my support question because the review part of it, I think the reason why I've actually only ever had one bad review is because I put so much manual effort and time into the current customer service. So like instantly replying to emails, instantly returning calls, picking up the phone, everything myself. And so that is one thing that I'm like hugely curious on, how do I build a system around that to where I I can get my time back, continue to grow the business while not losing that high touch and like really high quality customer service.
We'll wrap up on Amazon and then we'd love to get the support, support on Amazon specifically. Mike said the killer line of this podcast, there's no product you sell on the internet that Amazon couldn't be a part of. It's just the reality is half of all GMV is happening on Amazon. I would just list it as a seller fulfilled item. and somebody's gonna buy it. It's like, yeah, like it's, it's gonna be low volume, but your whole business is low volume right now. Like, I think you'll pick up 1, 2, 3 sales or whatever, right? Like, you'll just pick some up. Now, you don't want to sign up for Vine because every Vine review is going to be $1,000 or whatever. But the other advantage of Amazon, specifically seller fulfilled, is you have way more control than FBA. And what I mean by that is, and this has to do with your support You can put your phone number in the box. You know what I mean? Amazon's not going to check that because it's not touching their warehouses. So like you're starting fresh and this product will always be seller fulfilled. This is never going to go FBA. You just have way more support. Like it's technically probably against terms of service. I don't think you're going to get banned because they're never going to find out right now. Tying it to the customer trust, customer support you're currently offering. What's funny is you're the most AI-pilled guy I know. Right? Like you're doing full-blown AI everything, but you will not do AI customer service. So maybe explain that to the audience.
Yeah. So starting this year when Claude really became accessible, even as an engineer, I know a little bit of code, but I don't really code on a normal basis. So Claude was a huge benefit because it allowed me to just, when I knew I needed to improve my organic search traffic, but I didn't know how to automate that or do SEO or anything. I could literally ask Claude, hey, can you gimme a detailed instruction list on how to build automated agents to not only write blogs, but teach me how SEO works, build the system. And it gives you a blueprint. So like, if you don't know AI, for anyone listening, just ask it to tell you how to do it and then it'll help you do it. And so it's been brilliant for every operation that I do as a business owner. Google, Meta, SEO, emails, web design, literally everything. And the reason why I haven't touched customer service with you yet is because my own personal experience with any sort of automation, like everyone knows the pain point. I don't know, just take, I just got off a flight a couple of days ago and you're trying to call the agent and you have to go through a phone menu. You have to hit a number 5 times and then it says, hey, is this what you said? Yes. Is this what you said? Yes. You know, it just never understands you. Things have gotten better now, but that pain that I've experienced over time with so many different customer service systems like that makes me so timid to do any form of AI in it. Definitely open to exploring it now because of everything I've seen advance over this year, but please educate me.
I think it's gotten a ton better, Christopher. And like the way that I would do it is I would say this via email, it can be as good as You can give it the context, you can show it your conversations. And like, I think there might be a hybrid model where it's like, if somebody's having a really hard time and you want to have a voice call and you're like, I still want to do that myself, I don't think the technology's there. Totally. But if like, there's so many ways to create a really good, really responsive customer touchpoint with SMS or email that is automated, that has the voice that you want, that has all of the context and information. I would make it part of your onboarding process almost, you know, like that there's some kind of like automated loop via SMS or email that you're like walking 'em through things. So I would say look again, we did recently did an episode where we ranked a bunch of different areas of business and said, you know, among the 4 original kind of 9 ops guys, how would we rank them? I think when we combined all our Customer service was like second or third. Um, so it's, it's been consistently something that we've really seen work. So, but, but again, like maybe there is a hybrid here, here for you where like there is some more personalized touch. But I do think also the technology's gonna get to the point where like it can all be automated and the customer can have just a better experience than even you personally can provide. And, and you're saying it, but like, your business cannot scale if you're doing customer support. You know this, like, that's just the thing you're gonna like. So one of the most helpful things I think for me to do in the business is to set constraints. One of your constraints is you need to be doing zero customer support in 3 months. And once you have that constraint, it's like, okay, well, this is my limitation. And so I'm going to do the absolute best I can around that limitation, but I'm just, uh, if, if I can get to 80% of me doing it, if I can get to 90% of me doing it, whatever I can, that's what I'm gonna be aiming for. But not going to allow myself to do customer support because that does not drive getting new people in the door. That does not drive scaling or any of these other things that we're talking about. And so throw a constraint in, you'll be surprised at how good you can make the system once you like really embrace that constraint.
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Or you can charge for it, Christopher. You can charge for like the white glove concierge support level where we're gonna have somebody that'll talk you through things. It's an extra whatever. But Like when the more that you're investing your time in customer support, what that really is, is margin compression that you're not thinking about as margin compression.
Automated email slash human voice is exactly the model that I'm imagining. The reason I haven't pulled the trigger on it is because, uh, my competitors actually advertise that they have US-based support. So I've also advertised that. And the moment that I go overseas, because that's what's affordable, I lose that element. And so I'm wondering if I I'm putting too much weight on that credential and I should just go for that. It sounds like I should.
Yeah, look, and if US-based support's important, you don't got that many customers. Just hire an assistant for $22 an hour and just be like, hey, sometimes people are going to call you and they're going to have questions. If you can't figure it out, call me. It's like, at your scale, at your ticket, your scale of business, it's a couple orders a day. You know what I mean? And out of all those orders, only 33% should have a problem or need a solution from you. It's just, it shouldn't be that much and that this should be the easiest part to get off your brain so you could scale that number up.
Yeah. And sometimes, uh, Christopher, like the positioning, it's like, do people really want US-based support or do what they really want is they want somebody that can fluently speak with them about their issue, right? Like the issue behind the issue is I just don't wanna talk to somebody where I can barely understand their accent. And so like I'm having trouble communicating. That's what they're really saying. And so like, I actually don't think it matters where your person is. I don't think it matters if it's a computer. I think what people want out of the experience is I have questions. I want to be able to get answers from a sentient being that's going to give me relevant information and not say, oh, you have one of these 3 paths. And if I can't cram you in one of those, then like, I have nothing for you. And so like, maybe that does mean that you're using AI voice type stuff eventually. Maybe that does mean that you're using somebody that's in a different part of the world. I don't think any of that matters. What I think I would do is instead I would emphasize that, like, you could emphasize that you have 24/7 support or that, like, there's something else about your support that you emphasize. You could emphasize we have a 99% customer support satisfaction score, right? Like, all of these things speak to the real kind of question behind the question, which is, if I have an issue, are they going to help me fix that issue? And if you can kind of effectively communicate that the answer to that is yes, I think it's kind of like the made in the USA. People think made in the USA really moves the needle. It doesn't generally on sales. So like, I think it's probably more people are like, I wanna make sure that like slave labor didn't build, you know, it didn't knit my shirt or whatever. So anyway, think about what is the thing behind the thing, and then you can do messaging around that.
So you just saying this, I've known this and you saying it out loud is making it come true because the 24/7 support is huge. I used to answer calls on the weekends and I'd be out you know, cycling around Golden Gate Park with my wife and I'd like have to pull over and pick up the phone. And someone would be like, hey man, like my filter's leaking when I just, 'cause people unbox it on the weekends. That's when they finally have time. And so that's when they get to it. And it's like, my filter's leaking, the system's spilling water. And it's because they didn't put the O-ring on. There's nothing wrong with the product. And just to have someone be able to know that and answer that so I don't have to stress myself out over the weekend would be amazing.
Going back to it, I think I think if you could say email support from our founder, like, or, you know, email our founder, I think that does way more than any sort of phone call. And that, but like, so when you buy from Ridge, you'll get like a customer service email that's like, hey, how was your order? And then the next one is a Sean F., like, so like a, like from our CEO, hey, is everything going okay? I don't send that email, that is automated with AI, but it gives people a chance to like capture any issue upfront and just set the system up.
Yeah.
And like that inbox can be monitored by either AI or somebody from the Philippines or whoever, right? And just gives you like more of a catch people before they're trying to call you like that. That's what I would love to do. The last question you have, and then we'll wrap this podcast up. How do you build enterprise value in a non-recurring product, right? And I'm there with you. Mike's there with you. Jason's there with you. We have products that have no LTV or subscription tied to 'em, and we have to build enterprise value. And the way you do that is EBITDA. It's like, it's the only way. Like, you will be traded off a multiple of EBITDA, right? So what you need to do is grow top-line revenue so you can grow bottom-line revenue, and then you'll have a business worth millions and millions of dollars, right? And it'd be sick. You come from the software world, it'd be sick if we were getting multiples on revenue. Not happening anymore. So like, the only thing you can do is you can build a very profitable business and you can take dividends out and then somebody will give you probably 8x your EBITDA, and that's how you can become a multimillionaire. Mike, any feedback on that?
Yeah, it's hard, but I think enterprise value usually comes from, in hard goods, comes from brand and the intangible assets that you have. And so this would be if you're really seen as the authority in cold plunges or like one of the authorities, there's probably enterprise value that drives in different ways because it opens up how you can monetize. The other example that we didn't talk about, but you're seeing some people start to experiment with that is, are there ways to pull in recurring revenue with your— and the 2 main ones that you'll see people try is we have an app that you pay for. Eight Sleep does that, or we're going to sell you a supplement. So we're going to sell you a supplement that if you take this and then you cold plunge, whatever studies show that you get a 15% better benefit, But those are probably the 2 paths that are the most practical for you.
Yeah, the latter is something I'm exactly working on right now. There's 2 sort of products. Nonetheless though, it would still require the core product, the Home Plunge itself, to be sold. And so that's the constraint I'm constantly working with. But I love the idea. Just one thing that is fun about bringing a hardware product to life from scratch is that you kind of understand the full picture. And I'm starting to think about just crazy new products that can be sort of within the Home Plunge bucket, but, uh, that can live on its own, more consumer affordable to just expand across a larger TAM.
Well, and a, a really interesting idea here. I don't know if this is possible with your product, but, um, if you can sell something consumable with the hard good, then you can really reduce the price of the hard good. If it becomes more of a razor blade and, uh, razor, uh, holder, I don't know, whatever model razors and razor blades. is what I'm trying to say. Like, then you can actually do some interesting things with the cost of the, the core thing. So like, I can— if you did have some kind of like, uh, supplement that went with it, if you're like, hey, you go ahead and you sign up for quarterly subscription on the supplement, you can get $400 off your cold plunge. It's like, well, wait a second, this sounds like a really good deal or whatever. So there might be something there. I don't know. Uh, but I would certainly be— I would be experimenting.
Chris, you, you got a plug too. What are you doing besides cold plunges, man? What else are you working on?
Okay. This is more of a product development plug. In all of the AI aspects I've implemented into my business with Home Plunge, I've actually started to package them into a web app. And so for anyone that's, doesn't matter if you're starting a business, running a business, I'd love to get your feedback to help develop this further.
further.
It's called Agency AI and the web address is agencyai.app. You can sign up for free, try it out, and it's going to give you access to SEO, meta ads, statics and video, and a whole bunch of stuff. So I'd love if you could try it, give me feedback, help me make it better. AI has completely transformed my business. It saves me $15,000 to $20,000 a month on service sales paying before. My conversion rate's over 125% this year because of it. And so I just can't say enough about it. I love doing it. And I'd love if anyone listening could help me continue to build it.
I think the biggest takeaways to the audience are you control your price. You need to be testing that so you can unlock offers. Offers are the evergreen thing that'll drive results. And when you find the best offer, you will just feel it in your whole business. Ads are great. I love ads, but ads are those quick hits. They will die fast. Offers can last forever. Don't get super sold on wholesale right now. When you're doing a million a year, it can totally kill you. If there's a place for it, I'm happy to make intros to small select retailers that I think could drive results here, the Shields of the world. But don't go to Best Buy right now. I deal with them, I love 'em, but they will bust your balls way too hard.
No, he's totally right. Focus on offer. Focus on one thing. Get awesome at that first.
Uh, I think Amazon has a place in this business. Mike said it, if you sell something on the internet, Amazon can sell it too, right? Half of all GMVs there, very few things shouldn't be there. And right now we have a high-priced product that serves a great need. We just need the attention aspect of it. So plug in as an affiliate offer to the Whoops of the world, the Eight Sleeps of the world, uh, you know, the Equinoxes of the world. We can get you on Huckberry or GovX, all dropship. You give them $1,000, bucks, it's just money in your pocket. I think that's great. And then make TikToks every Sunday, record 7 hours of TikToks, post those. You'll be your own number one affiliate. That'll unlock affiliates for everybody else. Sell it at cost to affiliates. I think I just summed up the episode. If you're an operator and you are building, check out what Christopher's doing when it comes to AI stuff. It's going to be linked in the description. We're going to send an email about it. It's going to be all over your face, but he went through this in the past. You know, 18 months. He built a business from scratch and he's scaling it up and he's, he wants to share those learnings with you. So he came on here, we tried to help an operator out. Now maybe he can help you out. I love it to full circle. Guys, thank you for being here. Thank you for an amazing episode of The Operators Podcast. Talk to you guys later. Goodbye.