How an 8-Figure Business Builds its Teams and Culture

[Music]. welcome to the shopify masters podcast powered by shopify. i'm david gaylord. thanks for tuning in to the bush bomb miniseries. for the final episode we're going to be chatting through all things- team and culture- and for that i've brought on my two special guests, tim and rachel. so welcome, tim and rachel, to the show, thank you, thank you. [Music]. all right, so we'll get started. um, of course, you're joining me today, so why don't we do intros, rachel? why don't you kind of go first, sure? um, my name is rachel kerr. i've been with bushbomb for like officially a year now and i look after most of our brand and marketing. some have paid, mostly organic, everything from influencers to partnerships, um, to building a community online, and i'm really happy to be here. welcome and tim. yeah and uh, i'm tim and i am one of the co-founders and i guess i've given myself official title of cpo. but i do a lot of a lot of different things. so i kind of take care of all things: product and get getting product in the hands of our customers, so any anywhere from manufacturing to logistiks, shipping, uh, that sort of stuff- and then kind of dabble a little bit into finances and hr and kind of all back of house sort of stuff here at bush bomb, yeah, and you don't give yourself credit enough for the design work you do and there's some design doubled in there a little bit. yeah, all the packaging stuff, yeah, so i guess, like tim, you've obviously been around the longest out of anyone on the team, so maybe tell us your version of the founding story. yes, i mean, i guess it depends on how detailed you want me to get here. no, not super duper. okay, so you know some of the uh, the finer, more intimate, keep it pg, it'll be pg, it'll be uh, tv or podcast friendly. but um, yeah. so i mean, it all started with a bit of a, a weird, um fluky discovery on my honeymoon and i kind of took an interesting idea through self-testing and i pitched it to david on a bus trip to uh. i think it was a work conference that we were on our way to and i pitched it to david and everyone else on the bus and everyone kind of laughed, except for david- he's the one with the uh. he had a kind of a smirk and was like, okay, yeah, yeah, that could work. and the idea was, uh, scented pubic oil. it was, yeah, definitely different than where we're at, uh, today. yeah, it's definitely a use case, though, like, if you wanted, like it does, it's more of a man product, right, scented pubic oil, but yeah, definitely a use case. that i thought was a cool idea. yeah, yeah, and then, uh, fast forward to you jumping in and saying you wanted in. um, we kind of we ran it as a very much a side hustle on the side of our full-time jobs for three, three years, three years, yeah, and i guess most people watching would know or might not know is that we were at shopify, right. so this was starting a business, and starting a shopify store especially was promote it like they want you to do that, to try it. we did it part of a contest actually, actually, yeah, it was an internal build a business contest. yeah, we lost, we lost, but we, long term, i think we've won. yeah, i think so, yeah, so maybe let's go into the, the early days of when it was a like a serious side hustle. what were? what were a few, i guess. what was the dynamic that we had back then? yeah, back then we- i wouldn't say that we had a lot of structure- um, it was kind of a very much like this needs to get done, so let's do it. and who's gonna do it? uh, we, we co-we co-operated quite a bit of stuff. uh, shipping was handled by both you and i at one point during bush bomb. uh, marketing was all you. i know, i don't know a lick about marketing. uh, design was all me. although you were doing, you were doing- some dessert. yeah, i did all the the advertising design. you did all the packaging, just packaging design. yeah, yeah. and then website was split. um, it's very, very, very much a blended effort, uh, early on. but when things started to get a little bit more serious, it uh, it took a lot of a lot of time and a lot of effort on top of our full-time gigs. yeah, well, i think the things that became obvious were: manufacturing was a ton of work and effort and time. yeah, then, all of a sudden, shipping was a ton of effort and your apartment or your house becomes chaos with boxes and packaging material everywhere. yeah, those were the breaking points. i remember a photo of you that you shared. uh, i think you filled your bike basket full of uh samples that we were shipping out. yeah, i think that was the moment we're like we can't do this or or that, or you're filling, uh, a canada post box full, so then you needed to go find another one to fill full and then find another one. and then i think that was that, yeah, like we can't. and that was the moment. that was when i remember we got a three pl- yeah, that we got third party logistiks to handle all shipping and that that actually felt like we hired like two full-time staff to take over shipping. but it was just like a partnership that we needed at the time. yeah, yeah, fair enough, well, that's, yeah, that's the other day. and then we slowly changed as, even before rachel joined the team, we got our first contract manufacturer to help us, um, do a lot of our filling, liquid filling for our products and then ratio. you joined what would have been about a year ago now. yeah, and yeah, i guess what was your first impression of the brand um? first impression: i was pretty blown away, so i still am every day um, but it's super impressive what you two did as a side hustle, because it quickly became my full-time hustle and even that was a lot- still is, but it's really awesome, exciting, you learn something new every day- and super inspiring to work with people who are super dedicated to making something work so successfully. yeah, and what i guess one thing- uh, just so everyone knows- is the. so rachel joined the team and started and was our only full-time person, so you ran most of what everything happened for. i guess it would have been at least six months, yeah, or around that last year. you and i were still full-time- yeah, shopify mm-hmm at the time. so what was that like the first whole time? um, it was interesting, i think. um, i'm lucky david let me visit his apartment a lot where i could squeeze in some questions in between his meetings or at lunch. but one of my favorite ways to learn is kind of to just jump right in and dive in. so it was a great opportunity to see everything that goes on on a day-to-day. got to learn a lot about shipping and wholesale and i think it's made me a lot better at my role now because you kind of learn how the day-to-day turns and what's important and what you really need to stay on top of. yeah, but yeah, really cool experience and that was like the. it was to the point where you were like doing something and then you'd ask me a question and then i'd answer it and then you'd hold all your questions for certain times. yeah, yeah, that's one thing too, like i know we're gonna tok more about like building a team and culture and dynamics and in general, that is one thing that i think has held with us- is, if you're founder bread, you end up doing everything and then you know what goes into everything, and it can be for me, i think, at times it's to a fault, whereas i think for everyone we've brought on they've taken the. okay, i'm going to learn customer service, i'm going to look at instagram, i'm going to understand, like, what goes into it and then that way they can like make more informed decisions. um, yeah, anyway, so that's one thing that we'll probably tok more about and say onboarding, for instance. all right, well, let's get into a few questions here. the, the one that i think is interesting for everyone listening, is around just like the structure of bush bomb now. so say from your side, rachel, what is the marketing kind of team look like, um, so the marketing team right now, if we're counting david, which we absolutely have to, three of us, um, where we work really closely together. we have one team member, emily, who kind of handles a lot of our graphic design needs, so anywhere from like inserts you'd see that. go out and press mail.

How Bushbalm Grew From a $900 Side Hustle into an 8 Figure Business

[Music]. welcome to shopify masters, the podcast powered by shopify, and welcome to the bushbomb miniseries. i'm schweing estershan, one of the hosts of shopify masters, and i'm david gaylord, the co-founder of bush bomb and shopify's merchant in residence. we are so excited to bring you insights from bush bomb story in this six part mini series. we'll dive deeper into each area of the business. yeah, we'll be toking about product development, marketing, digital strategies and so much more. so, follow along, comment and ask questions, what you'd like to see. we're happy to do it. and, david, we have a very special start for the first episode. tell us, what do you have in store? yeah, i'm going to be toking with my, my former boss and the chief operating officer of shopify, toby shannon. we dive into kind of the nitty-gritty behind the business, some lessons learned, some kind of bad business practikes, as well as some successes. well, here it is our first episode of the mini series featuring david and toby. [Music]. uh, i'm toby shannon and i'm the chief operating officer of shopify and i'm here with, uh, david gaylord. how you doing, david? hey, very good, happy to be here. yeah, yeah, and so maybe it would be helpful for you to tell everyone a little bit about yourself, a little bit about your career at shopify and a little bit about what a bush bomb is what i'm pushing. yeah, it's. my journey at shopify starts probably nine years ago now. wow, so not as an employee, but two years before i became an employee. my family has a hardwood flooring store and they became a shopify merchant. right, that was when it was the slime green at the time, the admin. i remember comparing all magento. i learned all of them and then, after i did that, i joined the company in the customer service role. yep, at the time, so that would have been six over six years ago now. on my team at the time, on your team, yeah, and that was, i think the company was 700, right, shopify strong at that point. yeah, and then from there, so i joined shopify and joined toby's team, um, and slowly within the company grew into roles. we started to work closer together and, uh, it was four years ago. i started. what is a bush bomb? right? so i started the company with a partner who was also at shopify and, uh, should i tell what a bush bomb is? uh, maybe before that, even save, save that fun bit for uh later. uh, it should be noted too, that shopify is super cool on people doing side hustles, using our tiknology especially, right, yeah. and so, uh, did you know you wanted to start a business or were you just trying to get better at doing your job? so, actually, the reason i joined shopify- there was other places i could have applied and tried to get a job, but i wanted to join shopify because e-commerce i thought was really interesting and up and coming- yeah, have the time, okay. so the yeah, joining shopify was amazing because i learned everything about e-commerce marketing, like it was really interesting. and then the company: yeah, the reason we started bush bomb, which is the company we'll tok about today, is, externally, shopify- how to build a business competition- right, and with richard branson or the big island, they would be the trip. internally, we did it: build a business competition for employees- right. so bush bomb started as that. build a business 250 injection was that, yeah, yeah, so 250, well, 500, i guess, yeah, in capital, that's how you, yeah, yeah. and then we, we also put a little bit more in, so total- though i looked at this the other day- it was like 952 dollars with the domain charge. okay, yeah, yeah. and that was what started it right, right away. okay, so what is bush pump? yeah, so bush bomb originally started as a uh cosmetik product for freshening up down there. so it was all about scent. because our my partner and his wife, on their honeymoon, used the product- his beard oil- and he thought maybe we should build a product you can use everywhere that smells nice. and it's transitioned not to that. why? what does it transition to? so now we're more of a problem-solving care brand. okay, so we focus- we've just been working on this a lot lately- is we focus on solving skin concerns that we believe the beauty industry is often ignored. so think about ingrown hairs, razor burn- yeah, chafing those kind of sunburns on the top of head, potentially. yeah, good to know. so solving these things that people don't see as big challenges but they're really common. so that's what bush palms morphed to scent is is less of a focus. now can you tok a little bit about the scale of the business now? yeah, so, so this year we're on pace. we'll probably do close to 10 to 12 million in canadian revenue. okay, so from hundred dollars in investment you've gone to ten million dollars in revenue. yeah, and how much? four years ago we spent roughly four years, so it's, i think, four and a half now, but wow, yeah, and it's really been like, uh, exponential curve, yeah, every year essentially. and you sell all that through shopify. is there anything off shopify? 99 of it would be on shopify. we use one platform for wholesale in some ways, but even our wholesale business is mostly on shopify. um, and we've done that all mostly to date direct to consumer, and none, none of it on mass retail, none of it like on amazon anywhere else. it's been all shopify. so for a big chunk of that time you were working directly with me, right? yeah, the first four years of that, and so we worked a lot like we worked eight hours, nine, ten, twelve hours a day. like how did you have time to do all this? yeah, so the working with you is it's hectik, it's a lot of work. i, i need, i need a lot of help, is what you're saying? yeah, exactly so i guess in my role with toby, i was the. i was operations lead for a year there and what that meant was i worked on a lot of like decks and we were presenting to different parts of the company, doing all kinds of kind of internal public facing stuff. but yeah, the my bush mom routine which i got into- which is not very healthy, i would say- is every morning i woke up like 6: 30 and i worked bush bomb, usually seven to eight. i worked hard on stuff and i remember i'd go to meetings, i'd be like have to set it aside for later, and then i did a lot of tons of bush bomb at night, yeah, and then my biggest bush bomb day was sundays. okay, for three or four hours is when i got most of my good work done. so, would you say, an hour in the morning, an hour at night, probably at least, and three hours on sunday, yeah, yeah. so that was the bush bomb time you're still looking at. 13 hours a week, yeah, 15 hours a week, yeah, yeah, and you're able to build like a, like a multi-million dollar business, yeah, and what about your partner? um, so, yeah, tim, he, he also worked at shopify and, uh, yeah, so he, he left quite a bit earlier and that helped in many ways. so he, i focus on the marketing side and sales and he runs the back of house. so he, he fully left the company to do supply chain. how long ago was that? so he, it would have been about, uh, a year ago maybe now, yeah, yeah, yeah. so he went on pat leave and then he ended up extending that. he probably had a more confident boss too he could have. yeah, he didn't have to work 12 hours a day, yeah, yeah, so it was helpful, tim, obviously doing that, where, um, actually one part of being running a side hustle and a full-time job is it made us have trade-offs what to do. so a good example was in the first year. someone said you should do wholesale, right, and we said you know what? no, because it's too much, too much work, work. you gotta call people, you know tok to people. so we tried to do only things we could automate in many ways. yeah, ddc, an essentialist approach. yeah, just by hook and crook, right. yeah, forced into that, that's cool, exactly. yeah, um, you know where i'd like to go now is tok a little bit about like: so you're still at shopify, you've got this great business. we think it's valuable, right. so all the way along, we thought it was valuable, i thought it was valuable and- and maybe just unpack why you think i thought it was valuable- yeah, so for probably the last three years anyway, bushbomb has been growing and scaling.

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Bootstrapped to 8-Figures: How a DTC Skincare Giant Does Finance

[Music]. welcome to shopify masters, the podcast powered by shopify, and welcome to the bush bomb mini series. my name is shwang estershan, i am one of the hosts of shopify masters and i am david gaylord, shopify's merchant in residence and the co-founder of bush bomb. today we're diving in to all things. finances, yeah, the most exciting topic that we might have, or the most boring, some might say for sure, but i think a very crucial one. [Music]. so, david, for you guys. um, initially, when you guys started bush bomb, how much did you guys individually contribute to the business? so, the first kind of when we first kicked off, we all put in a very small amount. i forget what it was, i think it was like 200 and something 76 or something like that all three of us put in. so it was really a small, small amount. and that money was to simply get product, so just to get enough product as well, as i think it was to pay for our domain name and a few other things. but we wanted to start with a tiny assortment product and our investment wasn't to make a huge company. our investment was just to see if the idea worked and if people would buy it, if people enjoyed the product. so the investment for us early on was just to see if it would work and could we do it very small that it would be if we lost a thousand dollars. the test was, you know, we learned a lot from it. that's kind of the. that's how we exactly started with finances. obviously, i think you know a lot of businesses start this way. you know, your friend, your co-worker, you have an idea. you set things up. at what point did you guys take this seriously and say, you know, oh, we kind of need like a banking account. we probably need to move things into something separate than our personal accounts. yeah, that took. uh, like the first year we didn't do very many sales. we did about 3 200, i think it was, or 3 600, so very, very small um. and at that point it's, it's so, it's very easy to manage. income is so low from it. even your credit card, like if you're putting money on it it's easy to pay yourself back, like nothing is too complicated um. and then in year two, we we started to do more sales. year three, we i think we're at 150 000 in sales and at that point we thought, okay, we're starting to actually have money flow through the business into kind of new inventory facebook ads, and at one point we thought, okay, we should really tok to a bank to not only make it organized and easier to run, but also we need to build up our credit history with a bank. um, and that's kind of so old school to say, but building up your credit history with a bank, um, often with a small business account, if you're brand new, they'll say, oh, your credit card limit is whatever it is, but if you've been there for two years and you've paid off your credit card for two years, they'll say, you know what? hey, yeah, we can raise it a little bit, we can change it to this, we can change that. so once we started to say, hey, this is kind of a real business making, uh, a few investments and growing, we moved it all there and it helped so much on just organizing everything. my credit card wasn't constantly at like 10 000 limit for facebook ads or all the ads. um, i lost the ability to get points personally, but, um, i think that's worth it now. no, but that that's interesting to hear because you know it did take a while. you were saying year three and also it was the point where you guys hit six figures in sales. so, um, that's when you guys like swapped over to business accounts and business credit cards. yeah, exactly, and that we probably should have done it a little bit earlier, to be honest. but yeah, it made a big difference for kind of organizing everything. and there's so many horror stories about banking in general. and we we went through one with our, um, our old bank, who we moved away from, but we signed up with them at that, say, hundred thousand dollar a year mark, and then we went to 150 000 the next year. but then the next year, which was, uh, about a year and a half ago, we did almost 2 million in sales. so what happened was we went to our banking partner at one point and we said, hey, we were selling so much that our bank account and our line of credit and everything is just not sufficient anymore. can we increase our credit card? can we increase our line of credit? can we increase like whatever is available? and they were like, oh no, you don't have enough history with the bank, we can't increase it. and that was like the first time i'd ever been, like so frustrated by a system not making any sense. um, because literally every day, the money would flow into their their account or into our bank account in their bank, and then our ad spend would go on to our credit card and then we'd pay it off and it would. this cycle would continue and it got to the point where i had to pay our credit card, and i think it was every single day. i had to fully pay off our credit card, um, just to keep our ad account from going, shutting off, from not paying the bill. so you get like you get no benefits of a credit card because you, you can't pay it in 30 days. i literally had to pay it every single day. whereas, working with our new banking partner, we went in: hey, here's our financials, here's where we're at, here's how we scaled. and they said: baseline, here's where we'll start you, which was like 10 times bigger in credit than the first, the first bank we were with, and the first bank, the reason we couldn't get the line of credit because we didn't have enough history, whereas the new bank said: you know what? yeah, you have your sales history. we see it like it's fine and we'll, we'll scale. so some banks obviously are, are different, um, but yeah, having the ability to get capital from a bank is really efficient if you have the available credit, whereas if you don't, it's. it's really challenging. it's actually funny there's there's ways to be more efficient with, just like how you move money around and how you pay bills and how you do these things, whereas a lot of your standard banking accounts and business bank accounts don't have options for certain things. so a funny example is last year at the, the peak of covid, we were growing so fast and we had to buy inventory so fast and i do remember it was like right when coveted in north america was really spreading and like everyone was shutting down, things were locked down, everything and i physically had to go for five days in a row to our local bank to send a wire transfer. i had to walk in and they asked me the questions. they were turning people away. you could do it online and other places, but i had to physically do it in person and sign and do all these things and then after that five days in a row, the following week i came back i had to do another wire. it was just the time i had to do to do these things was, so i had to drive there. it was like an hour to do it every single time at least. they said, oh, for i think it was 24 a month- i can get a platform and i can just do it from home, and it took a week and a half for them to tell me that option, or however many days, and i was so frustrated because i thought 24 a month to save how much time, like that's incredible. so, yeah, there's tools to just make things more efficient and payroll and all the things you might have to do, um, which isn't intense or anything. it's just like knowing these tools exist to make your life easier. um, yeah, anyways, that was a long-winded story, but, uh, i love it. um, and also just like goes to show you that, yeah, there's logistiks with finances that would help run your business smoother. um, i do wanted to ask about, you know, your partnership with tim. you guys are friends and you guys are co-workers. before a lot of the times, people say you know friendship and finances and money don't mix. how did you guys, you know, approach like we are going into business together and now like there's finances involved? did you guys ever draft like an agreement ever? or how did you guys approach this area? yeah, so there's a lot of things um, like we we obviously have like our shareholders agreement and all of that um and th.

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The Ecom King: 21 Year Old Shopify Dropshipper Taking Over, Making 7 Figures & More || CEOCAST #33

for you personally. it's hard, man. is that a regular thing for you, or yeah? so i'm gonna be real with you. so before that, i was making between 20 and 30 thousand pound in pre-tax profit, yeah, but now, uh, i'm gonna thank god for it. but with the whole situation going on, it's actually helped me out and now we're able to do between 40 and 50 consistently, so it's actually giving me that little boost i need. [Music]. what is going on, guys, welcome back to the ceo course. today is going to be a very special episode. it's something you have been requesting for a long time and we're going to be toking all about drop shipping. now, before that happens, i need you all to please press that subscribe button. i'm trying to reach 10k for the end of the year and make sure you press the like button down below, just so i know that you are liking this episode anyway. with that being said, i am with camille sattar, who is also known as the e-com king, and all within e-commerce and dropshipping, so i'll let you take it away. yeah, man, so my name is camille sarah. i'm also known as the e-com king- uh, based in the uk, birmingham, and i've been doing ecommerce and dropshipping now for around about three years. i've been in e-commerce for five years. i started off with buying and reselling, then i transitioned into drop shipping, and here i am today, man over multiple seven figures in revenue. so for the people who don't know- including myself to some extent- what is drop shipping? yes, so drop shipping can be done in multiple ways. you can do it on amazon, you can do on ebay or you can do it on shopify. now, what drop shipping actually is is is where you have a product on your website or amazon or ebay and you don't buy that product until you actually get the sale. so then you limit your stok. so obviously, a lot of people buy a lot of stok, but they can never get rid of it. yeah, so this limits the risk of you holding stok. okay, so that's why it's such a good business model. um, so, like i said, you just stop you just. you just go on the website and buy it as soon as you get the order. so what sort of stok would you personally sell? yeah, so me personally. i just follow the trends. that's the thing with drop shipping. drop shipping isn't a long term business model. it's there to take a trendy product, scale it aggressively. you can do it in six and 18 months, make a couple hundred thousand, make a couple of million in revenue and then, once you've done that, then you can go out there and build a branded e-commerce site. and, as you will probably know, jim shark did start off with the drop shipping business model and obviously, like i said, as soon as they transitioned into an e-commerce brand. so let's take it back. so that's what drop shipping is. now. let's tok about how your involvement came into it. so, just to start off, how old are you? right now i'm 21 years old, so still very young, even though you look about 24, 23, so you're quite older. it's good for you. um, but yeah, when did it all start? how did you get? yeah, so, like i said, i started doing buying and reselling like giuseppe's, united's christian libyans back in 2015, and then in 2017, i thought of what, how can i scale? because buying and reselling, you can't really scale it. yeah, so for what business model can i do? but it's online and scalable. and i googled how to make money online and then it came across affiliate marketing, um, amazon, fba, drop shipping- read about dropshipping. i thought that sounds really cool. so when you heard of drop shipping. did you know what it was at the time? no, i didn't. i had to watch videos. now, i'm not the. i am really bad. i'm dyslexic, so i can't read, i can't do any of that stuff, so i have to watch a video content for me to understand it. just went on to youtube, saw loads of videos and i thought that's clever and smart. yeah, so i mean, i think, because what is drop shipping has come about recently. yeah, um, as, unless there's a hype around it? yeah, so recently, but it's been around for many minutes. it's been around since 2008. yeah, it's a long time. there's been people that messaged me saying: cam, i thought about dropshipping in 2008.. i've seen so many young kids make so much money. now i want to get back involved again. yeah, yeah. so then how does it? let's start off with this: yeah, how does it all work in terms of how do you know what's trending, what you're going to sell next and keep up with the time so you can pay your bills at the end of the day? oh, yeah, of course. so the first thing that i want to say is: look, drop shipping is a long term. it's not something that you're going to get involved with and get rich overnight. don't let those people online for you. it's gonna take between one and three years to make some decent life changing money from it. yeah, but in terms of how you find products that will do well and make money, you can use tools like things like google trends. if you touch type in a search phrase, it will tell you if that search term is trending. yeah, then it tells you. obviously, anything related to that search phrase could do possibly well. you can go on something called aliexpress drop shipping center and it'll tell you how many orders of products getting every single day. okay, so you could see it directly from. yeah, you can see directly through aliexpress, which is one of the, which is one of the wholesalers. yeah, you can see if that product is being sold in in terms of how much a day. yeah, so then that obviously will tell you. well, if that's getting sold- eight, eight units against a day, and it keeps increasing, increasing, increasing. that's trending. so then obviously you can jump on it. there's other tools where you can com. you can spy on competitors, facebook ads, which is the main way of people doing it, and you can see how many views they've got, how many likes and comments they've got. her videos got like two million views, it's. they're paying some serious money to get that. so then you're not spending that kind of money. if it's not working, yeah, so then you can go out there, copy the product and then, obviously, take it your own way. fair enough. so let's dive it back once again, once again. so you started early, like you said. so you're 21 now. you started howard. i started when i was about 15 years old, fifteen. so you're still doing your gcses, still gcse, still in college, and what? yeah, but obviously i didn't, didn't get my head down. i've got no gcses and i also left college in my second year because i got fed up with it. oh so you didn't, you didn't finish college. i got my first degree and then i just left because i was like i actually went to college to do a business level three diploma and i passed my first year. but then i realized i've come to a business college to learn business. yeah, i'm getting taught how to work for somebody else's business and i thought that you want to learn how to make your own. there you go. i wanted to learn how to make my own business, make my own money, but i wasn't softball the same. this is the time. so i guess everyone has got their own decisions to make, isn't it? so, yeah, probably the best thing to do. so you got in about 15 years old. how did you know what to do when you first started up? yeah, so what i did is, i thought, what i want to do, something that i enjoy to start off with, and this isn't one of those things. oh, you're just saying this. i, i just wanted to do something that i enjoyed. i didn't want to feel like like i watched my mom work and i'm thinking she looks depressed. man, like you don't want to be working, something like that. yeah, so i thought i like fashion. i love fashion, not anymore, but i was into it all. i was into like the high-end sneakers, supreme, and all that. so, for there's in my area, where i was from, there's a small like demand. there's a big demand- sorry, but small supply- of people being able to get these people good shoes. now, people are football players, celebrities. they haven't got time to go out there and source hard finding shoes. so for let me come in and do that for them. yeah, so that's when i did it. so you did um shoe sorting, basically personal concierge, shoe sourcing perso.

​​A 10,000 Unit Mistake and Other Problems Bushbalm Overcame

[Music]. welcome to shopify masters, the podcast powered by shopify, and welcome to the busch bomb mini-series. i'm schwann gaster shan, one of the hosts of shopify masters, and i'm david gaylord, bushbomb's co-founder and shopify's merchant in residence. so today we're toking about all things. failures. might sound a little daunting, but i promise it's going to be worth a while. yeah, i've got a lot of those failures, so lots to tok about [Music]. i mean, i think failure is a crucial component to reaching points of success, so i'm excited to dig in. um, but before we get into the different, you know- experiences that you had that were learning experiences, i wanted to ask: how do you define failure or what do you associate failure with? i don't actually associate failure to too much, because even i often, yeah, i see it as learning, like we've toked about this earlier in previous episodes. but anytime you do something that doesn't work, it's it might be a failure per se, as whatever you define a failure, but i look at it as just an opportunity to learn something new and do something different. so i don't see it as something that brings me down. i see it as something that i want to change and try something new with, and i also think it's just a moment in time. um, you know you're at a period where something didn't work out, but there's other things you can try to move you out of that period as well. yeah, true, and and if you think about failures in some ways is, um, something could be a failure right now, but two years from now it could be a huge success- exact same thing, product whatever it is- just because the timing. so that's why failure for me is more about like, yeah, learning and and doing something different or in a different way. looking back in the early days, what were some of those moments where you know you were in a bind, but you did learn a lot from them? yeah, so the probably the earliest kind of failure moments were around packaging and branding. so we learned quickly actually. so one thing is we call their products bush oil, which didn't resonate and people thought this is strange, like that's, that's an odd product. so that was a quick learning lesson. we kind of quickly failed there. and then the other thing we realized is, um, although we're trying to really destigmatize people toking about ingrown hairs, razor burn different products. five years ago we use branded packaging tape on our boxes and people really hated it because they didn't want a package with bush bomb coming to their, their place of work or house or whatever it is. so that was a quick failure that we stopped using that custom packaging tape. i've probably got 10 miles of it sitting at our office right now. but, yeah, we learned quickly that packaging is pretty important and if you screw it up, it's also a big investment because it's thousands of bottles, boxes, it's a lot more than you think. if you screw that up, i mean, hopefully that packing tape would be sold to a museum one day, become a collector's item, um. but i think a lot of it also goes back to um this portion, because i think sometimes business owners are scared of launching because they have this aspect of professionalism and they feel like: you know what i need to get my product perfect before i launch. but, to your point, you could have only learned about people's preferences on privacy and packaging when you've launched, when you've, you know, made that mistake. so how has your, i guess, um personal take about launch versus perfectionism? and, yeah, just like making mistakes and taking risks. as far as perfectionism, i think there's there's two elements that come up a lot. so the one side is on the product. so we've had some big failures around, even how people use the product, so doing kind of your own qa or usability testing of how would you use this. so for us, a failure was our bottles. they were a shaker at the time. not enough oil came out so people didn't enjoy using it because it wasn't efficient for them. so quick learning lesson. the other was one time we had caps that didn't tighten enough and they're metal so they leaked in transit. quick learning lesson: we had to change everything. the other side is the perfectionism on the website and design and and how it looks. so a lesson i learned early on which was frustrating was a lot of what i did on the website. i'm tinkering, i'm changing the colors, the images, i'm trying to make this look better. i'm putting this here. i'm doing that. none of it almost mattered because none of it was like tested and i wanted to see if this worked and then i'd wait and then it would work or wouldn't. i didn't have enough data. so if you're the person who's tinkering with your website and tinkering with your shopify store and trying to make it look perfect, that's almost too much of your time wasted. um, it's really easy to do. i think almost everyone falls in the trap of like, trying to make it perfect, whereas if you can get to market and get feedback and traffic, then you can see what people are doing. you can see what people are saying. you can ask customers like: hey, what did they like about the site, what didn't they? and then you can change things in a better way. you'll have a list of like: hey, what are my table stakes? like you probably want to have reviews because those are important: good product photography, good descriptions, home page with whatever's on it. but if you're tinkering on a lot that perfectionism it probably in the long run isn't going to benefit your store, especially in the early days. later on you can test and do a b tests and see. but in the early days you really got to get to market and see, see the reaction, sometimes taking a big swing. there's a lot of risk involved. has there been some decisions or some bets that you've taken that could potentially have led to failure, but you went ahead with it anyways and tested something new? yeah, so the biggest risk we ever took, i think, was we spent about. it was like a hundred thousand dollars of personal income into bush bomb when we really were on the fence about success potential, so that that 100 000 was almost more than all the inventory we bought the year before, or actually all the inventory we sold. so we took this bet and risk on the company and we bought the packaging that was absolutely beautiful, like it was incredible, and at the time, looking back, um, i think it was totally. it was totally worth it. it launched us to where we are today. um, but even on the packaging that we went with- there were some of it was a total failure. um, but you can't look back and say it was a failure. it was. a good example is we had rigid packaging, so the packaging we used wasn't as environmentally friendly as we want our packaging to be. now. we weren't even thinking about that as much back then and now we're like, oh my gosh, i can't believe we wouldn't use, we use packaging that had foam inserts, like that's not very good for the environment, whereas now we're like that's a huge failure on our part and we've changed. um, so, yeah, it's constantly a battle of should we invest this big amount here or should we invest it over here, and you kind of have to take these risks, accepting the consequences of maybe it's a huge success or maybe it's it's a total failure of a launch or whatever it is, and you kind of have to be okay with that. as long as you can, your business can handle it, i would say, because i think you know a hundred thousand dollars, that's, that's quite a lot of savings to invest and take a risk on. um, what about, like you know, the balance between your personal life, personal finances, and the risk that you're kind of taking with that and investing into the business? yeah, like that it is a big, big risk for sure. um, so for us, we kind of hedged, uh, our risk. and you see this, i've told people this before, but it's not to say i'm like mark mark zuckerberg, but mark zuckerberg he didn't just drop out of harvard, he deferred his status. so like he could have totally dropped out and been a huge success, obviously, but he deferred his risk. so for us, what we did is we deferred.

FREE Shopify Dropshipping Course | COMPLETE A Z BLUEPRINT 2022

hey guys, it's camille sarnon as the e-com king, and in today's video, i'm going to be giving you guys a brand new shopify drop shipping free course for 2022.. me and the team are going to be showing you how to build and advertise a successful, branded shopify drop shipping store in 2022. from the very start, this is gonna be a complete step-by-step, no bs- shopify drop shipping free course for 2022.. this is the only video that you need to be watching in 2022 if you want to start a successful shopify dropshipping business period. there's no other video out there that's going to be as valuable as this video today, and if you've been thinking about buying a paid course, you do not need to be buying a paid course. this video will be better than the paid courses that you've seen and this video will be the best free video on the internet right now. this is gonna be better than any paid course that gurus are selling you from a thousand dollars up to five thousand dollars, and i do truly believe that this is the best course on the market right now and it's completely free combined than any other course out there now, if you appreciate this completely free 2022 shopify drop shipping course that me and the team have put together. make sure you smash the like button and leave a comment to support this video. now, what we're going to be teaching you in this free course is how to find winning products, how to build a premium website with a page builder, how to set up all the apps that you're going to need to automate some of the processes, how to make video ads, ugc content, which stands for user generated content. we're also gonna be teaching you how to run google ads, tiktok ads, facebook ads, youtube ads and influencer marketing. so we're gonna be teaching you guys all the main advertising platforms right now that are giving out the best return i'd spend. you're going to be learning each one of these, and i'm not just done about scratching the service. we're going to be teaching you the exact blueprint for all of these different scenarios. now, this is the reason why this is the only video that you need to watch in 2022, and you're probably thinking that this is a very bold claim- and the reason why is because there's going to be 10 battle tested experts teaching you in one free drop shipping course. now, if you've already watched my channel before that, you know i've already put out two of the free courses, which is my 2020 free course and my 2021 free course. now, this free course in 2022 is not just gonna have me teaching you. it's gonna have another nine experts in different industries- google ads, youtube ads, tiktok ads, building websites- teaching you because, at the end of the day, i'm not the best at teaching everything within e-commerce and dropshipping. i'm very good at certain things, but i've got a team in place that are very good, for example, like youtube ads, google ads- and they're gonna be teaching you on a certain topic. so, for example, youtube ads will be covered by one of my business partners for dank, who's a specialist and expert in that field. so you're now getting taught by industry leaders and industry experts- each industry- so you can get the best experience possible. now, the reason why i'm saying they're battle tested is because they've been doing what they've been doing for the last few years by generating a full-time income, so they know what they're toking about. and this is six to seven figure tested information. with all the information we're teaching you today, it's actually generated- me and other people- between six and seven figures, and it's also future-proof information that you can learn and use throughout the next few years. now i want to make a massive disclaimer. this is a long-term business. it is a real business, is not a get-rich-quick scheme business either. this business has changed thousands of lives, including myself and all the other nine experts that i teach new today, but it's doing it on a long-term basis. now, if you've come into this video today to try and get rich quick, try and make as much money as possible in a short amount of time, then this video isn't for you. so if you're new to drop shipping, this is how the business model works. number one: you create your online store and you add your products. customers place an order. drop shipping supplier ships the order to your customers and you will never see or hold the product. then you make a profit. and the reason why the dropshipping business model is so lucrative and amazing is because it lets you start an e-commerce business without taking major risks like other e-commerce businesses that have to buy in bulk, that have to have a fulfillment center, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars. now, drop shipping will let you test multiple products before committing to buying in bulk and private labeling, and we're going to be teaching you in this course how to do both scenarios, because drop shipping is just a test to see when you find a good product, to then scale it into buying a bulk and, obviously, private labeling and things like that. now, this is how much cash flow you're going to need to start this business model in 2022. you're going to need an upfront amount of 2 000, and this is more than what it was in the previous year, and the reason why is because a lot of businesses since last year have started to go online because of the global issue that we've had and they've become an e-commerce business, which means that there's more demand and there is more competition, which means you need more money to compete with these people. now, the more money you have up front, the better, of course, because businesses rely on cash flow to succeed. you need to be topping this amount up by five hundred dollars to a thousand dollars on a monthly basis because, again, this is a real business model and you need cash flow to sustain the business. now, the five hundred dollars for a thousand dollars could be just whatever profit you make. you reinvest it instead of taking it out and buying something, so that's something that you can also do if you want to be topping this up. these are the main drop shipping costs within 2022.. the shopify plan is going to be 29.99 and it's on a monthly basis. but if you use the link in the description and in the free cheat sheet, you will get a 14 day free trial and some exclusive benefits, and that will be the same with any link that's in the cheat sheet and in the description. it is going to be a partnership link, meaning that we give you guys some exclusive benefits of using those links, so you get a better offer than you would go and direct with these companies. now the domain name is going to be 14.99. it's a one-off fee. then the theme is going to be around about 19.99 on a monthly basis. the logo can be done for free. the apps are going to cost you around about 20 to 100 on a monthly basis. now the marketing is what's going to be the biggest cost involved, and that can range from a thousand dollars to five thousand dollars. now this budget can last a month, it can last three weeks, it can last three months. it just depends how you're advertising the product. but the marketing is the most important part of your business. now this is the make or break to your business. if you don't have good marketing, you won't get customers and you won't make money, so you need to spend money on marketing to acquire as many customers as possible to actually keep the business maintained. now you're more than welcome to skip to any part of the video that you need, because i know some of you guys are watching this, are already used to drop shipping, so you can skip to any module that you want, and there will be timestamps in the description and in the slide bar so you can find it. but i would recommend that everybody watches this from the very beginning and make sure that you guys join the free telegram group for any help, because if you've got any questions related to this free course, then me and the team that are going to teach you in today's free course are in there so you can.