🎧🍌 The Einstein of Ecommerce 🧪 Bootstrapping to 9-Figures in Revenue with Sean Frank (CEO, Ridge Wallet)
🎧🍌 The Einstein of Ecommerce 🧪 Bootstrapping to 9-Figures in Revenue with Sean Frank (CEO, Ridge Wallet)
Lessons from sponsoring 5,000 influencers, a crash course on the fashion market, why wallets are a terrible category, how to build an enduring brand, and why Ridge is a top 10 advertiser on Twitter
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Sean is the CEO of Ridge, a men’s wallet and accessories brand that does over 9-figures in annual revenue. The company started in 2012 and raised $266,000 in a Kickstarter campaign to sell the first 5,200 wallets.
Ridge hasn’t raised a single dollar of outside capital, and has since expanded into new categories like rings, knives, watches, backpacks, and keys, with dozens of more products coming soon.
Sean is known in some circles as the “Einstein of Ecommerce”, and he gives us an inside look into running a consumer brand in 2023.
🔥 This episode is full of hot takes and insights on all things branding and entrepreneurship.
Topics include:
Why selling wallets is a terrible business
How Ridge has 80% gross margins
Why brands should generally not raise venture capital
When a founder should step down as CEO, and how to hire a new one
Why Ridge is one of the top 10 advertisers on Twitter
When and how to hire a marketing agency
Closing clients in a 1991 Honda Civic
Why Ridge never raised outside capital
A crash course on the men’s and women’s fashion markets
Why Sean thinks women’s fashion will have 50% return rates this holiday season
Investing in a watch manufacturer and building a factory in Arizona to vertically integrate
Why every company needs a core competency
The simple tech stack Ridge uses to run the business
Why Crocs and Lululemon are great businesses
Why Amazon shut down its private label program and why every brand should sell on Amazon
Lessons from sponsoring 5,000 influencers
The reason influencer marketing performs so well
How to start and scale an influencer marketing program
Why more companies should incorporate creators in their content
How FTX and other crypto companies inflated influencer marketing prices
Paying $1,000,000 to hire a creator in-house
How the Ridge Wallet has saved customers from bullets and chainsaws
Follow Sean on Twitter and his podcast The Operators for more hot takes and behind the scenes of running a consumer brand.
👉 Find this episode on Apple and Spotify
🙏 Thanks to Zac and Xavier at Supermix for their help with production and distribution.
Transcript
Find transcripts of all prior episodes here.
Turner: Sean, how's it going? Thanks for joining me today.
Sean: I'm doing well. Thank you for having me. I appreciate the opportunity to speak to you.
Turner: I'm very excited to have you on! I think you're in a really interesting spot. You run a direct-to-consumer brand. It's a men's wallet company. I've heard you say that both are not the best spaces to be operating a business in. Can you explain that?
Sean: Yeah, I think by default all of us are D2C brands, but I will just caveat that it's way better just to call it a brand, right? I think D2C has some stink on it. It was proven to just be a way to sell things and not the identity of a company. So yes, it is a brand. And then we are mostly a men's wallet company.
I would like to be a wallet company and then I would like to be an accessories brand, because there are no wallet companies. It is a horrible category to be in, but we have made a niche for ourselves in it.
Turner: So why is it so tricky running a men's wallet brand?
Sean: When was the last time you bought a wallet?
Turner: Personally, I don't know if I've ever bought a wallet. It's always been someone else that buys me one, and it was when I lost it. I think I only buy a new one when I lose the other one.
Sean: Yeah. You've just summarized the challenge of running my company – it’s that it's a product category nobody cares about. If you ever worked in traditional fashion like department stores or fashion brands, there's a totem pole.
If you are at Gucci, women's runway is the top, and then maybe it's women's handbags and then it's men's runway. At the very, very bottom of the totem pole is, men's accessories. It's literally like where they put people that want to quit. Nobody cares about it. So we've been able to build a great business because it's a category that nobody cares about.
But the challenge of that is the average man gets a new wallet every seven years, and he doesn't know where it comes from. It just shows up. His sister gets it for him or whatever. Compare that to shoes. There's an entire culture built around buying as many shoes as possible, collecting, cherishing. I'll tell you right now, there's like eight people on earth who cherish wallets and collect them, and they’re our customers and I really appreciate them.
Turner: So how big are you guys today? I've seen the numbers, it’s like nine figures in revenue. How do you guys talk about it now?
Sean: Yeah, that's probably the general statement we have, and what that means is we'll do over a hundred million dollars this year. We did over a hundred million dollars last year and we're still growing, mid to high double digits every single year.
The goal is eventually we'll get to a billion a year in revenue, and that sounds like a really crazy number, but Yeti does a billion a year in water bottles alone, and Coach is very large. They're publicly trade under Tapestry.
They just bought a company called Capri Holdings and they own Michael Kors and Valentino and a bunch of other stuff, but Coach by itself does $6 billion a year in accessories, and they have a billion dollar a year men's accessories business. So it is not uncommon for accessories brands to get to a billion a year in revenue.
Turner: And that's the very bottom of this totem pole that you talked about too.
Sean: The small leather goods market, which does include probably fine handbags, it's a hundred billion TAM. It's crazy. It's bigger than the movie industry. There's a lot of people buying small leather goods.
To answer your question, Ridge is a mid 9-figure brand. We're working on getting to 10. And then once I hit it, you'll know because I'll brag about it.
Turner: We'll have you back on when you hit 10. So do you know why it’s a hundred billion dollar market, just small leather goods?
Sean: People like to buy stuff. You're talking leather, you're talking handbags, you're talking wallets, you're talking phone cases, belts, just whatever accessories. The question you get at is like, why is the fashion industry so big? We could all just wear black t-shirts and black pants and wear slippers, but I don't know man, people have been decorating themselves forever.
And I just listened to a TikTok, which was really interesting about how we think of clothing in the prehistoric times as being like for warmth or protection, but it actually was probably first used just as ornamentation. The first person to put clothes on was probably just trying to show off how cool they looked, and wasn't actually trying to keep warm. So an inherent piece of human behavior is this ability to decorate and fashion yourself. So that's why I sell wallets.
Turner: The one that no one sees. You keep it in your pocket all day.
Sean: It's very unsexy. The largest true wallet company no one's ever heard of. They're called Randa. They do like $4 billion a year in revenue. But, everyone focuses on SaaS companies or whatever else. You know how hard is to do $4 billion a year in revenue? Selling to consumers is a good way to do it.
Randa owns a portfolio of well-known consumer fashion brands.
Turner: That's fair. Well, your market is just every human, right? I mean, every dude buys a wallet. Maybe there's not that many competitors, because we talked about how it's a tough business. What do the margins look like on a typical brand? Like what are the big costs and then what are the ways you actually have a profitable business? Are there certain things like tricks you really gotta figure out?
Sean: First, let's define what margin we're talking about, right? Because when people say margin, they have an idea in their head, but we should just make sure we're speaking the same language.
So there is the cost to produce a good, there is the cost to produce a good and get it to this country, and there's the cost to produce the good, get it to this country, and then get it to a consumer. Inside of that final one, do you include payment processing? Because that's two points of margin that you just can't get back. No matter how you wanna get around it, Shopify's getting their slice and Visa and MasterCard are getting their slice.
What companies do is they have gross margin, which is typically all of those things above the fold. And a company like Yeti is at 56%; a company like Nike is at 50% or whatever. Those are landed to consumer costs. So the cost to ship something to a consumer is typically 10% of revenue or whatever returns and exchanges have to be included.
Turner: Those can be high too. Those can be like 10, 15% in some cases also.
Sean: Women's fashion this season is hitting 50% return rates. That's what we're hearing. The home showroom is really becoming a trend in women's fashion.
In wallets, we’ve got like a 4% return rate. Almost nobody's returning a wallet.
Turner: (Laughing) The one thing you have going for you…
Sean: (Laughing) Yeah, yeah… Our gross margin tends to be 80%+. That's best in class up there with Hermès or any of the true luxury brands. The other thing I'll say is about the small leather goods market.
I believe, and check me on this, the most profitable company trading on the S&P with a product or service – so removing out financial arbitrage like Bitcoin exchanges or whatever else – the most profitable product focused company on the S&P is Hermès. I believe their EBITDA margin is 40%.
There's a lot of money to be made in luxury, a lot of money to be made in small leather goods as long as you can crack it. But yeah, we're in the 80% margins.
Turner: So that's gross margin. And then, your CMO Connor, me and him have been talking about paid ads for years. I think that’s when first met him. I was talking about Snapchat ads way back when they launched them. Is that where you guys spend a lot? On performance marketing?
Sean: Yeah, there's no free lunch, right? So either, either you have low gross margin because your product is a value or a commodity, or you spend that money on marketing. Apple only spends 5% on marketing, but it's because they have a very competitive product that people have to have. So yes, we try to run the business at a 3x MER[1]. So for every dollar in revenue, 33 cents is going to the great blue beast of meta.
[1] Marketing Efficiency Ratio measures the efficiency of digital marketing spend. It is calculated by dividing total revenue over a period of time by total spend over the same period.
Turner: Is it mostly Meta then?
Sean: Meta is on top. There were a couple years where it was really shaky and hitting the bottom, but,Meta is definitely on top. It's a duopoly for a reason. Google's got a big chunk of that. And then there's some smaller players. I'm a big Twitter advertiser. I'm one of the top 10 Twitter advertisers, I think that's what they told me.
Turner: So that's interesting because I know a couple people that previously and also currently run a lot of Twitter ads. What do you like about Twitter ads right now?
Sean: They’re cheap.
Turner: That's what I've heard. I've seen you get a million impressions from a couple bucks or something.
Sean: And there's just a certain group of users you can only reach on Twitter, just like Snapchat. We were the first advertiser on Snapchat, and there's some people for whom that’s all their screen time. If you want to reach them on digital channels, that's the only place to reach them.
Twitter probably has more users like that than anywhere else, right? If you wanna reach a Twitter user, they're not opening Instagram 10 times a day. They're not opening TikTok 10 times a day. They're just doomscrolling Twitter. And you gotta get everyone a wallet. So you gotta hit everybody on earth.
Turner: I've heard the argument for people who think Twitter is a good platform is that since it's so primarily text-based, the audience just skews slightly higher income. Maybe a little bit older. You can read. You don't know if your TikTok ad is being served to someone who knows how to read.
Sean: Yeah. They’re are adults who know how to read.
Turner: Yeah. So you're unique in the sense of you are the first person I've had in this podcast that is not actually the founder of the company. You're the CEO, you're running it. What's the story with Ridge? Can you explain the product and then also the story behind how it all got started?
Sean: It's a great product. So what are we talking about? It's a small metal minimalist, mostly men's wallet. I would love to sell some wallets to women, so if any women are watching, just go ahead and go to Ridge.com. You can buy one for yourself. Mostly we've advertised to men in the past.
Well, how did it start? Daniel and his dad made a wallet. Those are two original founders. He was going to Santa Barbara and he would just like wrap his cards in a rubber band and his dad would make fun of him. And he was like, “Okay, fuck it, I'll make a wallet.”
They made a prototype, put it on Kickstarter, and it ends up raising a couple hundred thousand dollars. It’s the golden era of Kickstarter, golden era of Facebook ads. They had a pretty sophisticated business, making a couple million dollars a year when I met them.
And they didn't wanna hire anybody. That was like a company culture thing for them.
Turner: So it's just them two?
Sean: And their best friend, uh, Austin. Those are the three original founders of Ridge. Father, son, best friend. Then they, they bring on their other best friend, Brett, as their first employee. So they’ve got four people when I meet 'em. They specifically do not want to hire or manage anybody.
Me and Connor had a digital marketing agency in 2016. I think Ridge did $8 million that year. I was like, “Hey, you need to do Facebook and creative and search and customer service and ops” and they were like, “We don't wanna do any of that shit. We'll pay you to do it.” And that works out great for a couple years in 2018 or whatever. I'm charging them like a quarter million dollars a month. And at a certain point they were like, “Hey, let's just become one company.”
Turner: Were they your biggest client at the time?
Sean: They were about half my agency revenue. So they were our biggest client and our only legitimate client. We had 10 clients and, and you've never heard of any of them. I say that in jest – there was a tech company called Biostrap. We did some consulting for some VC-backed companies.
Towards the end of the agency, we were the agency of record for crowdfunding campaigns. So like StartEngine, SeedInvest[2], a couple other ones. Acompany like Miso Robotics would wanna raise money. They would come to us for marketing help or whatever else.
[2] SeedInvest was acquired by StartEngine in May 2023. Source.
Turner: Oh, I've seen those ads before where it’s like “Miso Robotics is doing this – click the link, invest in the company.”
Sean: Yeah, so we were the marketing engine behind those companies. That's what we did pre-merger, but truthfully, at the time, I was pretty not involved in that. There were a couple other guys in the agency and I was really just focused on the Ridge relationship.
So we merged – me and Connor took equity stakes and then we sold the agency to the guys who were running the equity crowdfunding piece. They bought the agency out from me and Connor. They went to go do their own thing and then they've sold the agency again to big tech company called DealMaker in Canada that just does equity crowdfunding campaigns. So that's spun off doing its own thing.
Me and Connor come in-house at Ridge, so I'm not a founder, but I'm the CEO. My pushback for the whole audience is if you're a founder, why do you think you're good at running your business? It's so rare to have these two skills: the ability to start something brand new and push it to product-market fit and make sure it works, and then also scale a business and hire people and run systems and have vision for that.
The people who can do both? They're Steve Jobs, they're Mark Zuckerberg, and that's about it, right? And if you're delusional enough to think that you're amazing at both of those things, you're either a generational talent or you're probably bad at one of them.
I'm not saying Daniel was a bad CEO or anything. He’s still in the business, but he's definitely not passionate about what it takes to get a company to $100 million or $500 million. He's a product guy through and through. He's made a series of amazing, good-selling products and that's what he's passionate about spending his time in.
The reality is when you're a CEO, the product ends up being a smaller and smaller percentage of your time. It's way more about meetings and public personas and company vision and hiring.
Turner: And you just talked about how he didn't want to hire anyone. I think it's a totally fair thing to do but question on that. If I’m a founder or CEO of a company thinking about bringing someone else on to help me run the company, what things do you think I should think about? Were there any things that you guys really talked through and had to figure out and good processes put in place to make that transition?
Sean: We had a six year interview process. We worked together for years running the agency business through a lot of internal struggle. I think when we merged, Ridge was doing $30 million a year. So from single millions, probably mid millions when I met them – from $5 million to $8 million that first full year to $30 million when we merged. There were just a lot of growing pains that we had to work through.
You can go through an executive recruiter and you can get a ton of very talented executives who wanna come be CEOs. Or you can hire someone as a COO or hire someone as a president or hire someone as a VP and spend two years mentoring them to take over your business or hire a Chief of Staff, make that person literally be your second brain, follow you through the entire process, and then give them the reins of the president because they know exactly how you think and how you want it to operate.
I just think one of the worst things for a business is when the founder holds on to CEO way too long. In the past 10 years, we've just been idolizing the founder/CEO role, and that's what all the media's been about – how this maverick is coming in and shaking things up. That's just not really how the world works.
What I'll say the last thing about this is that there are four stages to a company. There's zero to one. That is starting the, the company and actually getting that shit in place – the formation documents and making and launching the first product. And then there's one to ten, which is I would call product-market fit. And then there's ten to a hundred, and that is actual scaling and probably where Ridge is right now.
And then there's 100 to 101 to 102 to 103. Once you get big enough, you actually just reach steady state, and that is a whole different type of CEO. That is the public market CEO; that is earnings calls and hitting EPS and that type of shit.
I think most people can only do one of those things. The very best can do two of those things. The true anomalies can do three of those things. Nobody can do four of those things. Mark Zuckerberg isn't actually the 101 to 102 to 103 guy. He has a CFO and he had Sheryl Sandberg actually running shit at that steady state.
I know I can't do that. I’m a ten to a hundred, and maybe a one to ten guy. I'm just two of those things. So that's my thought process on founders not being CEOs.
Turner: Yeah. I mean, I think it happens all the time. Basically every business, if it lasts long enough time, the founder will no longer be the CEO. The longer it gets, it’s more likely.
Why did you join? Was there a thought process where you were like, “I want to do this, I wanna sell wallets.”?
Sean: I was already selling wallets at the agency. So that was our main function, selling wallets. The reality is it's really hard to make a meaningful exit off an agency business. The agency was probably doing $5 million a year in revenue. I had a couple of co-founders of the agency; we were all making a decent living agency business. It’s good margins because it's just a people business.
Let's say I was 25, making a couple hundred thousand dollars a year off my agency business. It's so hard to sell agencies. I could hustle and grind, maybe work out a sale where I get $1 million or $2 million or whatever.
When we had the opportunity to merge with Ridge, me and Connor owned meaningful stakes of equity in this business. Basically, it’s like we founded it and got diluted by investors, that's the way I talk about it. Ridge is privately held, bootstrapped. So I own just as much as if I was the founder and got diluted. That's the way I look at it.
If we're optimizing for personal net worth outcomes, it’s way easier to sell Ridge than it is an agency. So that's why we made that decision. And dude, it was totally better. I wasn't especially good at running an agency business. I'm not a process-oriented guy. I was the CEO of the agency, so I was really just in a sales role, and I'm not very good at sales.
Turner: What should somebody think of when looking to hire an agency? What's the process? How you think about what's a good agency and what should people look for?
Sean: What type of agency are you trying to hire? I think you should identify that first. My thought process has always been you shouldn't outsource things that should be core competencies. There are on-demand engineering firms, and Apple doesn't use them because engineering is a core competency. So what type of company are you?
For a D2C brand, even though I hate the term, paid media is your engineering. At the end of the day, you are a marketing company, you're a media company. That's what you are. So you shouldn't outsource that. You should get good at that internally. And if you can't or won't, then you deserve to go out of business.
If you're a logistics company, your core competency is logistics. You should outsource your paid media because it does not matter if you're good at that or not. What matters is you can deliver packages on time.
So first, identify what you're actually trying to outsource. If you're a D2C brand listening to this and you currently outsource your paid media completely, I think that's a mistake. But you should totally outsource a lot of your creative. It's really hard to make high-quality creative, and there are agencies in the world that do that.
Or maybe you should outsource your web development because that's not a core competency. You don't need to know how to web develop. What you need to know is how to make good ads that convert and how to run Facebook ads or whatever.
So anyway, how do you choose an agency that's good? I always look for the one core metric: client tenure. So if clients are sticking around and growing with them for a long time – the aggregate client tenure, not just one or two flagship clients that stick around – but if their average client staying for over a year? That means that they're selective about who they bring on and they're good at retaining the people they bring on. So that's the one core metric to look at.
Turner: And that probably means that they're making their clients money because they're sticking them.
Sean: Right, you don't lose money for a year for fun.
Turner: One thing I'm super curious about then for Ridge is how do you guys do your production? You said your competitive advantage is the marketing. Do you guys do your production overseas or in the US? How do you designed products? You've launched a couple new ones. What is your manufacturing or product stack look like?
Sean: So production meaning the actual manufacturing of goods? We just bought a factory in Arizona, so we are onshoring a lot of our production right now.
Turner: And that's a new thing.
Sean: Yeah, I bought the building last week.
Turner: So this is, this is breaking news.
Sean: Yeah. Breaking news. I've talked about it a little bit on Twitter or whatever, but we're currently onshoring a lot of our production, and.
How do we think about new products and categories? We launched rings, men's wedding bands. That's been the surprise success of the year. It's already an eight-figure business for us, and it's only nine months old.
What we thought about was, the pandemic happened. Women's engagement rings went online very quickly. That trend has always been happening, but Pinterest has really driven online adoption. Women go on there, choose out their engagement ring, find it online, and buy it. My wife just sent me a link. She's like, “Buy me this.”
Men's engagement ring shopping or men's wedding bands were typically bought at the point of sale at a jewelry store. It was the way jewelry stores made most of their money. It was just an upsell. Like “Here's $8,000 you're gonna spend on a women's ring. Here's a men's ring, it's $1,000.” The joke would just be, “It's a lot cheaper.” They would just buy it. Even if it was a $15 ring, they'd spend $1,000 on it because comparatively it's a lot cheaper. You didn't even think about it.
As women's engagement ring shopping went online, men's engagement ring shopping didn't go anywhere. There was a massive hole where men didn't really know where to buy rings. There are a couple of D2C competitors doing it, but we pushed hard into it.
We're definitely reaching a huge swath of consumers who are super stoked to buy men's wedding bands online. We go above and beyond to reasonably price them. There's a crazy warranty where you can lose it twice, and we'll still give you another one. We call it “Never Lost” and “Forever Fit” protection.
The core focus of the business for the next couple of years is rapid product development. I do not want to be a wallet company anymore. Whatever Coach sells, we are going to sell. It's a push to be a men's accessories brand. You are going to see us get into 15 new product categories in the next couple of years. I'm spending a ton of money to do that. That's how we think about product.
Turner: And then is the core competency still to be very good at performance marketing?
Sean: Yeah, we're trying to develop more core competencies. We've always been product first and marketing first. Those two things have led the entire company. The rest of the company actually set up just to protect those two things: making sure we're making the best thing we can make and making sure we spend as many dollars on marketing as possible.
It’s like a very simple supply chain, a very optimized supply chain, but we're slowly making the rest of the company more complex so we can have additional first principle core competencies.
Turner: When I think about the landscape of men's accessories, I don't know if I've ever seen like a Coach ad, but their strategy seems to be more of partnerships, high-end luxury type stuff. Their thing is not running Facebook and Google ads, at least not as a core competency. So is that the opening in the space?
Sean: Yeah, they have a ton of stores. I think they have like a thousand-plus stores. Their men's business is just a proxy for a large women's business. They have a $5 billion a year women's accessory line, and they want those female customers to buy the men's stuff as gifts for the men in their life. Hopefully, those men come back and buy totes, slings, backpacks, or whatever else. It's a big gifting business, I think.
I wouldn't say that they're amazing at Facebook ads by any means, but none of the luxury brands are. Coach is considered a mid-luxury brand, definitely approachable luxury. They're not the Gucci's or the Chanels of the world. They're a tier below, but they're an American accessories brand with a huge men's business. That's who we're going after.
Turner: So typically, these men's businesses seem like high-margin bolt-on products really, if we're going to dissect it. Is that ultimately what it is for a lot of these women's brands that expand into men's?
Sean: Yeah, they definitely don't care about it. It's definitely not the primary focus. Typically, you hear about brands talking about the other thing, right? “Women are an underserved market.” The pink tax and razors – it's just a men's razor and they made it pink.
That dichotomy cuts both ways where there's totally underserved men's markets. We call it the testosterone tax, where men are willing to pay more for a more men's version of something, a more premium version, an authentic version. Huckberry is a website that exists just for this, or Filson, the brand exists just for this. It's men's stuff for guys.
In contrast to this, I don't know if your audience is going to be super bored talking about women's fashion for an hour, but my background, I used to work for Ralph Lauren. I've worked for Theory, I've worked for fashion brands. If you look at that world, it's very common for a mens-first brand or a mens-first designer to get into women's, right? Brooks Brothers did this, Ralph Lauren did this. There are countless examples of making stuff for men, then making stuff for women.
It's very rare to find a female designer making stuff for men carrying her name on the label or a women's first brand getting into men's. Lululemon is the only good example of a women's first brand launching with women's and then getting into men successfully. Maybe we'll see more of that in the future. But if you want to talk about the psychology of men or the patriarchy or whatever else, very few men would wear women designer labels.
I think it's becoming maybe more common now, but typically, even with Tom Ford, a lot of the heads of these luxury fashion houses are men-first. All of that to say, we're hoping that by making elevated masculine-first things, we can really serve that audience.
So instead of a guy being gifted a Coach wallet, maybe he'll prefer an opt-in to the Ridge Wallet. Instead of LVMH, he'll prefer and opt in to the Ridge Wallet. Then we can build an ecosystem of accessories around that, and hopefully, by going male-first, we can follow the great designers ahead of us and work our way backward into some sort of women's line.
Ralph Lauren did it, Brooks Brothers did it. Hopefully, we can do it.
Turner: It sets your market. The goalposts are probably a lot further out than what someone would think right now.
Sean: It's a big market. Everyone wants to build Uber or whatever, and I'm like, “Damn, that's super fucking hard. I'm just gonna try to sell wallets to people.”
Turner: Yeah. So I did not realize you guys had purchased a factory. What was that process like? Can you talk us through just how that came about and why you did it?
Sean: Yeah. So, Trump passed tariffs in 2016, and that started this whole decoupling of the US and China from a manufacturing standpoint. We looked at opening a factory in the US in February 2020. We had quotes, we had everything ready to go. It was an old automobile factory up in Wisconsin.
About a month later, COVID hits, and that factory's like, “Hey, we're making PPE now. We don't want to talk to you anymore.” So the whole world got really crazy.
Then Trump stopped being President, Biden comes in, he keeps all of the same tariffs. He did not remove the tariffs. So the Trump-era tariffs have existed throughout Biden and they have only added more, I think. So we're in a world where the decoupling of China manufacturing is happening, and I think it's going to continue to ramp up.
We restarted those plans. We were working with a company called FTS USA. They are the premier watchmaker in the United States. So if you buy any US-made watch or any US-made movement, it's probably coming from them.
A really nice guy, Kunal, he's running the whole thing. We were doing some business with him, and I was like, “Hey dude, can I just buy some shares in your business?”. So we bought 30% of FTS USA.
Turner: This is Ridge or you personally?
Sean: Yeah, so Ridge is on the cap table of FTS USA, and I think we're equal shareholders with him and his co-founder. We wanted a seat at the table.
Part of that is, "Okay, cool, we're shareholders. What do you need from us?". He says, "Well, my lease is coming up in my building. It'd be really great if we had our building where we could do whatever we wanted." We said, "Okay, cool, we'll buy you a building." So we bought a building in Arizona, and he's moving into it now.
Part of us buying it was the idea that you should just own more of your supply chain. So if you're buying raw goods from China, maybe you should own some shares in that business. And if you're buying assembly in the United States, maybe you should own shares in that business.
We tried to buy up and down so that if I spend a dollar on manufacturing, I'm getting like a 10-cent dividend. That's my goal, to start getting paid dividends off my manufacturing investment. So anyway, we have shares in FTS USA. We bought a factory from them, and now we've submitted a million-unit PO. So they're going to start making a million wallets for us.
The goal is by 2025, all of our wallets are made here. But that's a long road, so you've got to give me a couple of years to see how it goes.
Turner: And I think you guys sold like 5,000 or something, was the number I saw in the Kickstarter. The first one.
Sean: Oh yeah, I don't remember. That was before my time.
Turner: Are you still working with Jackie in China?
Sean: A little bit.
Turner: As you think about all these new products that are launching, is the idea to leverage the manufacturing facility as much as you can?
Sean: It just depends on what we're making. So, it'd be sick if by 2030 everything we make can be made here in the US but the first thing is quality. So wherever we have to go to make the best thing, that's where we'll go first. So a lot of carbon fiber comes from Japan. That's just where it's gonna come from because they make the best carbon fiber. I don't know why. But we're gonna get into watches, we're gonna get into knives. I think we're gonna do US assembly for those things.
Turner: Interesting. Okay. And then you guys have never really raised outside capital, is that correct?
Sean: Yeah, we've never raised any money at all.
Turner: But I've heard you say before you wish that you did, or you've thought about how the world would be different. Can you explain that?
Sean: Yeah. Now it's this chest beating thing where people are like, “We're bootstrapped, like we've never raised a dollar.” And it's like, nobody would give us money. It would've been cool. It would've made life a lot easier. Maybe the company would be ruined by now if we did it, but it's not like we had the option. I guess that's what I'm trying to point out.
It's not like people were beating down our door like, “We just need to own shares of the wallet company.” It's like, “Look, we're successful despite all that, but we were never given the choice.” And I think given the choice, yeah, we totally might've did it.
Now I understand the fallacy in it, but it's not like I'm better than other entrepreneurs because we didn't do it. It’s just that the entire company has no connections. We were all broke. We all just made the company ourselves.
Daniel's dad was a special ed teacher for 30 years in California. Motherfucker was not rolling in money. It’s me and Connor. We were dead broke. 20 years old too. So I didn't own a car. Connor got a car from his dad that was like a 1991 Honda Civic and it was rusty, barely worked. We would take that to client meetings, like that's how we closed all of our clients.
Anyway, what I'm trying to say is we don't come from a world where we could have gotten venture capital. It would've been sick. But yeah, nobody was trying to give us money.
Turner: Do you think there were things then that you did right in terms of order of operations of scaling up? Because I think the common dogma is it was a mistake to or raise so much venture capital. Are there places you think that you really did things right?
Sean: There's two. We made money the entire time because we couldn't not make money. If we had one year of losing money, we would've gone out of business.
Turner: That's that's a good thing. Good to make money.
Sean: What it taught us is that everyone else was high on fucking fumes. They were straight up smelling glue, just sitting there. We were like, “No, companies are supposed to make money. We're not actually doing something crazy. We're just doing exactly what Coach does. We're selling wallets, so we have to figure out a way to make a profit doing this.”
And then the second one is we grew at a tempered pace. I think physical good companies should never double. Right? We had a couple years where we did double, but you should never double. You should just aim for mid-teens or, or mid double digits growth. That's the way these companies are built.
And what I point to is Lululemon. I think the most growth they've ever had in one year since being public is 25%. Lululemon is worth $40 billion. They're worth more than Honda. The leggings that, that people are wearing, that company is more valuable than Honda. You should just try to do what they did. 25% growth is pretty good.
Turner: That's pretty good. I'm not an expert on this business, but I was just looking into Crocs lately. They sell hunks of plastic for like 80 bucks. I mean, it's an insane business, right? I don't know how much those cost, but selling those for $80 or $100 is a good business, good margins.
Sean: They're a great example of a functional company that has a fashion element. Crocs are a functional shoe. People love them for the comfort level or for the off-road mode or whatever, the sport mode. People love those, but, if you become fashionable, your sales just go through the fucking roof…
Turner: … which is insane that Crocs are seen as fashionable. I just think that's awesome. I don't know how they pulled it off.
Sean: What I'm really happy and joyous about regarding the VC crash, the tech crash, and the crypto crash, all these different crashes that are happening… It's horrible when people lose all their money like that's not something to revel in, but what is joyous about it is that all of those people can now have to look at real companies and understand what makes them work.
And it's like, “Oh yeah. You know, Crocs. They're unconventional and they might seem odd or whatever, but people like them and they buy them.” And it's like, let's go back to the core fundamental reason we're doing this, which is to make things people enjoy.
All I'm trying to say is Crocs is a great company. I appreciate that they're unique. I appreciate that people like them. That's beautiful. Good for them.
Turner: Yeah. I remember two years ago you said something like you're doing $2 million a year in revenue per employee. Is that still the case?
Sean: That's probably higher this year.
Turner: That's insane. You look at some of the best businesses and it’s a couple hundred thousand or a million a year in revenue per employee. What's the secret that you guys have that can get it so high for employee?
Sean: We don't have a warehouse, so we use a 3PL and it's not included in that number…
How a 3PL works. Source.
Turner: So you’re cheating? [laughing]
Sean: If you look at Amazon, they have like a million warehouse staff, so it's really hard for that number to be high. And if you look at Apple, they have a million store personnel, so it's really hard for it to be that high.
More or less we are just an HQ, so it'd be better to compare apples to apples to whatever their HQ numbers are. But if we're just talking headlines, yeah, it's a couple million bucks per person, then that's how we get there.
Turner: What does the tech stack look like at Ridge today? Any main products you guys use like operating system, selling online website? How you guys do 3PL, all that stuff?
Sean: It's nothing special. We're a Shopify merchant, so orders go on our website that's hosted by Shopify. Those orders hit Shopify and then they get passed, to our warehouse via our ERP system called Fulfill. So Fulfill does warehouse management, it does order splitting, all that type of stuff. Then the 3PL gets the order, they ship to consumers, we have AB testing software. You can go a layer deeper like what does our reviews do?
But I fundamentally I think that is a mistake of way too many Shopify merchants analyzing the tech stack like you're a tech business and you are not. All of your time should be spent on two buckets. It is, 1) is the product good and do people like it? 2) How do I sell it to people?
Everything else should basically be disregarded. We're pretty simple and if you wanna get more in depth in the stack, I’m happy to. Like what’s our SMS solution? I think none of that shit matters.
Turner: So what do you think are some of the big problems broadly that D2C brands are facing? Is it marketing's too expensive, logistics too expensive, their product sucks? You can be as polite or as non-polite as you'd like, but what are the big problems that you think most brands are facing nowadays?
Sean: You can put them in two buckets: those who raised money and those who didn't. They face different challenges. If you raised money, your business model likely can't support venture-level returns because you're essentially a fashion company, and fashion businesses are cyclical.
Many fashion companies, like Express, Super Dry Japan, and Fossil, trade at less than one quarter of their revenue. For instance, Gap, a massive revenue player, is worth only $4 billion. If you're in the fashion industry, raising money puts you in a position that's fundamentally incompatible with building a sustainable business.
Instead, you should aim to build a company like Lululemon, which consistently achieves 25% annual growth with excellent profits. It's not that fashion companies can't deliver venture-level returns; they just require a different approach and mindset.
Consider Hermès, with 40% EBITDA margins, surpassing many software companies, and valued at $200 billion, more than Uber. Companies like LVMH are worth more than Walmart. Such successes demand a generational perspective and continuity.
So, if you've raised money, you're essentially set up for a different kind of challenge – one that may lead to failure.
Turner: Okay, so it's a tough road either way?
Sean: Yeah, you might achieve okay outcomes. Like Warby Parker is public right? They raised money and went public. The challenge there is every terminology that you use in a tech company just cannot apply for Warby Parker.
Do they have product market fit? Yeah. Day one they have it. People have glasses. But can you have product market fit to get 100% of the market like a Slack can or like an Uber can? The answer is no. Because it's a fashion business.
The most you can ever get is 20% of the market. or you have to be Luxxotica and you have to own a hundred different brands. If you want 50% of the market, it just, it doesn't work the same way.
And then the other thing is, the whole idea that everyone's gonna own equity and that you're gonna raise money and there's gonna be like a preference stack? Yeah all of those preference stacks are underwater. If you're an employee at companies like Away, Outdoor Voices, or Warby Parker, your stock options are fucked. It’s worth nothing.
It’s a very difficult outcome if you’ve raised money and if you haven’t raised money, you just have to deal with normal boom and bust cycles. Like e-commerce had a huge boom cycle over COVID, over the pandemic, over lockdowns. It was artificially inflated.
Now you have to go through the bust cycle, and we're still in the bust cycle and there's less dollars being spent online year over year as a percentage of GDP so there's less dollars for you to win over.
Turner: You've said before that you think the next three years will be pretty good in consumer. Can you explain that?
Sean: We've had a really good year this year. There was revenge shopping and IRL so travel spending, Taylor Swift tickets going for five grand, taking a disproportionate share of e-commerce dollars. But e-commerce penetration's down year over year because of that.
But as that normalizes again, people love online shopping. Online shopping is here to stay. It's gonna win over more and more percentage and We're back to where we would normally be if COVID didn't happen. And I think we're gonna start accelerating again.
I think we're gonna see rapid acceleration of e-commerce penetration. And we'll get to 20%, we'll get to 22% of total transactions happening online. And when that happens, we're in another boom cycle. You just have wind at your back. It's built in 10% year over year growth. I think that happens again in 2024.
Turner: What do you think is like the ceiling for e-commerce? Like will we ever hit 50% of all transactions? And if you are in Walmart and you're doing self checkout from your phone in the store, is that technically e-commerce? Because it's like a digital transaction versus actually like point of sale.
Sean: I think if you gotta get in your car, it counts as in store. So I don't care if you're doing, click-and-pickup. That's in-store to me.
Will we ever hit the 50%? We have to identify what percentage of the bucket can even go online. Are you gonna buy houses online? Are you gonna buy cars online? Are you gonna buy groceries online? Those are the three biggest.
Then after that, it's like are you gonna buy gas online? If the world is all electric cars and for Tesla and you can click online, maybe there's a world where that bucket goes online, but that's like a huge chunk.
I don't think we'll ever get to 50% because I don't wanna throw out false percentages. But those things going online are difficult.
Turner: Yeah. When you think of like the Opendoors, which people use, and Carvana, truly buying online – maybe actually. We’ll see if those two business models will work. It depends if a lot of it will shift. So it's an interesting thought experiment.
Sean: We have to get those people online. The big holdouts are fashion items. People love to try stuff on in store. They love to for shoes. Anything requiring fit is difficult because return logistics is so expensive. But yeah, those are the ones we still have to solve.
Turner: One of the things I've always wondered about is how ecom penetration increasing in terms of creator brands, influencer marketing shifting things. I know you've spent a bunch of money on influencer stuff, not just paid, but I think you mentioned before you've done like 5,000 different influencers that you've worked with over the last couple years. Is that true?
Sean: Yeah, we sponsored 5,000 individual influencers.
Turner: How do you do that? It just sounds like a big proposition.
Sean: We have a big team. We have 2 W-2 employees working on it. And then we have probably 10 international contractors to help us get that done. I think it's the coolest piece of marketing we do. It's a small percentage of overall marketing budget, but this year we've probably spent three or $4 million with creators.
Turner: Why does it work, do you think? Is there some like psychological thing between partnering with a creator, embedding in the video versus showing up in the Facebook feed or search based in Google?
Sean: It's the only form of advertising that builds goodwill. Maybe sponsoring segments on TV for your favorite sports team could do the same thing. But people hate Facebook ads. People hate YouTube pre-roll ads. People do not want you to interrupt their YouTube viewing experience with ads. It actually makes them dislike your brand you sponsor a creator.
Especially small creators, it's like, “Hey, you're watching me because you like me. And I'm very excited to say that we have our very first sponsorship. We did this, we're a team, we got this.” And it's kinda like a “We did it!” moment, right? Like the creator got the bag. Fantastic.
Turner: You read the comments of those videos and the previews are like, “Congrats on the sponsor deal. You got the bag!”
Sean: Yeah. So I think it's less common to see those now, but the very early response was like, “Fuck yeah! The creator that I like that I've been with since day one, I'm on their team. We did it, we got the Ridge wallet money.”
Turner: Yeah, so do you see higher performance on those influencer marketing dollars than you do just typical paid spend?
Sean: Yeah, I mean this gets in the whole attribution question, right? So, yeah, they do typically have a higher last click in NorthBeam per dollar spent.
But the challenge is it's really easy to spend Facebook dollars. Anyone listening can spend $10 million today if they just type in $10 million in Facebook to spend. To spend $10 million on influencer ads is very difficult. That would take a team of 15 people or you would tolerate really shitty results.
Turner: Oh, really? Okay. Maybe you saw this tweet. There was a video where Mr. Beast was like, “I can't even do these deals anymore because my reach is so big that none of these brands can really afford to pay a fair price.” Have you seen that at all?
Sean: So there's a lot of competition in the $10,000 or $20,000 or $30,000 video range, right?
Turner: Views or dollars?
Sean: Dollars spent per video. It's actually way cheaper to sponsor bigger creators just because there's very few brands who can tolerate a risk that big. Mr.
Beast is the only creator who can charge seven figures for an ad spot, right? Any other creator, you can get a deal done for six figures. Every celebrity wants seven figures. So it's still a better place to spend dollars just because there's way less competition at the very, very top.
We've done deals with PewDiePie or Marquez Brownley or whatever else, and those deals, I mean, there's just very few brands who are willing to spend a hundred thousand dollars on one piece of content. The amount of companies that spend money on YouTube, the amount of companies that have the budget to get that done, is just very few.
So what he talks about in that video we've seen firsthand. We've never worked directly with Mr. Beast, we've talked to people on his Night Media team – a lot of times we've worked with other creators on Night Media.
We tried to work with Mr. Beast during probably 2020 or 2021, and we needed videos to go live in a six week period and they just couldn't commit to it. They were like, “Our production schedule is so crazy that like we just don't know when the upload will go live.” So that's why we didn't do that deal.
Turner: So is that something you might run into a lot if you're doing a lot of influencer marketing? Just lining up when the content hits with when you're expecting?
Sean: Most people don't have that problem. Most people will, can put a video out within a six week period. Or they'll work with you to get that done. For us, it was like, “Hey, if we're working with Mr. Beast, it needs to go live during Q4. It needs to go live from like November 15th to December 15th. Somewhere in there the video has to go live.”
We opened up to early November just because we know. Especially to get one of those videos. And they were like, “Yeah, there's no fucking way we can commit to that.” Most other people can find the time.
Turner: So then do you have any advice frameworks? Like let's say I'm trying to do my first influencer marketing campaign, what should I look for? How do I evaluate how to think about win-win for both sides? Can you just talk through us one of those scenarios?
Sean: Just find someone who actually likes the brand or the product. That's the easiest way to get started is find people who are one-to-one matches with your niche. Understand that doesn't scale, but when you learn to dance, you should dance with people who want to dance with you. Don't just jump into a fucking tango competition.
Let's just slow down a little bit and just figure out like the way to get it done. So if you're in the home goods niche, find very small creators on YouTube. Figure out how to work with them, approach them with a CPM deal that you're gonna pay them. Don't approach them with affiliate deals. Nobody wants your affiliate deal, they're a dime a dozen.
It's way better for them just to drive people to Amazon because people actually convert on Amazon. It’s so transparent on Amazon. They can track the whole thing. You have to give them money out of your pocket and just find a very small creator that you can learn the dialogue with.
Turner: I wasn't gonna ask about this, but you've had this hot take in the past. You're like, “Get on Amazon. Everyone should use Amazon.” A lot of people say don't go on Amazon because you know they steal your customers or whatever. They'll steal your product.
Sean: Yeah, that's, that's dumb. You should definitely be on Amazon.
Turner: Because there are a hundred million customers? Billions of people?
Sean: That is a 2010 debate being like, is it Amazon or D2C? What should you do? The war's over. Amazon has half of America shopping on Amazon every single day. If you're not there, someone else will get the customers.
Being worried that Amazon's gonna copy your stuff or whatever – they're getting rid of their private label brands. It was a disaster for them. They lost money doing it because they can't charge themselves ads, they've realized. It's just way better to have us compete with each other and us pay each other ads. The private label thing was actually a mistake and just made regulatory pressures that they didn't need. So that's all going away. Just give Jeff Bezos your money, just like you give Mark Z.
Turner: True. And anyways, it makes it a – what's after duopoly? You go monopoly, duopoly, .oligopoly. I think it’s more competitive. There's more of these massive things that fight over your ad dollar, so it's good for the brands.
Sean: Yeah, we're officially in the America is an oligopoly stage.
Turner: Slightly more beneficial, I guess.
Sean: Yeah.
Turner: This is when I actually first reached out to you because I had always been familiar with everything you guys are doing. You want to bring a creator in-house. You had this tweet that I thought was really interesting. Can you explain your proposal and what you're trying to do?
Sean: So you brought up, will creator brands force adoption quicker of online penetration? To throw it back to that earlier point you made, I don't think they're going to be a needle mover of online shopping in general, but I do think creator brands pose a real threat to legacy players.
Turner: Why is that?
Sean: People like people, people shop from people, people watch people – we are a social species, right? If I like a creator and they make a, a fucking olive oil or whatever, if I'm actually a fan of what they do and I wanna support them or whatever, I'm more likely to buy their olive oil than someone else's olive oil.
It's another way to stand out in commoditized spaces. They have reach and awareness that we have to pay for. It's like when Mr. Beast does a video, it gets a hundred million views. For me to get a hundred million views on YouTube, just buying ad space or whatever, it costs me a million dollars. So they have built in natural reach to, to promote their products.
And I think Mr. Beast and Feastables is a great example. Now, the flipside is most creator products suck. Nothing against them, it's just they're not product experts. They're content experts.
Feastables does break the mold where they actually have a product that people like and enjoy and it's in Walmart or whatever else. But most creators just do merch or they do products that have low margin because they don't understand the business of it.
Then they don't have like a team designed to scale in the way you have to. Being a creator product does not mean you don't have to run ads. It just means you get to start on step three instead of step zero, so what are we trying to do? I would like to find a creator who knows how to make content, who knows how to build community, who knows how to speak to an audience, and I want to integrate them inside of Ridge.
I would like to confidently say Ridge is a creator brand. We don't have that skill, so I have to buy that skill. Everything is build or buy, right? There's only two things you can do: build or buy. I can try to build it, which I'm not gonna…
Turner: You don't want to go do like TikTok dances. (laughs)
Sean: I don't have the energy or the charisma or anything like that. I'm not gonna be the creator. So we can't build it internally. We're gonna have to buy it. So I'm willing to pay a creator. I'm willing to give them equity, have them come in as a consultant to help us get better at making short form content, to help us build some sort of community also as a repeatable person in our ads.
They have to be like, this is our company. This is my company. I'm a piece of it so that people can identify them with it. That's what we're trying to do. If you're a creator listening and you've made it 30 minutes into the podcast or whatever, you can DM me on Twitter. I've got like 200 DMs, but I'm having like five or six serious conversations right now.
We're trying to find the perfect person. I have made an offer out there, so maybe the deal's gone, but the people I made the offer out to. Might be too busy. That's the other thing: creators wanna do everything right? So can they actually take a moment or a month off or three months off to come in there and actually integrate with our business? But that's what we're trying to do.
Turner: Do you think a lot of people are going to do the same thing? These creator driven brands?
Sean: I think it makes a ton of sense. I do think organic social companies will become table stakes. People point to Scrub Daddy or Duolingo or whatever. Like they're reaching consumers through organic content way more than their paid ads. It's a one trick pony, kinda like the Wendy's account. Like, “Oh dude, the Wendy's account roasted me.”
Turner: Great reply. Trolling Pepsi or McDonald's or whatever.
Sean: Yeah. And when every brand starts doing that, it ends up start being annoying, and then you have the meme “Silence brand!”, right? Like brand, get outta here.
There's a way. It'll have to be done authentically. But I do think the, the most interesting place to watch organic social in the future is brands integrating creators.
Turner: You've said before you think that influencer marketing is peaked. Do you still think that?
Sean: Yeah, but there's a ton of layers to that. The way platforms work are changing, so there's less opportunity for influencers. The reality is, and all the data points to this, there's more people creating content than ever before, and there's more people with less monetary incentive creating content than ever before when brands start becoming their own influencers, like Wendy's or whatever, or when there's part-time influencers like my wife.
My wife's an influencer, she has 50,000 followers on TikTok. She's not doing it full. She's not doing it to make an income. She's just doing it because she's fun and she likes she having fun with her audience. So there's more competition on the content side.
And then we've reached peak saturation and viewership. Like long form content on YouTube? Consumption's probably gonna go down and they're shifting the way the algorithm works to favor A+ creators, which are Mr. Beast, and then brand new creators or very small creators.
The entire industry's niching down because of TikTok, because of For You content. It wants to just show you the 10 things that you are gonna absolutely love. So it's just a really difficult time to be a creator and because of that, creators are getting less views. Because they’re getting less views, there are fewer dollars going into the influencer ecosystem.
And as paid media gets better again as Facebook and YouTube figures out how to live in an iOS world, less dollars will go into influencers, I think. So I think it's a difficult time if you're relying on brand sponsorships. I think they're gonna be harder and harder to get in the future.
Turner: I think the interesting thing I saw too was – I don't even know how to describe this – the “crypto effect.” I saw a lot of interesting things being done by the crypto companies at the peak.
Sean: Yeah, they fucked it up for us. I mean, at the end of 2021 into 2022, we pulled back a lot of our influencer spend just because FTX was spending an insane amount of money that didn't make sense. And now in retrospect we know it was stolen funds, but they would give a thousand dollars CPM and we're like, “It doesn't work. I'm sorry, creator.”
And the creator's like, “Hey, my videos worth $50,000 now.” I'm like, “They're not. I'm sorry to tell you this. They're paying that. We can't.” So we pulled out of a lot of deals just because they didn't make sense in retrospect. It was stolen funds and now those people are coming back to us.
There's still a lot of price memory where they want a lot more money for their videos. But we are one of the few sponsors left standing in 2023. Most people have pulled out all influencer budgets. We've activated more influencers in the past six months than ever befor just because our number stayed consistent.
This is how much we pay because we know it works. We sign a lot of people and then when their expectations break it, we don't sign anybody. And then when they come back down, we sign them again. So that's the way the market works for us.
Turner: You're like a value investor, but you're a marketer…a value marketer.
Sean: And we've had people we've sponsored for three plus years who love the relationship and love working with us and some people don't.
Turner: Well, that's one thing to think about as a creator. It’s almost like retention. Let's say I'm working with Ridge, I don't have to go out and find new sponsors. I integrate you into my content and I worked with you for like 10 years. I never had to find a new customer because you paid me a $100k a year and it worked.
Not very many people talk about how fucking hard it is to get sponsors as a creator. It takes a lot of time.
Sean: And also now that there's audience pushback on bad sponsors, it's like, “Oh shit. Okay. Ridge is a real company. They're not scamming anybody. Okay, we'll work with them.”
Turner: It's just a wallet. Hopefully the wallet is a good quality. Actually on that note, you have these reviews on your website. One of them, I think a guy got shot with a bullet the wallet protected him. Someone almost cut themselves with a chainsaw, but the wallet saved them. Are those real reviews?
Sean: Yeah, people can Google this. There was a police officer in Illinois who was in a shootout. I think the guy was a murderer. I think he was like a sex criminal or something, and the police officer shot and killed his person. But the guy was shooting him and the police officer got shot like four times.
The police officer said this and the doctor said this, that he would've died if he didn't have his Ridge wallet on him. The way that the bullet hit him, it would've went into his intestines and killed him or whatever, but the wallet stopped it. So that's it. That really fucking happened. And you know, maybe we should make wallet body armor or something,
Turner: Yeah. Ridge Armor.
Sean: Yeah it’s actually really common, the chainsaw thing. It happens every two weeks. So if you are watching this, don't use a chainsaw. They make special pants that you're supposed to wear with a chainsaw that has fabric so the chainsaw won't go into your leg because they kick back all the time. Buy those pants, dude.
Literally every two weeks someone's like, the wallet saved my leg. Imagine all the people that don't have the wallet. Like chainsaws are dangerous. I won't use one.
Turner: I think I've only used one one time andthey're cool machines, but yeah, don't want to be using them too often. Do you have a founder or CEO or business that you really look up to?
Sean: The way that we run our company is the same as the guy Matt Mochary. He has a book called "The Great CEO Within," he's like a CEO coach. It's the only business book I've ever read or recommend, but it's very good. There's no fluff. It's just straightforward. This is how you should structure things and these are the best ways for outcomes.
He's probably the guy I look up to the most. yeah. And then like for learning, Logan Bartlett has the best podcast besides this one that I'm on right now. And then for co-CEOs or brands that I'm close to – I don't have like a, a coach necessarily, but I have a bunch of group texts with Jeremy from Kitsch, David from Mary Organics, Todd from Planet Art.
All the guys doing my podcast with Jason, Matt, Mike – they all have amazing businesses, all doing nine figures all profitably. None of them raised money. We just coach each other. That’s how I find the best businesses and the best advice as quickly as possible.
Turner: And what's your podcast called again? Is it The Operators podcast? Is that what it's called?
Sean: Correct.
Turner: Go check it out. Also, check out Logan's Logan Bartlett's podcast is very good too.
Sean: Dude, nobody listens to it. I tell everyone to listen to it. I've DMd Logan Bartlett about this. It's criminal. He got like 4,000 listeners and I'm like, the Nelk Boys – no offense – have a million listeners. Logan Bartlett has Daniel Ek from Spotify in a two hour interview that's unfiltered. Go listen to that. It'll change the way you run your company.
Turner: Yeah. Do you have a favorite interview question when you're hiring and adding to the team? Anything you really focus on?
Sean: I mostly ask, why don't you wanna do the thing you're doing right now? We should spend a lot of time talking about what makes you dissatisfied with your current position, or what are you actually looking forward to change? And try not to get all the bullshit interview answers like, “I'm just looking for the next great opportunity.”
It's like, no, leaving sucks. Why are you actually leaving? Is it money? Do you not like your boss? Why don't you like your boss? Really dig in on that. Most people can do most jobs and I don't think there's anything special about what I do or what anybody else does. I think most people given the opportunity can do most jobs if they're willing to rise up to it. But understanding the motivation why somebody wants to leave is really important.
Turner: Is there anything specific? Do you guys hire for slope at Ridge? Do you hire for like previous experience? How do you think about that?
Sean: Yeah, all I care about is what was your exact last job, and do I think that last job helps you do this job better? I don't know where anyone who went to college. I'm just like, what were you doing? What was the exact last thing you were doing? And is that a skill I need? So that's what we look for.
Turner: Interesting. Yeah, I don't think we've gotten that answer before on the show. I like that one. What is the most successful company that you know of that no one else talks about?
Sean: I think some people know about this company, but Mary Ruth Organics, my friend David, runs it. Amazing company, several hundred million a year in revenue. Amazing subscription business, really helping kids get vitamins, a bunch of cool stuff tied to it. That's an amazing business.
And then this guy doesn't want me talking about him, but Todd at PlanetArt. All I'll say is one of the best operators on Earth. He does not want any publicity. He has a burner Twitter account. You cannot have any more information, but one of the best businesses on earth.
Turner: I won't follow up on that one. What was the other one called?
Sean: Mary Ruth.
Turner: And what is that? It's subscription kids medicine and vitamins? My daughters love their vitamins. Every morning they ask. It's just like gummies. It's like candy to them. They love it.
Sean: Yeah, yeah. Kids love that shit.
Turner: Yeah. Awesome. Do you have any questions for me at all or anything? It's a new question I've been asking the last couple shows.
Sean: Why do you do the podcast?
Turner: Because it's fun. You get to meet cool people. Would you have spent an hour and a half talking to me if I didn't have a podcast? Probably not.
Sean: Yeah, we could find a way to get that done.
Turner: Yeah. Also as a venture capitalist investing in startups, you need to do some form of content marketing and this is the one I use. I guess I use Twitter a decent amount, but this is just one that I think made a lot of sense for me. It's fun, I like doing it.
Sean: What was the last investment you did?
Turner: I invested in one earlier this week, which I just don’t know if I'm allowed to talk about yet. I just don't know what they want. The last public one is a company called Browse.ai.
There's no AI involved in the product. He's had that domain for a while. But it's a web scraper that doesn't use any coding. So if you've ever done any web scraping, you probably use Python and maybe you have like an engineering team that sets it all up.
This one, it's a similar concept to Zapier where it's just like anyone can use it, no code. You basically just click some things on the website and it just runs these automatic web scrapers. It's a combination of pretty simple things but also works really well.
He has a lot of directions he wants to take it. It was profitable, so it's a weird venture investment. But it fit in the bucket of a lot of things I like to look for.
Sean: Sick man. Well, thanks for answering my questions. Thank you for coming to the Sean Frank Podcast. Talk to everybody later.
Turner: Make sure you check out Sean's other podcast, The Operators. Make sure you check out Ridge if you need a wallet. And thank you Sean for coming on. This has been awesome.
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