Gabriel Flores 0:00

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the shades of entrepreneurship. This is your host, Mr. Gabriel Flores. Today I am here with Jake Rosenberg who actually started something that I probably need crit, because but before we get into crit, let's go and introduce the world to Jake. Jake, how are we doing?

Jake Rosenberg 0:18

Pretty great. Thanks for having me

Gabriel Flores 0:19

on. So Jake, give us a little background. Where are you calling in from? Tell us and then we'll get a little bit about the business.

Jake Rosenberg 0:25

Yeah, so I live in Southern California. I'm originally from New York, Long Island moved here went to high school in LA. I've been here ever since. So, yeah, I love it out here. It's not always the easiest to do business in California. But it turns out that my business is actually it's the epicenter in the US is Southern California. I did not know that when I was starting this. It's just kind of a happy coincidence. So yeah, I had a ski accident a couple years ago, and it it left a scar on my nose. And from that I was forced to learn about skincare as a regular guy who's you know, bar soap to wash his face and didn't really know much. I occasionally use Vaseline or moisturizer or something like that. I'm learning about actual products like hyaluronic acid serum concealer, that guys didn't even know they existed, it wasn't even a problem of are they too feminine or masculine or whatever was guys didn't know about them. So I started Crete to educate guys on products that work amazingly well for them and tell them a message that these products take 30 seconds or less to use, and they can change your skin. And if your skin looks better, and you look better, and you feel better, it's you know, it's not just a skin health thing. It's a mental health and wellness thing, we all want to be more confident. So it worked for me. And so now we got a lot of guys using our products, and it's going pretty well.

Gabriel Flores 1:38

Right, so So for the listeners at home, what is Crete? And how did how did you kind of get to that process of mass producing it?

Jake Rosenberg 1:45

Yeah, so Crete is a skincare company for guys. I mean, we do actually sell lots of women the sentiment of the company is that we kind of removed all of what what they call the beauty industry, which I don't even like that. It's called the beauty industry that's inherently not for guys, right? Makes sense. Every package was you know, frilly pink packaging, overpriced things. It was focusing on phrases and words like beauty, you know, beautification, contour brighten, you know, do you want your concealer shear? Or do you want it like, you know, high glossy, it's like, I don't know what any of this means. I want something that can hide a nose scarf on something, can I dark circles, I want a moisturizer that's not too oily or shiny, etc. So that's kind of why we started create, it's because I actually learned chemistry, I formulated the products myself, because I just there was the industry stuck in the 1980s. Whether it was from manufacturing to the outlook that they had on actually, you know, treating customers is real people and understanding the customer experience was just go to CVS and buy our thing. It's like, no, there's a lot, there's a much better way to do that. There's a way to find your tone at home. So you don't have to be embarrassed. There's a way to tell you about complex chemistry without it actually being complicated. So I started it, you know, from the ground up. Like I said, I learned chemistry, and I formulated our first few products. You know, Google and YouTube and a little bit of time, you can learn anything, it's one of the first things I get asked about is like, how did you teach yourself and, you know, time is a resource now that we're bigger, my time is more valuable. When I was first starting out, I had time, I didn't necessarily have funding, but I had time. So you can use that time and free resources. I Googled how do you formulate watched 50 videos on it started learning things, you know, an ionic versus cat ionic interactions. Oh, that's why this is filming, et cetera, et cetera. And you build up your knowledge base, after a month or two, I was making really great formulas. So you know, from there, you sell a little bit, then you invest a little of your own money, it grows. And so you kind of want to do it step by step, making sure that at no point you're wasting time or wasting money. And then once he kind of grows to a certain point, you might bring on investors, you might expand your product line, you might expand your marketing channels. And it's kind of like day by day, you just grind and you really build it up into something bigger than you look back at six months later. You're like, Oh, we're on five sales channels. And we have four products and we're selling a bunch of now. We've quadrupled our revenue, you know, things like that. So the aha moments really come back when you turn around. You're like, Oh, look at where we came from. But every day it feels like only a little steps. So yeah, there's no the only celebrations we have, I guess are like numerical milestones blank sold in a day blank sold this year. But to get there requires so many other little wins that people usually like to skip over that. It's like, you know, it took me 10 years to become an overnight success. Like I've put so much time and effort and built such a good team that's did the same. There were no easy wins. But you know, there were wins because you make them so that's kind of that's kind of the philosophy I have a lot of people like to glorify this as you know. They like to look at the star up once it's very successful and forget the 3am 4am Nights, six months in a row, no weekends, you know, that kind of stuff.

Gabriel Flores 5:07

Yeah. And that's exactly what we're trying to highlight on this podcast. Right? You mentioned the education going through YouTube university right and Google University. And that's, that's what I've been trying to tell folks. You know, I paid quite a bit of money to go to Syracuse University to get my masters. Not everybody needs to do that. There is ample amount of free education available and books on YouTube on the internet. Now, what was that moment for you what you're kind of going through this process that you said, you know, what, I think I have a product that I can actually scale.

Jake Rosenberg 5:43

Well, once we had the product that worked really well, I put it on and I was like, Okay, this mic dry skin is just gone. There's no irritation anymore. I can dry shave, like a crazy person, if I want and put it on, and there's no irritation. It's like, once I once I realized we had a product that good. I said, Okay, let me look at the numbers. Margins are crazy. Let me look at the fulfillment, it's pretty small $3 and something cents to ship to New York, it's like, okay, well, all the business things make sense. We can put more money into it, you know, as long as our marketing our marketing costs, you know, that's, that's the vast majority of what it costs to do business. If we are acquire customer for 30 bucks versus 50 bucks. That's a $20 difference, obviously. But like the the products, if we got them for free, would only save us a couple of dollars. So you know, they're relatively inexpensive. The cost is in the acquiring of the customer. And so that was when we, you know, first we knew we had a business because we had a product that people were buying and not returning, and they were repeat customers every month, then we realized we had a real business once we started hitting marketing efficiency, where we'd spend $1 and make more than $1. That's when we started scaling it. You know, you we spent plenty of money where I'd spend $1, make 50 cents. Next week, spend $1 make 55 spend it on make 60. But we did that with 1000 bucks a week. You know, now we're doing 10 times that way more than that, and so, but we hit that efficiency and grew, ya know? So that was it, it was basically you have to have a product that makes people want to come back to it without you needing to do anything. Yeah, that's That's it. You know,

Gabriel Flores 7:26

one of the things you mentioned, is the cost of per customer, right? You said you're at $50. Now at $30, can you give the listeners at home that might not be familiar with that phrase? One, what does it mean? And then how do you kind of measure it?

Jake Rosenberg 7:40

Yeah, so customer acquisition costs, right? If I want to tell someone about Crete, how do I do it, I have to run an ad somewhere. So let's say I'm running an ad on Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, something like that. You'll have what's called a CPM, which is a cost per mille. So an impression is like, I think I don't remember the exact definition. But it's something like, on a million people scrolling on Instagram, it'll put the ad in front of them. Now most people will scroll by as you do. So let's say the cost per mille is 50 bucks. I don't remember what ours is, to be honest, I have a whole team that handles it. They give me the week of the report. I'm on to future products in raising money and other stuff. So if our CPM is 50 bucks, that means we spent $50. So if that gets to 1000 people, great 1000 people saw it, how many people watched the ad? Let's say it's 100. Okay, how many people have that 100 click on the ad, that's a CTR click through rate. So let's say that's 10. So you went from a fifth now for 50 bucks, we got 10 people to click into the website, I think the rates I'm giving are not that great. I don't think you'd be doing so well, for only 10 people clicked in. But let me think I think it clicked rid of two or 3% is pretty decent. So at 1000 people you'd want like 20, or 30. So let's say you got 20 people, they click in now they're in your website. And again, this is the funnel, right? You lose people at each level of the marketing funnel. And so they have 20 people on your website, how many of them navigate to your product detail page, the one where you actually buy it? Maybe that's only 50%? Can you do anything at any of these levels? Can you make an ad that captures people's attention more stops them from scrolling, as we say, Okay, well, if you can do that, maybe you get 200 People watching the ads instead of 100. Now all of a sudden, you get 40 people on your website later in the funnel instead of 20. So that's, that's where you have to really pay attention to every level of this. So then they click out and then they add to cart and people abandon the carts. Do you have emails that tell them hey, you abandon this comeback? Here's an extra deal. They check out do you fulfill it quickly? So it's one of those things where you have to break it down into every single layer of that and there's different marketing strategies, different teams, different designs, but they all need to be kind of considered as one general customer experience. For instance, when somebody adds to our cart, they basically check out way higher than the industry standard, I'm not exactly sure why we designed a nice cart, something revolutionary, it just probably has something to do with our product page, they really like it. So when they actually make the decision to add to cart, they're intending to actually buy it, they don't leave. And so there's all these considerations up and down, up and down the funnel. So again, if I was to spend that $50, and get it to 1000 people and ultimately converted into to sales, let's say, Well, my products are 50 bucks each, then I'm getting $100, let's say the cost of goods is $10. Each and to fill it as another five, that's 15 and 15. It cost me 30. So I spent 50 bucks, the products themselves, and the fulfillment cost me 30. And I made 100, I made 20 bucks is the difference, I'm profitable. So that's it, it's pretty simple math, it's just you know, in that case, if I could get our click through rate did double, we would have made $200 still would have you know, would have cost us like 100 110. So we'd make $90. So that's it's, it's essentially a reasonably simple formula. It's just people kind of skip over. Every interaction is a chance for you to lose customers. So maybe don't have navigation on your website, take 10 steps, because then you'll lose people at every step. Yeah, maybe take people you know, maybe have a landing page where they can buy right on there. Like one one click purchasing, there's a lot of that's why those kinds of things come into play. It's because where are you weak in your marketing funnel?

Gabriel Flores 11:34

Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. Makes sense. And I'm being completely honest, I'm actually checking out your website. And it just has, we'll talk about the marketing and branding for a minute, but it just certainly has that masculinity filled with the color the shopping cart, I really do. I really do like it. But one of the things you're mentioning, before we get into the branding and marketing was venture capital, you mentioned you're out you have a team, right doing what they need to do while you're out currently raising funds. Tell us about your experience raising? Are you currently raising capital for the business?

Jake Rosenberg 12:08

Yes, I did. Um, so I stayed away from VCs and institutional investors like the plague. I self funded this for three and a half years, we're doing incredibly well, there's no reason for me to have some entity come in with their own set of rules, maybe they can get 10% of the company. And they basically act like they own 50%, they get seats on the board, they veto stuff, they'd want us to do certain things in the interest of revenue, instead of profitability and efficiency. It's just a different business model, their interests would not be aligned with mine and my teams. So we raised from angels, which was great. I've had a pretty solid Angel Network for a while. And that'll allow us to do what we're doing, you know, we grew like 8x, this year so far. Wow. So we can do that again next year, it's like, Great, then we'll go to institutions, because then I'll have leverage, I'll say, Hey, we're doing X millions a year, if you want it, like we do it correctly, we have a track record, right. But as far as institutional investors, they can make sense, accelerators can make sense, they just didn't, we had enough success without having outside funding, that we didn't need to kind of give up the company, essentially. And you know, they have a lot of power over us something nobody talks about as a VC or an accelerator or some sort of institutional money comes in, they have a lot of power over you, even if they didn't take over your voting rights, even if that because if you're raising another round in the future, let's say you're doing well, if they don't come back in that round, it signals to all other institutions that you're not worthy of investment. So they have quite a bit of leverage if they decide to not invest, or they might want better terms in order to invest the signal to other people that so I just I was not about to give somebody who doesn't necessarily care about our company and our people on our products and our attention to detail and quality and all those things, our principles, massive leverage over us when we don't need that we're doing great. So that's it, you know, there's no no such thing as a free lunch. If you're going to get a half million to $10 million check from somebody, they're going to expect something from you. So make sure you have very clear expectations and understanding of what they're asking what they're going to demand is not always it's honestly it's usually disproportionate. They usually want more than they're putting in they're not trying to be charitable to you their business.

Gabriel Flores 14:31

Yeah, yeah. You know, I think you brought up several great point, one for aspiring entrepreneurs to take a look about what your business and your your priorities and your goals and what you mentioned, what your business stands for. Because venture capitalists you know, they do there's some great ones out there don't get me wrong, but at the end of the day, they're their goal is to make money.

Jake Rosenberg 14:54

Yeah, look, they were the first people and you know, Peter Thiel, I don't know the exact VC from they were the ones that were first into Facebook and they helped Facebook grow into the behemoth it has become like, you know, everybody used Facebook until everybody used Instagram until everyone use tick tock like, but for a while they were Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, you know, and Oculus, and like all these, then everyone was using all their products same with Google, like, there's no there's not inherently evil, it's they're giving you money, they just they will, they're not gonna give you a multimillion dollar check and, and expects a lot in return, which is completely reasonable, they're giving you a ton of money. So I always tell entrepreneurs who I consult with, especially if they're seen stage, it's always easier to spend less than it is to make more if you can learn how to negotiate a contract, if you can learn how to build your product, if you can fulfill yourself for the first six months, year, year and a half, whatever it is, you have to do it because it's a lot easier to do that than it is to raise money or make the money. You know, it's the very rare exception where you have like, you know, Apple Computer where they're just money hand over fist your one, right, you know, you're usually a little more of a grind. And so if they're grind, spend less because guess what, if you have some money in the bank, get as far as you can with it, because then it's easier to raise money or, you know, we got to the point where we make enough profitable revenue where I was raising money so we could grow faster, it wasn't so that we could operate it was so that we could double or triple our size quickly. So it's a completely different. I was playing a different game a better game for us

Gabriel Flores 16:28

that Yeah. Now, is this your first business?

Jake Rosenberg 16:33

No, it's like my fourth and a half because I don't I tutored a lot in high school in college, but I don't know if I consider that a business. I was just mostly making a lot of cash.

Gabriel Flores 16:44

That's, that's been a side hustle right there. Yeah, I

Jake Rosenberg 16:47

mean, it was I was I had like an internship at Universal Music Group. And then I finished that at 6pm. And then I would go tutor from like 630 to 11:30pm for kids in summer school and doing SATs and that stuff. So I was exhausted and come back the next day the internship was unpaid internship. And I was making more than like the people I was working for, because I was making like a few 100 bucks every night tutoring. But yeah, I was one summer I was exhausted, awesome Apple stock and Amazon with that stuff. But so I don't know if I consider that. But I had a shoe company that I sold a fund and then a software company that did a lot of E commerce tools.

Gabriel Flores 17:27

Nice.

Jake Rosenberg 17:29

Yeah, it's been a bunch of things.

Gabriel Flores 17:31

Would you consider yourself a serial entrepreneur? Yeah.

Jake Rosenberg 17:35

But also, I don't know if the implications of that are, you know, there's positive ones, because maybe means you have experience that there's negative ones because I know a lot of serial entrepreneurs who basically can't actually execute and can't finish a project. So they're bouncing from project to project. So they always look busy. And like they always have a cool pitch deck, but nothing ever gets built. So I actually build the stuff and make them run successfully. But yeah, it's interesting. The stages of my experience, like it started with the software, then into the shoes and manufacturing. And then so this is a combination of software helped me with the sales funnel on the website, and those kinds of things in the shoes helped me with fulfillment and manufacturing and FDA regulations, etc. So you learn more from each business. And then at the end of the day business, if you you understand fundamentals of unit economics, marketing costs strategies, they're 80% the same, you know, yeah, yeah. In your industry in the shoe industry, like they were not dissimilar in the way you needed to run the businesses. Obviously, the marketing was going to be different and things like that, but, you know,

Gabriel Flores 18:41

make sense. Yeah. You know, one of the things you mentioned quite a bit as education, you were doing some tutoring, what is like one thing you would say like, was the most beneficial for you? from an education perspective.

Jake Rosenberg 18:58

I knew how to encourage myself to learn about things that were really shitty to learn about. I don't know what I mean. I don't know. Okay, so and that's how I tutored I used to I did not like English class in school, I read zero books, and I was just salutatory into my high school class. That's the second highest GPA so it's not like I was a bad student. I was like, the one of the top two students I read zero books in English why? Because the books they picked boring. I didn't like it. I didn't like the way they were. But I got an A in those classes because I figured out how to kind of gamify and beat the system I turned like the English class itself and getting an egg into a challenge to overcome. And so you know, whether it was this English teacher doesn't believe in me so I'm going to show him whatever was I have motivated kids in the funniest ways possible. One of the main ones was like a lot of boys would not like their English teachers, because like the English teachers would just like give them books they hated. And so I was like, How nice would it be to stick it in his face that like you get an A on a paper and Unlike that, like, Yeah, I'll show him was a motivator to get kids to do well in English, like, who cares? What gets them to read the book and whatever. So you have to figure out a way to get yourself motivated. Because, you know, half my job is operations. It's, I'm negotiating a contract with a new filler, right? That's not fun. Yeah, I am, I'm trying to figure out how to more out like, you know, automate our customer service. That's certainly not fun. There's a lot of things you have to do. But you have to motivate yourself to realize like, the result is so great, if you pull it off that, you know, you just have to get through it. So that would be the kind of thing from the educational perspective. I taught that to students, and I use it for myself.

Gabriel Flores 20:44

Yeah. And you know, speaking of contract, I think the worst acronym anybody can hear is RFP, just I'm going to issue another RFP, which is, which essentially is just request for proposal, right? So if you're dealing with contracts, right, when you do an RFP, you might be looking at a CRM or some type of software, and you're gonna go talk to a bunch of different companies, and they're gonna negotiate different prices. And it's, it is tedious. It's long and tedious.

Jake Rosenberg 21:10

Now, but it has done, it's one of those things has to be done. Yes, true.

Gabriel Flores 21:15

It has to be done. It's just things like, and I think that's what's important, too, is is folks that are listening, there's certain aspects of the entrepreneurship world that they're just going to have to do that nobody's going to do it for you, Jay kind of explicitly stated, you know, that staying up until three o'clock in the morning, four o'clock in the morning, doing fulfillments yourself during

Jake Rosenberg 21:35

that two month two to three days ago, because we just launched the second product yesterday, we just launched our second product, like literally Monday, so yesterday. And you know, we had emails with new ads that came out, we had website, we were building different pages, I was I was editing images, you know, like, we have a nice image of it. And I put the floating text, and the designer was busy, like designing a new page for my developers, so no one could do it. So it was between like about 1am and 2:30am. I was just like, I was updating the product images myself, like, someone had to do it. Yep. Everyone was busy. So I did it. I had to learn, you know, I've known for a couple years, but I had to learn sketch, which is like a Apple's Photoshop. It's like kind of a lighter version of that. Because this always happens. I always need to like I have an idea. And so I can design a crappy version of it and show my designer then she can go build it. So there's a lot of things that you need to acquire skills and you need to be just be the one that sits down and do it a lot of the time.

Gabriel Flores 22:30

Yep. Yep. Yeah. What has been the hardest? You know, you mentioned you've been an entrepreneur you've done a few times over now, what has been difficult about being an entrepreneur?

Jake Rosenberg 22:38

Well, when you first start something, you have no idea if it's actually going to be successful, you are a crazy person who's like, I'm going to do this, even though nobody else has done it. Here's the thing, everything that we see around us is that every single product, you know, the person who built the building, I meant that I'm going to build that building, and I'm going to get all the rules that like every single thing around you is that so it's obviously doable. It's just you have to you have to be constantly willing to learn because there are 100 things you need to know to run a business successfully. And most of them are not rocket science. You just need to know they exist in handle. Yeah, you know, for me, inventory management, that was easy, okay, we it takes us three weeks to produce 10,000 bottles, okay, we were at were we sell 10,000 bottles in six months, you know, whatever it is. Every little thing like that. You just have to be aware of those things. You know, legality and regulations is probably the one that people need to focus a little more on, especially when it comes to starting a corporation with partners or investors. Learn what you're doing, learn what you're signing, learn the corporate structure you're building, even if it's just a simple LLC, S Corp. C Corp, because those are the things that cause giant rifts have clear conversations with co founders about expectations, and equity and put it down on paper with clear understanding. There can't be vague vagueness and ambiguity. And so one of the reasons I'm a solo founder with creed is because I had partners with other things. And it worked great until it didn't work great until well, frankly, I did all the work and they stopped doing the work and then I got bitter and they like, Well, I still want 50% So there's nothing you can do. Okay, well, I can move on to new business.

Gabriel Flores 24:26

Yeah, yeah. And sometimes that's what you got to do. What What would you say has been easy? Has there been anything easy about this new venture with your experience as a entrepreneur?

Jake Rosenberg 24:38

Um it's easier to handle the ups and downs. It's not easy, it's easier. You know, we'll have revenue days that are insane and we'll celebrate you know, we'll metaphorically pop champagne because I don't do that unless there's like, wins over time. And then the next day, it's like for no reason. Sales are down you What and then their backup, and it's a roller coaster. And so I can handle that pretty well. It's been 10 years, and we do in this kind of stuff. So that's why I call it entrepreneur days where it's like four things went really well on two things went really badly. It's like, celebrate those things. But I also don't really have to worry about the bad things, because these other things, you know, we got an investor, but like Shopify broke, it's like, okay, it's another day since that's called Tuesday. So I would say that gets easier as far as any individual things, you just start knowing more as you get into it, you know, I can look at a website in two seconds and tell you 15 things to improve about it. You know, because I've just done a lot of website design. So things like that the skills you have that you've practiced get easier. You know, hiring people gets a little easier. I can smell BS easier. Yeah. You know, that kind of stuff.

Gabriel Flores 25:54

Now, what, what keeps you up at night is with this business that you're starting? What are the things that you think about other than, you know, having to edit a picture at one and 2am?

Jake Rosenberg 26:02

Yeah. You know, I'm working 24/7 These days, because we have an opportunity, we're growing things are going well, and to me, it's like a window of opportunity. If I don't work my ass off and get my team to, we're going to lose this opportunity. You know, like I said, we grew like eight plus x this year, like 800%. That's crazy. If we can do that next year, okay, yeah, I'm gonna be dead tired this time next year, probably bags under my eyes. But if we did that, again, it could be life changing money, you know, it's like, I can't, I can't not. So it's funny, because when things are going, okay, you can relax about them. And things are going really well, you got to really work hard to make them go well, and then capitalize on that. And things are going really terribly if we're really hard to fix them. So the only time you can kind of chill is when things are going okay. So, you know, things are going well or badly. You know, you need to do something, either do some 180 degrees what you're doing or do exactly what you're doing. So, yeah, things are going well. So it's just a lot of work, man. I mean, I don't hate it. I still own the company, I get the benefit of it. And so on those nights where it's like, oh my god, I'm so tired. Just push through. It's like, Yeah, I'm winning from this. So why wouldn't I?

Gabriel Flores 27:22

Yeah. Yeah. You know, one of the things I was mentioning was like marketing, right? So let's talk about who is your target audience? And what are they receiving when they purchase your item.

Jake Rosenberg 27:33

So we, I looked at basically this stuff and said, I think I'm not like an average dude. But I'm relatively an average guy. He's like a bar. So before I knew about facial cleansers that had blah, blah, blah ingredients, and you know, I use Vaseline or moisturizer, whatever I got at CVS, I liked smell mice, like I was lavender, I like it. Until I understood about hyaluronic acid serums, like the ones we sell. So I decided to market this brand to a guy like me are versions of it. So our ads use a call aspirational, but approachable models, you know, use real people real customers are like maybe on the 73 year old who looks 50 or a 40 year old who looks 30. But they look like you could look like them. You know, it's they're not GQ models, because I didn't think that was real. I want people to say, oh, I want to look like that. Another part of our marketing is this kind of a value equation when you're offering a deal. And it's like aspirational outcome, okay, you're gonna look younger, dry skin, no irritation, whatever. And then how hard is it how much time whatever is it to get there, and then also multiply that by the likelihood of achieving those results. So our promise is, you're gonna look amazing, you're gonna look younger, you're not gonna have any more skin issues. Our tagline is 32nd skincare, which means it's going to take you 30 seconds a day to get there. That's easy. And then the likelihood of it happening is before and afters five star reviews, those kinds of things. So when you put those together, someone comes to our site, they go, oh, I want that result. That's gonna, that's, that's all it takes. Okay, and I actually believe it'll happen. Sure, then on top of that, we offer a $6 trial instead of $39. So because we know you're gonna love it, so it's like all of that. And then I only pay six bucks with free shipping. And that's a deal that people just like they can't say no to. And that's is a book called 100 million dollar offers. And we kind of made this and then I read the book, and I was like, oh, what we did fits right in there framework. So that's kind of the marketing and then as far as the as we do video ads, they just need to kind of tell that story. It's not really rocket science. It's 95% user generated content. guy saying, Look, man, this is how fast it is to apply and he applies it. There's a 32nd part. It was look I mean 73 But my skin is looks young. There's the aspiration limits part. Here's 505 star reviews, there's the proof. It's like, you just kind of work on that new video. And I could talk about the nuances of editing those videos for hours, because we do them in house. But yeah, one thing I will say is, your first two, three seconds better grabs some attention, because people just scroll right by it. Very true.

Gabriel Flores 30:21

Very true. In fact, you know, what you mentioned that used you mentored, and you've done tutoring, what advice would you have for aspiring entrepreneurs?

Jake Rosenberg 30:33

Um, if you want to do this, understand, there is no security blanket, it's on you, which is both unbelievably amazing. But also, every single day, I need to wake up and figure out, what are we even supposed to be doing? And then how do we do it, I could say, Great, we're gonna launch tick tock next week, maybe that's a terrible idea, maybe we should be launching on Snapchat, maybe we should be doing Amazon, maybe we should just focus on Instagram and Facebook, maybe I should be trying to get into wholesale and retailers or subscription boxes, there are so many things you can do. And great, you have autonomy to do them all. But you also have to pick which ones to do and actually go and execute them. So that's what I would say is is, is you have to really stay focused, that's it, it's focused and discipline, you have to build things in a way that they can then stand on their own. And I'm talking about like systems or a team or a product, you know, system might be your customer service system, couple automated emails, a voicemail that puts them into the email, you know, something, build it. So then you can say, set it down, it's working, move to the next thing, because everything you'll build is brick by brick. But yeah, you know, it's not for the faint of heart, you need a lot of grit, determination and focus. There's ups and downs, even with this business, it's gone well now, but it took two years to even get the products out and to have some idea that we could even sell a bottle and all of that kind of like delusional. Yeah, we'll be a billion dollar company one day, we'll before you sold one bottle, right? Yeah, so but yeah, you know, turns out some delusions are completely true. I mean, we're selling a lot now, we're a lot closer to that then than we are when we first started. So it's, it's do that and then also, you know, just make sure you can support yourself and your family. It's it will take more money, it will take more time than you think it will eventually so just make sure you're not like quitting a good job with security without a lot of savings and then jumping into something that could like set you back a few years because I know people that that's happened to that's the reality of it. You know, not everybody is in a position to be an entrepreneur. It's not an easy thing. You're trying to create something out of nothing. That's it was easy, everyone would do it.

Gabriel Flores 32:49

If it was easy, everyone would do it man. There have never been truer word So Jake, folks that might be interested in hearing more about you maybe they want to buy the product where can they find you on the social web and working

Jake Rosenberg 33:02

on you know, we have our instagram facebook Tik Tok, it's all Crete KR E T dot CLU B or website is also Crete dot club not.com. It's crazy to carry to eat.cl UB, depending on when this airs our holiday sales like crazy right now, this kind of stuff, like, I wanted to go big, I wanted to see how many sales we get because our margins are great. So it turns out more than we expected. And I was actually just at a new manufacturing facility this morning, because we have to have to triple our orders. So it's nice. But um, yeah, so if this airs soon, you'll have that discount. If not check out the $6 trial bottle, it's literally a $39 full bottle, we just sell it for six bucks with free shipping, because we know you're gonna buy it, we know you're gonna love it. Like it knows, like, so many like such a high percentage of people come back for the second bottle, which is still discounted, like 22%. So that's it, we keep it pretty simple. We have two products now launching a third one in like, March and then five more other ones coming out next year.

Gabriel Flores 34:04

I like it. So this might air after they all do it. So what I'm going to do the holiday season is what I'm gonna do is I will actually reshare this information though, on the Instagram. So folks that are following me. If you are not, please follow me at the shades of E on all the social sites and we'll have create information on there. We'll also have this information on the newsletter. So if you're not subscribed to the newsletter, you can at the shades of e.com and then again, we'll have all your website information. So folks that are interested, get a hold now do you have Are you on social media as well?

Jake Rosenberg 34:35

Yeah, we're on Instagram. We are on Facebook and we just started launching our tic tock stuff. We're not doing any YouTube stuff yet. We don't have really long form content. It's just you know, we did really well on Facebook, Instagram and then tic TOCs next Yep, we our demo was 30 plus and so now that we're extending into like 25 Plus we're like okay, we got to get to tick tock a little bit more. You Yeah,

Gabriel Flores 35:00

yep. I'm just kind of ventured in the Tiktok. world. i The biggest audience for my podcasts, oddly enough is LinkedIn.

Jake Rosenberg 35:08

Okay, I mean, that makes sense. Yeah. LinkedIn marketing for us is not going to be a thing. No people will mix professional courses. And the ads are ludicrously expensive there. So it's like, we're not going to sell you don't sell consumer products on LinkedIn. We looked into it. And it was like, no, yeah. That platform is so bad. Snapchat is a little too young of an audience. So we like Pinterest is interesting. When we launched the females in a year or two, we'll probably try Pinterest. Anyway, I'm just saying that because more marketing advice,

Gabriel Flores 35:38

no, I personally enjoy it, I'm probably going to send you my website, and you can tell me exactly what I need to do. Because I'm trying to rebuild that thing myself. I've never done any classes. I'm like you, I'm going to YouTube University. Build it through Wix just trying to get my understanding.

Jake Rosenberg 35:54

People like to talk about that. But like, I am very passionate about redoing our education system. And like, I'm not going to say, Okay, let me redo all the schools. I'm just going to start with at least my experience, I've taught myself a lot of things at a professional level music editing, video editing, chemistry, a lot of the business things I know completely taught myself. Because it's just about diligence. Oh, I don't know what ROI is. Google it. Oh means return on investment. I don't know what row as is. Oh, it's return on adspend. Okay. It's it's his years of googling things and making sure I care enough to remember them. And then all of a sudden, you're competent business person and can start companies. Yeah. Okay. All that's free. It's all free. It was not free his time, attention and direction, you need to know the direction of things you need to look into. But yeah, a lot of audiobooks and audio book for 12 bucks or whatever on Audible. That could be a semester of college right there. Yeah, yeah.

Gabriel Flores 36:49

I literally earlier Google that. Don't be ashamed to Google folks. I literally Googled early SKU, because we're about to launch.

Jake Rosenberg 36:57

That was I didn't know what that was after I launched a company. Yes, Q. I didn't, I didn't. And I was in a contract. And I was like, this is a typo. I remember that. I'm the same boat, man. And now it's like, it's like second nature.

Gabriel Flores 37:09

Yeah. Because it's so important, right? It's like, kind of monitored. So yeah, I'm learning and I folks, listening, I really hope this podcast has acts as a learning tool for you as well, because that's, that's the premise of it. The goal is really to highlight these entrepreneurs stories, and really focus on what they're doing. And hopefully, you know, getting some advice, giving some free advice to you as the listeners, and hopefully some inspiration. You know, as you said, you know, this isn't for the faint of heart. But people can you can do it, there's people that are willing to help you to do it. Whether you want to go the venture capital route, Angel route or self funding, there's always going to be help along the way.

Jake Rosenberg 37:49

Yeah, and there's, there's a lot of resources, one thing I found, is share your ideas, because no one's gonna steal them. Someone said this to me, when I had my software company, I think I was like, 24. And we'd built this app. And I was so worried about telling anyone who said that they'd steal, they said, If you walked into Mark Zuckerberg his office right now and pitched it to him, he tell you get out of my office. If you actively tried to have Facebook or Google steal your idea, they wouldn't because they don't have time for yourself. You know, so someone said that to me. I said, Oh, that's probably right. Okay, the guy, my neighbor one telling her with my friend or whatever, they're not gonna steal it. But they would have to do is start a company believe in it so much, you're going to spend 2345 years and money, like share your idea. Because only by getting feedback from people, will your idea actually become something useful for people? You know, feedback is the best thing and like, your idea is not that that brilliantly different than everyone else's. Obviously, there's like a patentable part, maybe keep that a little secret. We're successful because I tell ideas to people and I go, that's really stupid. I go, Okay, I won't do that. Yeah, well, that's great. And I build a small version of it. And then they'd say, okay, that's really good. But I don't like this part. And then whatever. And after a bunch of feedback cycles, all of a sudden, you have something that everybody likes.

Gabriel Flores 39:05

Yep, very true. Learn, learn to fail fast, right? You don't you don't want to be given fool's gold and make sure when you are inquiring with individuals, you're not just inquiring with people that are gonna give you the answer you want, right, truly go after the consumer that you're targeting.

Jake Rosenberg 39:20

It's funny because people use that phrase, fail fast. And something about as always, just bugged me because it's like, learn to fail small and when fast to me, it's like it's not necessarily failing fast. You don't want to fail you, it's totally fine. If you do fail, you're gonna fail a lot. But keep the fields small, keep them small and fast. And then also the winds small and fast, and then just keep doing the winds and stop doing the fails. I stopped the fail fast. It's like, that leaves out such a big part of the picture. Like, you know, because then everyone's just trying stuff and it's not working. It's like, but I'm failing fast. It's like, okay, great. Well, how about some wins? Our wins are not giant. They're not like Oh my god, we launched his product, we're a different company, it's like, we have a new landing page in our marketing is 767 percent more efficient the next week. It's like, Wow, that's great. Now new emails and other 4% more efficient, we launched a new product or average order values went up $6, it's those wins it stack up that take you to like 200% return on adspend to a 400% over a year and a half, and then you're printing money, you know. So so that's my thing. It's like, the wins are not going to be monstrous. Maybe if you clear a check for a million dollars, that's a big win. But like the day to day is small wins, they just they add up.

Gabriel Flores 40:36

It's very true. I'm not gonna lie, I got a check for 500. And I was ecstatic. I'm like, we're making a revenue, we're not profitable. We're making a revenue.

Jake Rosenberg 40:45

Those are wins. Those are big, okay? That's a different thing. That's like an emotional one, too. I celebrate those because you need those. Because at the end of the day, for a company like us, it's this is not going to change my life for another year or two until it's big enough where I'm going to take a salary that's crazy or crazy. So I need to take the winds when we cross blank revenue a day or this product is launched, we celebrate those wins for sure. It's just like, the launching of a product is Okay, turn on the website. It's like it's not this dramatic thing is a fireworks going off. It's just like one day we're selling another thing. Okay, a website just looks 10% different.

Gabriel Flores 41:23

Right has a shot button on it now. Yeah, exactly. It's

Jake Rosenberg 41:26

like, okay. I think nothing dramatic happened. It's like, Oh, great. So you have to celebrate those things. But yeah, I mean, again, focus, discipline and prioritization. Just figure out what you have to do every day. That's that's the thing that people don't usually get, right. They spend a lot of time working on things they think sound good, but aren't actually going to deliver value. Very

Gabriel Flores 41:47

true. Jake, thank you so much for joining me on the show. I really do appreciate it for those folks listening. Again, you can subscribe to the newsletter at the shades of e.com or you can follow me on all the social sites at the shades of E Thank you and have a great night.

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