 We were in that hustle phase, just grinding, trying to get it off the ground. And then we had our friends helping. We were doing events and expos. I remember buying like 5,000 wristbands from China that we were trying to use. Man, we did everything wrong. Merch, merchants, like that. T-shirts. We had this cartoon character made. We did a lot of like, you know, entrepreneur stuff that wasted a lot of time and money. Really early on. And then ultimately it failed and it led Kim into kind of a really dark place. This is Startup to Storefront. Today's guests are Kim and Tim Lewis, co-founders of Curl Mix, a brand focused on clean beauty hair products for, you guessed it, Curly Hair. This is the second company that they've started together, but they'll be the first to tell you that their first one was a failure. Still, they grew from the experience and attribute the success of Curl Mix to the lessons learned from that first failed business. As you'll learn in this episode, Kim and Tim are innovative, driven, and work exceptionally well together. We've had a few founders on this show before who are married, and it's always immediately apparent why both the marriage and the company are successful. Kim and Tim perfectly complement each other's skill sets and have such an infectious energy that it's a no-brainer why they were chosen to appear on not one, but two TV shows. So listen in as we cover everything from how they funded their first company on Tim's winnings from Who Wants to be a Millionaire, how they grew Curl Mix's sales from $140,000 to $1,000,000 in only one year, and why it's so important for them to be the entrepreneurial role models they never had while growing up in Chicago's South Side. Now, back to the episode. Welcome to the podcast on today's show. We have the founders of Curl Mix. Either one of you can take this, just give listeners what is Curl Mix? Curl Mix is a clean beauty brand for curly hair. We focus on women who want to wear their hair in its natural curly state. We usually, at this time, I usually ask you how you got started, but I read you're a little bit about just your bio, the About Us page on your website, and there's a very interesting information on there that I kind of want to open with. Let's just start on, at what point of your life did you guys really want to dive into entrepreneurship or want to want to start a company? It might have not been Curl Mix, but just wanted to jump into entrepreneurship? I will say that I am not a natural entrepreneur, not in any means. Kim is the risky one, the entrepreneurial one, I think, but it started for us in college. I didn't really even consider entrepreneurship until my senior year in college. I think I read the four-hour work week and I was like, I think like a pretty easy life. Let me, you know, let me try this out. And that's when I got interested in it, but even then, I'm still, I still wasn't like built to be an entrepreneur. I'm a natural procrastinator at heart. I overanalyze everything, you know, and Kim is just like, you know, done is better than perfect. Let's jump into it and we'll figure out the details. So, yeah. And I think we first kind of got introduced to it at a professor who came to teach my business entrepreneurship class, Entrepreneurship 101. And he had took the kids on like a trip abroad and he bought like a Ferrari in Italy and had a ship back. And I was like, where did they do that? I was like, how does, well, how do you have that kind of money? And then I remember asking how it's such an interesting flex. And then I said, do you have your PhD? Like, you know, you're teaching a classic. Oh no, I'm a guest lecturer. I was like, what? I was like, I was like, you know, when you're successful entrepreneur, you get to skip all the lines and you don't have to follow any of the rules because they invited him back to teach. He did not have a PhD. He buying cars overseas, shipping them back. And so that was my first introduction. But then after that, in senior year, we had a class, we went to a talk on social entrepreneurship. And they were talking about like apps and tech stuff. And so at the same time, I was taking my first IT class and my teacher was like, you're going to build an app. I want you to wireframe it. And so that was our first, just hearing about entrepreneurship. And then we started our first business, which is a social network for natural hair. It also really failed. We did it for about a year and a half, but we didn't make any money. And the first shift you got, it was for like, space on our website. Yeah, so one ad of the year and a half, we were in business. We sold one ad for $250, which is like, after we had sunk probably $25,000 into the business. It was an ad that we were doing. Yeah. And so the way, I can tell you about how that got started. We left school 2013, summer 2013, got married, moved into our own place. Kim had a full time job. And then I had an internship. I didn't get the full time offer for my internship. So she was the only one working. And at that point in time, she realized that she hated her job, her full time job. She would come home crying, would be stressed out every single day. And she's like, you know what? I want to do the app business that we had thought about when we were back in school. And I was like, yeah, Kim, let's go for it. You know, what do you need? Like, we need about $25,000 to get it built and get it started because we weren't tech people. And so I was like, well, we got to have to save up for that or figure something out. And then I was like, no, you're going to go and who wants to be a millionaire? And then he was like, that's ridiculous. And I was like, no. That's not a linear train of thought by any means. I was like, no, you're nuts. That's not a way to raise money. There's just a lottery. They're not going to pick me. This is a waste of our time. Let's try to like get a loan or raise VC. That summer we were watching a lot of who wants to be a millionaire and Kim would answer every single question right. Every single question. Yeah, you ever said next to somebody who knew the answer to every one of those questions? Yeah, for sure. So I was like, okay, you have to go on this show. So I looked up how to apply and I saw the tapings were in New York. I like booked him a ticket. Yeah, let me be real. I'm not telling the details. I came back home from work one day I walked in, she didn't get a hello. She was like, I booked your ticket to who wants to be a millionaire. I got you the hotel. The tryout is at this time. You're going. It wasn't a conversation. It was a commandment. So I was like, yes, dear. Then he got on the show and he ended up winning $100,000. So really 80 acts of tech. Wait. So on the show, so when you get to the $100,000, right? So did you answer it and then you got, did you get the phone a friend? What lifeline are you on? Give me a sense of where I definitely skipped all of that because that was like maybe two months between getting on the show and actually getting the check. So yes, actually, we're skipping out on a pretty crazy detail. So before even getting on who wants to be a millionaire, we were trying to win pitch competitions with that idea. Okay. We didn't find out we got who wants to be a millionaire until we had lost a pitch competition. We came in fifth place and weren't going to move on to the finals. Right after we got the news that we had lost the pitch competition, it was at a conference in Houston. Then we were out in the hallway. They was like, what happened? It's like, we just found out we're going to be a who wants to be a millionaire. People just lost. Is everything okay? I was like, no, it's cool. We're out of here. So I got on the show. I answered the first, out of the first 10 questions or so, I answered eight of them and I use a couple lifelines because my goal really was only to win $25,000. I was playing really conservatively. I was like, Kim just needs $25,000. Let me just try to get $25,000. You know, trivia is really random. You never know if you're going to know it or not. So I'm trying to win $25,000. So within the first four or five questions, I got in the $25,000. I think I was up to $64,000 before I used my first lifeline. And so I was like, I was trying to play really, really conservative because I knew that after 10 questions, you get a guaranteed $25,000. So my whole goal was to make it through the first 10 questions. After we did that, started using all the lifelines, just trying to keep going. But I actually walked away at the $250,000 question after getting the $100,000 question correct because I didn't know it. I can give it to you. It haunts my dreams. Tell me what that question was. It was like the main character of The Catcher in the Rye appeared in a magazine, I believe it was Variety Magazine, in an article a year prior to the publishing of the book. What was the name of the article that the character appeared in? And I was like, yeah. And it had all kinds of answers. It had like, this sandwich had no mayonnaise. Which was the correct answer. No idea. That was all kind of random stuff. How random is that question? I had no idea. So I was like, no, I didn't, I wish I would have saved one lifeline to skip that one because I think I could have gotten to the million or half a million. But $100,000 was cool because that's outside of $250,000. That's the one that they give you completely upfront. Just get a check for $100,000. So that was really cool to get like six weeks later in getting the check in the meal. And then we didn't cash it for like the first two weeks. We were like, I don't know. I don't know what to do. I've never seen this amount of money. It's going to bounce. ABC is just going to bounce a check. Yeah, we're two kids from the south side of Chicago. I'd never, never seen that many zeros anywhere before. So it took us a little while to cash it. So it seems like it was a pretty straightforward point to walk away with that $100,000 because you had already forexed what you had originally set out to go there for. Because you know, this was, this was not just some arbitrary, oh, let's see, we can make some money. This was your attempt at fundraising for your company. So when you were sitting in that hot seat, was there ever a moment in your mind where you were like, just take a guess and maybe this will, like before you got to the 100,000, was there a moment where you, where you thought to walk away earlier than that because you had already surpassed the 25 K goal? Actually, no, the first, the first few questions, I knew them. There was one that I skipped that I really did not know. You could get like two skips and a 50-50 back when I did it. And so I skipped one question that I really didn't know, but I knew the rest. And then I used a, the 50-50 on one that I thought, like I knew that I knew, I said it, I said, this is what I think the answer is. I've read it somewhere in an article, but I wasn't sure. It was like the maximum eight, what social media platform has like the maximum age set at 99. And I was like, I think it's Facebook because there was like an article about a hundred-year-old person being ineligible for Facebook. But it was like, I was like, there's no way that that's real, but because, and I didn't know what Instagram was at the time. And I was like, maybe Instagram I'm pretty sure it's Facebook. So I took the 50-50 and then they eliminated Instagram. So I was like, okay, yeah. So it's definitely Facebook. But we said that if you had, I was like, Tim, if it's anything under this, just go for it. We had a certain amount. It was 80,000, just go for it. It's okay if we don't get it. If you lose that, but if you get to a hundred, if you get to a hundred, don't take anything. You know, one thing you mentioned at the beginning around the Ferrari. So for me, when I was a kid, I had like, everyone's got like a rich uncle or something that at some point, right? And I remember getting in the BMW, I might have been like 10 years old or something. And it was a seven series and I was in the backseat. And for the first time in my life, I grabbed, you know, the oh shit handle and I grabbed it and I'm just like holding on to it. And then I let it go. And in every car I had been in prior to that moment, the thing just slaps up. It goes, and it hits the car. And for the first time in my life, I let it go. And it just, it just gradually goes up. Like there's a little air piston in it. And I was floored and I thought, what does this guy do? How do I replicate that money so I can buy vehicles like this? And it was like this moment in my life, where it was like, I just need to piece it together, whether it's education, whether it's entrepreneur, whatever it is, I am now following this, this thing because I want this car. And similar to the Ferrari story, it sounds like, right? Where it's like the seed of, oh, you're a guest lecturer. Oh, you don't have a, yeah. And these things are like super powerful motivators at an early age, at least for me. This exposes you. Yeah. You know, we both grew up on the south side of Chicago. They're almost no entrepreneurs in our family or in our network that we knew prior to, like, you know, prior to learning about it literally in school. So there weren't a lot of like examples that we could choose from. It was always, you know, somebody on TV and this is kind of unrealistic. Who are both like, let's get jobs, you know, go to college, get good jobs, you know, maybe one day you'll save enough to be rich and take vacations and all that stuff. But like, after we had these experiences, we're like, you know what, for Kim, entrepreneurship was the only way I could survive being in the office. She couldn't. It's kind of the antithesis of who she is. It's not even, no, I didn't know it was just me, my manager, my first manager was terrible. He told me, I'm the same way, Kim, I'm right there with you. Literally, like, if you guys hired me today, you'd fire me tomorrow. You'd say, Diego clearly thinks he can run this way better than anyone. And that's at any level. You could hire me to be a janitor and I'd be like, everything's clean, but let me, let me take it. Let me, I look at the whiteboard and I saw some, some ideas that aren't really clicking. And it's just a problem. And you know, I've learned that about myself pretty early on where it's like, if I'm not in control, it's not usually a good thing. My manager would tell me how bad I was in my job every day. I wasn't bad at my job, but he didn't like training. He was training me to be his supervisor. So he told me that I sucked for three months every single day. Literally, you're terrible at your job and you're never going to make it here. And I was working at like a grocery train at trains. I'm like, I definitely could have done the job. You know, he just, so that I was, I can't say him. And that's when I started looking into entrepreneurship. Well, good for you to, for you to notice that and not get down on yourself and be like, no, this dude's crazy. It's definitely not me. So let's go back. So what a crazy story. You said $25,000. You go on, who wants to be a millionaire? You get your $100,000. You get your check in the mail. You hold on to it. At some point you cash it. Now what? Now you go right into the app building. Yeah. So we went into, well, no, I was still working at a, so I worked for the job. I was making 70K a year. I left that job before we got the money. So there was about a month ahead. Yeah. The Monday, the Monday we came back from who wants to be a millionaire. We hadn't got the money yet. They chewed me out for going. They said, because I ended up getting to them to be like five minutes before it started and they wanted me to be an hour early. We drove back from New York overnight to get her there five minutes late for her Monday morning meeting and she got in trouble. I got cheated. I was like, you shouldn't have went. They were like, I miss dinner dates with my wife all the time. And I was like, this is not a dinner date. I was like, you know what? It's okay. So I ended up leaving. And then we took about $15,000 of that money and we bought the camera. We put something towards the app getting built. We spent a lot of money with the developer who kind of played us really because we could have just built the site on a WordPress for like 300 bucks. We wasted about $7,000 on that first version. It wasn't seven. Tim was making up all the details, y'all. We spent about $3,000 because I didn't think I was in India. And then after we had spent that money, I paid the time. You have to factor in your time and energy, all that. It went into it. But we had bought the camera because we were doing that. We were a content site. You're gonna be supposed to know we're good to make content. So we were making a lot of content. So we ended up investing maybe $15,000 and then ended up making this out on WordPress like 300 bucks. And then at that point when I was still working this time and Tim was working at Starbucks. So even though we had to check, it wasn't like we weren't working. We were still like working our jobs. We worked at a photo studio. I worked at Starbucks. I was doing $825. She was doing $10 an hour. Yes. So we were in that hustle phase just grinding, trying to get it off the ground. Yes. And then we had our friends helping. We were doing events and expos. I remember buying like 5,000 wristbands from China that we were trying to use. Man, we did everything wrong. Merch, merchants like that. T-shirts. We had this cartoon character made. We did a lot of like, you know, watchpreneur stuff that wasted a lot of time and money really early on. And then ultimately it failed and it led Kim into kind of a really dark place. But at that point in time, I had gotten a new job making like 150k. And so we were in a good space, but the business was failing. And so she wanted something different, something more to do. And that's when we kind of developed the idea for Chrome Mix. So after the Natural Hair Academy went belly up, we knew that the next business that we're going to start needed to, number one, make money on day one because we weren't going to do any more like ad companies, content, all this stuff, do a lot of work without getting paid for it right away. And then the second thing, it needed to be basically product based. So it can be divorced from our time. So whether it was a productized service or a product, we wanted to make sure it was divorced from our time because we didn't want to have another repeat of that first failed business. So we tried to learn as much as possible from that failure. Honestly, I went to business school as someone who went to business school and fought at the whole time. It was dumb. I was like, why am I here? I'm wasting money. I would literally like, if I was in business school and you said, why are you here? I would say, it's a cop out. I would literally, like I knew it was a cop out. I knew I was in a place in my life where I had, I had just started a company. And so it was kind of like, you know, the way I put it in my head was, well, I'm in business school and everything I learn, I can sandbox on my company. That's like how I rationalized it. But honestly, it was just a cop out. It was a complete waste of time. And I had, you know, it's weird. I had classmates that would come up to me and say, you know, 95% of startups fail, right? Like you're going to fail. Like they classmates of mine. And I would just always say like, one, for sure, you're a hater and I'll never talk to you again. Like you've just told me what camp you're in. Thank you. And two, it's like, it's really important to know that you create your own data. It's super important in any, in anything, right? It doesn't matter how you grew up. You know, it doesn't matter anything. It's like, you create your own data. And this is, you know, that's really why like I'm against, I'm against statistics because they can really play a role in your head. Like, oh, like my mom's a single parent. And so it's like, I'm a Latino single parent guy, you know, if I look on the map, I'm at best a GM at McDonald's, according to national data. And there's a problem. There's an inherent problem with that because I think it does play with people's psyche. So for me, I was like, you got to create your own data. At what point in terms of your app, did you know it failed? Was it just like nothing was happening? Or like, what was the signal that this isn't working? We basically realized we were competing with Facebook and Instagram. And so we had, we realized that women love to talk to, they love to showcase their hair, not talk to other women about their hair. So it's like, I don't want to connect with you about my problems that I'm having or this condition or whatever. I don't necessarily even want product recommendations. What I want to do is make my hair cute and take a picture and show you how cute my hair is and whatever. And so we couldn't get people to come back every day. And we were at over 1000 users or whatever on the social network, but it wasn't good. Yeah. I mean, if you think about, so I think context is important here. So we're talking 2013, 2014. At that time, the app store was a brand new thing, right? I mean, Blackberries were still, like they held market shares still at that time. And so for you to have a thousand users on any social media app, I mean, that's pretty good at that time. If you had told us that back then, we probably would have kept going. And we didn't make no money. And that was the other thing that I was like, we don't, this is not a revenue generating business. I can hire people or even feed myself with this. Tim will just happen to be making a six-figure job or working on a six-figure job while I was doing it. And that's the only way that it allowed me to do it. But we also realized we're going to have to make content to keep coming back every day. I mean, I need to have something 365 days a year. And I was like, if I can't pay people to have them make the content, this is not a business. And this doesn't really work. And so I either need to do one, get more ad revenue so that I can pay people to make content. But even still, that's not a lot of money for a lot of work, you know, content for every day of the year. So I was just like, you know what? I need to come up with something else. And I just closed the business. And at that time, I had learned like photography, web design, like you learn so much, you know, so it wasn't a complete wash. And I also made a ton of connections in the hair industry, so I was producing content for professionals in the industry. So stylists and influencers or whatever. And so I was like, so I had a lot of education about the industry and connections at that point. And so at this point, you think, all right, cool, we need to create, you're solving for a lot of the things that you are trying to like, you realize these things don't work according to this business, let me go ahead and solve for them. And so now you're entering a product that people can use all year round. So it's not seasonal. And what was the first iteration of it? And how did you even come up with it? So we were watching, so funny enough, I was made, I was a DIYer back in and do it yourself first. I was making products for myself for my hair. And I was buying raw materials from Whole Foods and like coming home and mixing them up. Just destroying my kitchen. I'm the chef. I really love your relationship, you guys. It's amazing. From all over the place, you hate it, it goes, just leave it out, it goes bad on the counter. Whole Foods is not cheap at the time either. Like, what? Whole Foods has never been cheap. You got $300 and you don't even like what you made? And so I was doing that and we saw an episode of Shark Tank where the lady was doing like organic cookies, but she was putting everything pretty packaged like ready crocker in a box and you could make it yourself and know where everything came from, knew it was organic and it was simple and a fail-proof recipe. Yes. So I was like, I wonder if anyone's doing this for hair because I would totally buy this. It's like 30 bucks. And then I looked online and I couldn't find anybody doing it. And I was like, wait a minute. This is probably dumb. If this 2015, this box doesn't exist. And there at the time there were about a thousand subscription boxes, I was like, okay, I'm not going to do it. And then Tim was like, no, Kim, like, you should just give it a shot. We launched it. I sent one box to my cousin and I was like, see, tell you this is dumb. Nobody wants this. And then you didn't launch it right. Yeah. Just try again. And so it's funny at the same at the same point in time that she decided to launch it. I just read, I believe it was Ryan Holidays, like Confessions of like a Media Manipulator. And I was like, you know, he has like a whole formula about how you might want to try it again. But you said Airbnb can relaunch seven times, surely Chromebooks can relaunch twice. So I was like, fine, I'll try it. I ended up reading like Robert Childani's book, Influence. So how did it win Friends and Influence Equals? That was another one. And I applied those six principles to our website. And I also applied those six principles to pitching journalists. And I looked up, how do you pitch journalists, found some journal, found some templates and adjusted them. And then also went to bustinlo.com to figure out who the top journalists were in my category, so for DIY in the last six months. So found the top people, read a few of their pieces of article, use a template, pitch them with also like a custom intro about the work of theirs that I had read. And then we ended up getting refining 29 on when it's our for our launch. So everybody who had told me, no, that was a media company. I went back and traded up the chain and then say, hey, refining 29, that's coming our launch, but hey, for you to miss it. And this is like, refining 29, like a million followers at the point. So like now they're like, we're gonna act. And then they all said yes. So we're gonna be like seven media people to cover our launch. And we ended up selling like 100 boxes on that first day. And that led to a year of revenue in 2017 for 130,000 and the following year 140,000. But we realized we weren't growing. And that is when we were like, okay, we're not going like a subscription box company should grow. And we realized our box was novelty and not necessity. And then also a lot of the DIY companies that were boxes in the industry and started failing or going bankrupt. And I was like, there's not enough profit here. And I thought that the profit on our box is only 30%. But we're competing with the hair industry that can sell a bottle for $20 $30. And their margins are 70 80%. There's never I'll never be able to catch up. And so we ended up realizing that we needed to pivot. And that's how we land on our flaxseed Joe, which is our hero product and the thing that we do differently than everybody else. And you say we landed there, but Kim took there's a lot to get to that to that flaxseed Joe because we were we tried making products on our own, we just couldn't get the flaxseed Joe right. But it was the number one seller like by far people loved it. We just couldn't figure it out because it's really volatile recipe. It goes bad within like three days start to growing mold. And so we couldn't make it shelf stable like a cosmetic product needs to be. So my wife she's seven months pregnant with our first baby at this time. She spent a month in the kitchen on her feet just grinding out recipes over and over again every day. 50 batches. And so we could got something that was stable that we could scale and do more than 60 in a pot we could do 600, you know, with the machine. And we launched it to our audience and we have so hundreds of matter of hours. And I'm like, Oh my gosh, we've never launched anything that's successfully before this has got to be it. Yeah. So we did a beta it was 60 bottles. We're like, Okay, 60 bottles cool. So that in a couple of minutes, let's do another 60. So that in about an hour, another 60. And then we're like, Okay, crap, we actually have to make this now. So we ended up doing that beta launch of the flaxseed Joe. And then you're like, you know what, this is actually what people want. This could be the next step in our business. So we decided at the top of 2018 to just quit the subscription box business. We had like six boxes lined up. We had all this inventory in our house. And we're just like, let's throw it all away. And then we pivoted. And is it still just you two at that time when you guys are doing this? We have some of our cousins and her brother out. But like, no official anything, not even like official contractors, right? We're in our kitchen at our apartment. And then we so in 2018, we've pivoted to a traditional e-commerce store, we start selling our flaxseed Joe and various fragrances and various oils, right? And then we also turn our best selling boxes, so four of them, into full size products. So it's just hodgepodge products. We don't necessarily go together. It's just hodgepodge. And we ended up doing like a million in sales that year. So we went from 140 to like a million 10x. Yes. And then the year after that, there's a few things that happened. I can go back. But the year after that was last year. We ended up doing 5.5 million. It was like a 5x jump. So like we've been kind of like, there's a cost with growth, right? Because so much you don't know. And then you have to find that out after the fact that if you had gone a little slower, you maybe have been able to implement some things. But now we have like over a staff of over 30 people. And hopefully on our way we're doing 2 million this year. So I'm excited. So in terms of, I mean, so many things there. But at some point, like one of the things that I learned moving from my first business to my next one was I was not thinking big enough. Did that resonate with you? And you're like, yes, when we do this, we're like, even on the pivot, was that something that you guys were like, we need to think bigger? For me, it was reading a tremendous amount of books. And I was like, if I had only known this when I was that, you know. Yeah, I think the exact moment we realized, okay, this could be because we're 140. We thought, oh, yeah, we're doing it like that's almost as much as a salary, right? We're really good. And then it was she went to a comp that same point where we pivoted Kim went to a conference called game plan from the traffic sales and profit community, which is led by Lamar Tyler. And I remember I went there too with the baby. I was up in the hotel room, she was down at the conference. And she came up at the end of one of the days and she was like, there was this lady there and she did $300,000 last year. Could you imagine doing $300,000? And I was like, that's that would be nuts. Can you can do that movie on top of the world? It's a thousand hours a day, right? And now we make like 20,000 or more a day. But you know, like, it's just funny because back then I was like, if we could spend $1,000 a day, that would be phenomenal, you know, right, right. Do you think that you would have had any kind of the success that you're experiencing now with Chromex if you hadn't had failed with your social media startup? No, we probably would have, we probably would have done our wills a lot longer. And then on with And wasted money on things, wasted money on things that we didn't know didn't make money, but we did that. It's like we call it like paying for our MBA, but it was a really cheap MBA, if you will. Yeah, the social network game in general is difficult because at the end of the day, it's like there's been a bunch of academic papers around if we can collect data on society and create that as a platform, then we win. And so Facebook was attacking a game where almost in the college world, they started and if you think about it, you were putting in your name, whether you were single, your ethnicity, what school you went to, what you like, what books you read. And so there's a lot of data. And a venture capitalist who's usually been like an academic trying to study how can we create a social platform to literally digitize humans sees this and goes, oh, Mark Zuckerberg doesn't have a clue what he's sitting on. And so it just requires hundreds of millions of dollars to scale. It's a long game. And when it hits, it hits, but 99.99999% of the time, it's very difficult to pull off. And I mean, I don't know how he's done it, frankly, because you can you can take a wrong turn. And, you know, it's difficult. You could even get big and then fail my space. Like there, there are so many examples of why we should not have done it in hindsight. Right. But, but you needed to to learn those lessons and to be able to learn from them and take curl mix from, you know, 140 to a million in a year. I mean, you kind of needed that stepping stone first and foremost to be able to vault your next platform to new and uncharted heights. I mean, you said it yourself. Data is king. And so that's why we won't do retail. We're on, we're staying online because if I don't have your phone number, your email, then this is not useful to me. You know, I don't necessarily, I don't want you just buy 10 dollars from me in a target, you know, that's not enough. I need to be able to continue to sell you over the lifetime with you as my customer. So yeah, a lot of people don't realize that once you get into these retail stores, they own you. I mean, ultimately, like they can put an order in for 10,000 units today. And then if you don't fulfill that within seven days, they can cancel your entire contract. And if you've sort of projected that, like, oh, I'm going to be used like selling the target at 10,000 a month. Now you're just sitting on a bunch of inventory. And it's like, it's like cool. Like I kind of look at it like a vanity metric where it's like, yeah, it's, it can be a necessity. So your family knows you're gray and it's great marketing. Don't get me wrong. But at the end of the day, if it's your primary business, it's dangerous because they can cancel anytime they have way too much leverage over you. Yeah, we just had a, I got a good quote from one of our mentors here. He just said, you know, if you go into retail, you're basically doing twice the work in the same amount of money as well as like giving up most of your power. So we made facts. Yeah. And that's how your costs are so low on Shark Tank. But before we get to Shark Tank, at what point did you guys start either, did you raise money and start seeking advice of other people, entrepreneurs, other mentors, venture capitalists? At what point did you start to think about that? The first person who recommended we focus on a flagship job was actually our advisor. So he had just came on as our advisor and he's like, you know, that's your best selling box. Try to make it. So many issues. So we didn't do it. Figure it out. You never stop selling your best selling, you know, product. So we worked with him for, that was the end of 2017. So I met with him for an hour each month since the top between like January, 2018, or really September, 2017. But anyway, so we were doing that. And somewhere along 2018, that year, we made the million in September, we ended up pitching the shark. And that's when we knew we were on track to do a million, but we still weren't really sure that our first six-figure months, we're like, but if this keeps going the way it's going, like, we're definitely gonna hit a million at the end of the year. But we weren't, we were still unsure. Was your valuation based on the growth rate? And so were you like, if we grow another 10X, we're going to be a $10 million company next year? No, we didn't even, I wish we were working in my right. I think it wasn't even that high. We had basically won a million in sales for the year. And we had done like a, originally we had went in with like a $7 million valuation. And then the shark, not the shark, but the people who are advising us around the show, suggested that we go lower. So it was okay, fine. We went lower. We didn't be fault them on it, but we just ended up just going a little bit lower. We did a $4 million valuation for Robert. And Robert's offer was a $2 million valuation, keeping in mind that we had already made like almost a half million for the year. And so I was like, this is not fair. I was like, we're not, this sucks. I was like, we're not doing this. And the night before we had made, we are like walk away numbers. Like we're not going to give up more than 15% of the company. It does not matter what they offer. It's a hard, bad no. And Robert would negotiate and he asked for 20%. And so we just, we ended up walking away. But later that year, I got offers from like, Angel Syndicate for $7 million valuation on the same data. You know, and so it was just like, I knew that I was right in that valuation, but we ended up getting an offer from the CEO of LinkedIn, Shirley Axel, Jeff Weiner. He's a former CEO. He just stepped down for a million, $1.2 million. And so I'm skipping Backstage Capital though. I was just, I was going to go back to it. You can finish. Backstage Capital gave us $25,000 a year. Back when we were actually still doing the boxes. They first started with us back and we were doing the boxes. That's Arlen Hamilton. And she's been a mentor since then. And so they gave us $25,000 on a convertible note. The month that we made $30,000. So in top of 2018, we cut off all the subscription box. We had $3,000 in sales in January. And then by March, we're doing $30,000 a month. And we were just like overwhelmed. We're like, we don't know what to do. We need, we know we need help and we need money. We need to get out of our kitchen. And Arlen came through with the 25K that helped us move into a new manufacturing facility that allowed us to then scale to that million. Yeah. That's great. To go back to Shark Tank, we had, we had Bad Birdie on recently who actually almost, or did, did deal with Robert specifically. And he was telling us, apparently there's like a, there's some, I think it's a girl. He said that keeps a Google sheet of every single episode, every single person, the valuation and whether it won or not. And basically what he shared with me was every shark cuts your valuation in half every single time. That's what they said. It's like, that's exactly what they do. They just cut it in half. And so when he went in, he was prepared for that cut because statistically they were going to do it anyway, no matter what you set your valuation to. And if you set it to high, they kind of, they laugh at you. So not good. But if you set it at something realistic, they're going to cut it in half, no matter what, which is interesting. That's good to know. I wish we had known that at least initially. I'm glad we did though, because we might have made a just start to get a deal versus value that what we personally value to that. And Robert said he didn't know anything about the industry. He literally said, I don't know anything about it, but you guys sound like great entrepreneurs. The numbers don't lie. Everything looks good. I want to make it helpful because I believe in you, but I can't really help you. And at that point, we needed more than just money. You got to justify. Like most new entrepreneurs or even people who don't have a big network of people, the information is almost just as important, if not more important than the money. Knowing what opportunities are going to be good or not, or getting the right kind of people in our network, those things have just been just as valuable as any check that we've gotten over the years. So what happened after you guys aired? So you air what happens to the website? Does it blow up? You get three weeks notice, right? So we have a couple hundred thousand so we get a four inventory. So the month we air, the month before we air, we did about 300,000, 295, something like that in sales. And then the month that we air, we did about 900,000. Wow. Wow. That was huge. However, we also upped our estimate too, because we knew like the retargeting value. And I think, but our mistake is that we didn't come down from the scale. So it's like, you have that blip from Shark Tank and you really should kind of like go back to normal operating procedures. And like we didn't as much. I think that hurt us ultimately, because it was also around primaries. So last year you had like all of the, you know, 26 Democrats, you know, pump the money into Facebook. So like the ads got really, really expensive on top of our operations. And I tried to kind of scale the company with Facebook ads. And I learned that that was a mistake. And so now we've, now we're like way more profitable last year, even though we haven't had a Shark Tank this year, which is kind of crazy. So Can you share more about that? So when you say, what was it about Facebook that was not working and what did you move the money to? So last year, I think at best we could get like a 2x, right? And I want to say this to the summer and use like a summer low. And it wasn't just me, like a lot of my friends that run commerce companies are experiencing the same things. So like bro, like basically ads got so expensive, like what the hell? And then we found out that there were 26 Democrats running for office. And there's also Trump was spending like a million a week or a week or a day. That was crazy. And I was like, you know, black folks usually swing vote too. And that's a part of a large part of who we target as well. Because New York Times did an article on how they were all black audience. And so my friends who run black companies, we're all, you know, black. So like the ads got crazy expensive for us to the point where I was probably maybe spending $45, $50 per customer or something crazy. Like I was ridiculous. So now I think because we got so that way you could barely get a 1x. And so we ended up like cutting costs dramatically at the top of the year. And just to kind of like not to believe so much money or having a burn, we didn't have a burn before we took our investment for a million dollars, right? But then after sharking in the summer hit and then everybody started painting, then we had a burn. And I was okay. This is my mistake. I still have a company with Facebook ads and it shouldn't happen. So this year, we kind of flattened the ad spend and we focused on organic growth, organic growth and hiring people because hiring people is how you create your organic growth. I didn't know that back then. And so this year, we're probably going to maybe like less than $15 per customer now. And we're focusing more on email SMS. And then also, of course, you have recommendations and affiliates, things in referrals, yeah, things where we have total control over what we are able to invest in. And now also the ads are like significantly cheaper. Way cheaper right now. Yeah, today's a good day. Now that all the big companies have pulled. Now we're getting like seven, eight, you know. There's arbitrage right now. So in terms of when you say $15, you mean $15 to acquire a new customer? That's my position cost, yeah. That's amazing. So you're spending $3 to make it $50 to acquire, selling for $30, you're netting $12. We're in the money right now. That's pretty good. Thank you. I'm trying to get you a million dollar a month. Are we starting with that, Hunter? I'm trying to get to like that seven bigger months, but we haven't gotten it yet. So how do you do it? You go back on who wants to be a millionaire? Do that quick mill? You know what's funny? We see that there are new opportunities. So not in addition to like how the environment has changed online with e-commerce and it comes to COVID, there's so many new customers now online that weren't shopping online before. I think like the majority of ourselves are from brand new people who might be shopping online for the first time. And so now we only, we don't even go on to the store to get groceries anymore. Before we used to go to the grocery store twice a month, and we spent a few hours there. Now we're literally only ordering on Instacart and that's, that's it. Yeah. So we're trying to prepare for this new, I think, I forget what you told you. Isolation economy. Yeah. And so we're trying to gear up to, to meet that kind of demand. And so what's going to happen is as people leave traditional retail, brick and mortar things and start going online, you need to be able to speak to them and all of their different needs. And so we see an opportunity to expand into new areas as well. China is actually a really good economy, if you want to think about the direction of the United States. So China has been 70% in terms of like Instacart grocery delivery, 70% adoption for like the last three years. The US was at like 10. I think during COVID we got to 30, 40 at best. And so when you think about the growth trajectory of economies that have moved forward, like China is the best example of this, because they're super early to adopt everything related to technology by force, but it works. It's a good data point, right? And so to your point, totally right. The isolation economy is a real thing. One data point that I have is like, when I order clothes, I hate buying online because I have to, like, what if I have to return it? My wife orders 40 pairs of shoes, returns 38. And I'm like, what's wrong with you? And she's like, FedEx, you know, she just, she's like, what are you talking about? FedEx is right there. And I'm like, but you got to unpack 40 things, try on 40. And, you know, and so there's two markets, right? There's two buyers in the retail space. One group doesn't mind returns and then me, I mind them, but that's going to change also. I'm going to remind it as well. So, kudos to your wife though. It's like amazing, frankly. So yeah, the isolation economy is a real thing. That makes a lot of sense. And in terms of just your online marketing, anything driven in relation to like influencer marketing or anything you've gone into education maybe, what does that look like for you? That's kind of how we started. So we knew kind of from that first business that content is going to be king for us. So even if you have a great product, you still need to be able to get eyes. And then also, especially if you have something that's relatively new, like us, you have to do fair bit of education when it comes to the customers, not only learning how to use the product, but understanding why you made, made the products that you made, what's in them, how it works. And so that's another thing that kind of changed in the hair and beauty industries. People are a lot more conscious about what's going into their bodies and on their bodies. And so we started with a kind of a focus around, let's get really small, what we call micro influencers, people with followings of 20,000 or less on Instagram or YouTube, and get them on board as revenue share partners. And so they have really, really activated fan bases because they're new. People are still really early and dedicated. And so they can speak to them really well. So that's kind of how we started our first year of marketing. That's what we focused on. And then after that, that first year of doing that, we did that for about a year, but then we found some codes that in the end were like, retell me now, and people were getting payouts and that, but that's not fair. So then we kind of like moved that, pulled that back. We're like, okay, we're too big to do this now, this way. But now we're beginning to make our own content too. Right. So now we can afford to put a lot of money into video productions and influencers and things like that. But really what's really kind of like brought the business to profitability and really keeps the revenue going, coming in regularly. It's email marketing SMS. Those two things. We have over 350,000 people on our mailing list. And 1,000 people we've suppressed. So over 400,000 in total. That's massive. That's the money. It's in the email. Is it like a 10% click rate or like purchase rate? Or are you guys out on that? It depends on what you're talking about. We have 200,000 total customers. So they don't always come from that list. I have to double check what our CMotor figure out what those click-through rates are. I wouldn't know them offhand. CMO. I like it. You too. Yeah, this is another level. You got to keep going up. Oh, she was from like six months ago. Linda and you. Maybe a little bit. Six months. I don't even remember it. So QVC. Is QVC calling when what's going to happen next? Let's see your next like big bump. So that actually QVC HSN was in the works for us. But at the exact point in time when we were going to do it is like that's when everything started shutting down. I think now they've moved to doing skyping people in. But there was like a moratorium when people. But they've already called. So we'll probably do it next year. They just told us to let them know when we're ready. And then we just don't we need a moment to kind of like, can we have another plan for what we're working on right now? Yeah, at this point. Let's talk about that. Yeah, being the COO at this point is my hardest job is like getting off back order. Like I remember saying it's on Shark Tank. That's right. You said it on Shark Tank. Yeah. I was like, what a great pitch. What a great thing to say. Oh, our problem is we can't we can't hold our stock. It just goes away. And so now I'm still trying to get off back order. We were off back order for months. And now we're back on it because we. And I think it was the beginning of March is when they started doing a lot of the shutdowns. And then people started shopping online. And then we also had a rerun of Shark Tank air. And then on that same same time we had a rerun. A lot of Instagram pages decide to post our story. And then they got a retweet from Chance the Rapper. And we just ourselves just exploded. But the biggest issue is that because China experienced COVID, they make everybody's plastic bottles. And so in the beauty industry, right. Just crunch. Yes, it's crushing a lot of people because hand sanitizer, right. People are making this hand sanitizer and like these hand gel, whatever these cleaning supplies. And literally in the big companies are like buying up all the stock of it. Because so that they can almost like kind of compete as you will. You know, if you can buy a couple million bottles, you'll make sure that the people who are smaller than you don't get them. So you're the ones from the shelves near now. You know, all that happened within like two weeks for us. And we started making our own shampoo conditioner. Oh, within like two weeks. And so we got like two weeks behind on orders. And now we're working our way back up to now what we used to be able to do is like two day shipping. So we're down from 10 days or more to now to like five, six days. So we're just trying to get back to a normal shipping rate. And so, and as also marketing is trying to like take the breaks off. It's like, like you said, it's arbitrage. They're like, can we spend more money? Yeah. We can't ship more products. What are you guys seeing around ROAS and paid averages? So for us, it's a little bit different. I mean, for us, it's, you know, the goal isn't revenue for us. The goal is like we're really taking almost that social network approach where it's all about listeners. It's all about downloads. It's all about reach. Ultimately, it's also about trying to help the company. And so the companies that come on, let's say you're specialized in Chicago and you make something in Chicago, you have a big fan base there, then we'll throw ads at it in Chicago just to kind of educate you. And so for us, the ROIs is measured a little bit differently. When we started the podcast, I'm a real estate developer, Nixon video production. My wife was usually on the podcast is in construction. And so as much as we're all entrepreneurs and doing our own thing, it was really about how do we just create value for the entrepreneur? And help. And so whether that's, you know, it's funny, we had somebody came on the podcast and they had sold their company to GoDaddy so seven years later, right? And it was the first time that the investor had heard the full story of that company when we released the podcast. And so it's just like, it's crazy to think about that, but we've at least seen, you know, things like that happen. And so for us, we're really just in the growth phase of this. How big can we get the audience? We've had some people reach out to us in terms of wanting to do ads, but, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't fit with the ethos of it. Totally fine. Thank you guys. I don't think it makes much sense. I was thinking maybe some other folks have told you guys what they were getting because, you know, you were saying that they're lower than they've ever been in your arbitrage. I was like, yeah, they are. It's crazy. In addition to trying to scale our operations to kind of fit with that, the new economy, we want to make sure that, you know, we can take advantage of those new opportunities as well. Yeah, one of the things that's come up a lot in this interview and I want to circle back to it. You mentioned at the beginning that, you know, you're built from the south side of Chicago, not a lot of entrepreneurs in your life as examples. And when you went on Shark Tank, you were looking for more of the information than the money. And I wanted to see if you guys had thought about or even taken action at this point to, because you are probably one of like the better examples, shining examples for the Chicago area of what an entrepreneur can be. And especially going back to your neighborhoods, have you thought about ways that you can kind of give back and educate that next generation of entrepreneurs? Absolutely. And we do tons of free speaking events in our neighborhoods whenever we're asked to speak at schools. We also employ people from our community. So, you know, we pay them $17 an hour starting, which is like double minimum wage, which is like nine or something. And then we also are trying to get a manufacturing building in one of the poorest areas in Chicago so that that will create more jobs and raise property values in the area, but also bring in the businesses who are more comfortable coming when they see larger businesses buying real estate in those areas. So we do, I feel like a good amount of... And one of our things that's close to our heart is one of the nonprofits we work with is called the Gray Manor Experience. So they take kids from CPS, particularly minority children from CPS, and they get them starting a new business. So they take them from nothing to starting a new business in high school while they're still in high school. And so we work really closely with them to help them. Lots of free speaking events with them. So these kids and the people that you hire, I mean, that's first, that's amazing. Kudos to you guys. I had heard that you guys had opened up your facility in Chicago, but I didn't quite know the extent of the levels that you were going to enrich the community and build it up. One thing for me, you know, just to share some personal story for me, it's like when I was born in Peru and so when we came here from Peru, so we landed in Massachusetts, it was like there was no examples of a Peruvian that had made it, right? They didn't exist. And you can look in any arena, you could look in sport, you couldn't, if I was like, hey, name a professional Peruvian in the NBA or any sport, you'd be like, no, they don't exist, right? And so it's like, for me, the problem that I'm trying to solve is that. And so it's like, I have to be that person so that when my nieces, nephews, family members, community, right, when they see, oh, Diego's doing it, we can too, he looks like me, we can do it too. And so that's like the constant driver for me. And I think, I think as minorities, we share that, right? It's like, you have this intrinsic thing that you're like, I have to make this because it's bigger than me. Yes, that has been, and for any moment that I thought the business is going to fail or that I will want to quit because it's hard. I was like, you know, my story isn't for me, you know, my story isn't for me. And I can even tell you how many people we probably inspired and have, we'll go on to be successful entrepreneurs. And that makes me so, it's so satisfying. You know, it's more than about the money that we've made or what we're doing right here. So the jobs and then the inspiration, people come behind us. I love it. Well, listen, I appreciate you guys coming on the podcast. Tell everyone where they can find you. You guys can find us at chromics.com or chromics on any of our social media. If you're looking to like work with us directly, then I know you guys kind of talk to entrepreneurs We do do consultation sometimes. Kim and Tim Lewis.com. And yeah, thanks for listening. I'm happy to be here. Yeah, this was a lot fun. Yeah, this is honestly easier than one of the most creative journeys of entrepreneurship. We covered a lot of topics that we've never heard on this show. They're never very unconventional. And they want to learn how to get on with a millionaire. But it just goes, you got to think outside the box when it comes to fundraising for your company. It doesn't always have to come from PC. That is next level, though. That is so next level. The traditional avenues weren't available to us. We couldn't convince anyone to give us money. We couldn't win any of the competitions we entered. I've never won a fist competition. Not for money, which is great. We didn't win anything. I've won one. And honestly, they say it's $50,000. And by the time you read the fine print, it's like a $5,000 check. And it's $45,000 of services legal in office. So it's honestly a complete... It looks really good. It's not. It's not at all good. Well, thank you guys so much. We appreciate you. You bet. Thank you guys.