 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. Marilla marketing. Merch. Merch, it's like that. T-shirts. So funny. We had this cartoon character made. We did a lot of like, you know, entrepreneur stuff and wasted a lot of time and money. Really early on. 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 Curl 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 product-ized 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. 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 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 conditioner 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 so we couldn't get people to come back every day. And we had over 1,000 users or whatever on the social network. But it wasn't... That's pretty good. Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, 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 share still at that time. And so for you to have 1,000 users on any social media app, I mean, that's pretty good at that time. Oh, wow. Well, thanks. 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. And I was like, we don't... This is not a revenue generating business. I can't hire people or even feed myself with this. Someone just happened 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 if we're coming back every day. I mean, I had to be something 365 days a year. And I was like, if I can't pay people to have to 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 one of these years. 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. So really chemists, yeah. 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 a DIYer back in there. Do it yourself first. I was making products for myself, for my hair. And I was buying raw materials from Whole Foods and I come at home and mixing them up. Just destroying my kitchen. From you, Dio. I'm the chef. I really love your relationship. You guys, the dichotomy is amazing. You can just flee from all over the place. You make stuff, you pay to go, just leave it out, it goes bad on the counter. Whole Foods is not cheap at the time, either. Whole Foods has never been cheap. You got $300 and you don't even like what you made. This is what I'm talking about. And so I was doing that and we saw an episode of Shark Tank where the lady was doing organic cookies, but she was putting everything in a pretty package, like ready for 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 was doing this for hair because I would totally buy this for 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 like 1,000 subscription boxes, I was like, okay, I'm not gonna do it. And Tim was like, no, Kim, like, she's giving 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 he- You didn't launch it right. Yeah. Just try again. And so at this funny, 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. And I ended up reading like Robert Tildani's book, Influence. Influence. So having a win friend to influence people. It's like Six Principles. That was another one. And I applied those Six Principles to our website and I also applied those Six Principles to Pitching Journalists. So I looked up, how do you pitch a journalist? Found some templates and adjusted them. And then also went to BuzzSumo.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 the template, pitched them with also like a custom intro about the work of theirs that I had read. And then we ended up getting Refinery29 on when it's time 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, Refinery29 is coming to our launch but hey, for you to miss it. And this is like, Refinery29 was like a million followers at the point. So like now they're like really big in an act. And then they all said yes. So we ended up getting like seven media people to cover our launch. And we ended up selling like a hundred 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 growing, the 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 had started failing or going bankrupt. And I was like, there's not enough profit here. And I found out 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 we needed to pivot. And that's how we landed on our flagship show which is our hero products and the thing that we do differently than everybody else. And you say we landed there, but Kim took, there's a lot there. It took us a while to get to that Black Sea Joe because we had tried making products on our own. We just couldn't get the Black Sea Joe right. But it was the number one seller, like by far. People loved it. We just couldn't figure it out cause it's really volatile recipe. It goes bad within like three days. It starts 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. It made like 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 had sold hundreds of a matter of hours. And I'm like, oh my gosh, we've never launched anything that successfully before this has gotta be it. Yeah. So we did a beta, it was 60 bottles. We was 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 or the flaxseed gel. And then we'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 were 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 little brother helping us out, but like, no official anything. Not even like official contractors, right? We're in our kitchen and our apartment. And then we, so in 2018, we've pivoted to a traditional e-commerce store. We started selling our flaxseed gel in various fragrances and various oils, right? And then we also turned our best selling boxes, so four of them, into full-size products. So they're just high-price products. We honestly go together, just high-price. And we ended up doing like a million in sales that year. So we went from 140 to like a million. Yeah, 10X. Yes. And then the year after that, there are a few things that happened. I can go back to it, but the year after that, which was last year, we ended up doing 5.5 million. So we got 5X to jump. So like, we've been kind of like, there's a cost would grow, right? There's so much you don't know. And then you have to find that out. After the fact, 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, 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, ugh, if I had only known this when I was that, you know. Yeah, I think the exact moment we realized, okay, this could be big, because we're 140, we thought, oh yeah, we're doing it. Like that's almost as much as a salary, right? Like we're really good. And then 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. Oh, could you imagine doing $300,000? And I was like, that's, that would be nuts. If you could do that, that would be Ruby 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 was just funny, because back then I was like, if we could spend a thousand dollars a day, that would be phenomenal, you know? Right, right. So 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, And wasted money on things. Wasted money on things that we didn't know didn't make money, but we did that. This time we called it like paying for our MBA, but it was a really cheap MBA. But you needed to, to learn those lessons and to be able to learn from them and take ChromeX 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 to 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. Hey everyone, thanks for checking out that clip. If you enjoyed it, be sure to hit the like button down below. And if you're interested in hearing the full episode, it's out right now on our YouTube channel. We've had a lot of great guests come on this show before and we've got a lot of great guests coming up in the future. So hit subscribe so that you don't miss a single episode. And one final note, we're always looking for new ideas and new companies to feature on the show. So if you know of someone or know of a company, write us a comment down below letting us know who they are and what they do. We'd be happy to have them on the show. Till then, I'll just be here waiting for your comments. So, see you later.