 All right, welcome to the podcast on today's show with Standard Self-Care. Austin and Hannah, thanks for joining. Either one of you can take the question, what does your company do? Okay, so we have a clean beauty line called Standard Self-Care. It's clean, but it's also results-driven products to help elevate daily routines. And there's a little two on it, and you all told me it's two higher standards. I just love that, the exponential there. What made you want to get into this space? So when I think of this space, I've had obviously a couple people on this podcast that have come and sort of introduced me to this, but I think it's a lot of noise. There's a lot of people, a lot of competitors, and a lot of money, right? And there's a lot of things that I think, if you're an entrepreneur, can hook you in terms of like, oh, let me go get this model. Let me go create this like beautiful imagery, which I think a lot of people will fall into. It's like a bunch of traps. And so when you guys think about this, what did you see as like, obviously, people can mess up X, Y, Z, but what did you see as the opportunity in the space and why go into it? One thing before we jump in, I just wanted to say is as far as there is a lot of competition when you talk about that, I think our mindset is always there's enough room for everyone. We're playing a game our way, but I think there is room for everyone. And I think that's the best and most exciting part about entrepreneurship in general. The market's big enough. Yeah. And I think having that mindset, and it's not that, oh, another person launches a brand and it's successful and that makes yours less. We're just on a different race. So I think that was always our mindset. Yeah. The reason there's so much room is like I was saying earlier, there's always something new and better, right? That's how the product market right now seems to be working. If you walk into everyone in your whole foods one day, the next day you walk in, there's probably going to be a new product next to yours, right? And our goal was one, we had a lot of background in the whole foods kind of industry, right? Because we started with things like Sousa juice. We've worked hand in hand with them when they first started. We saw that growth happening exponentially. And we got to see like we wanted to make something different that would kind of be more legendary and everlasting versus like focusing on one niche. So when I say focusing on one niche, there's like gluten free. And you have a brand that's all gluten free, right? What we saw is like focusing on holistic health is different than focusing on like one little small sect of health. And that's why this was created. The reason that we have so what we call our list of nose, which was decided before we even knew we wanted to get into skincare, is because we knew it was kind of like the ultimate form of health, hence raising it to a higher standard, right? So anything from being vegan to cruelty free, like I feel like when you look at different products like that, you'll see like one brand focuses their whole entire brand on cruelty free and they're like we don't test on animals. That's our motto. That's what we're marketing to everybody. And that's good. We want to make sure like that's why there's enough space. We wanted kind of to combine all that and say we're 100% of everything was the goal. Hence raising it to a higher standard. Yeah. And to what you was saying, we both had experience in the better for you product space over the last 10 years. From the time we were in college, we both were kind of on a fast track with a lot of startups that like Suja that were very fast paced and growing and we got experience from the time we were 17 on. So we were able to see some of the most amazing wellness brands that there has been in the last 10 years, very firsthand and beyond the leadership teams there. And that kind of sparked both of us in our interest for the product space. We are always very interested in better for you products, wellness, kind of hacking our own lives to try to better ourselves, whether that be in work or whether that's like through working out in our wellness routines. And so the products that kind of fuel those lifestyles just naturally became interesting to us. I think for me, especially, I always knew I wanted to do something in business before I came to college. But I didn't know exactly what that was going to be. And I was just personally very interested in the wellness world. And that was kind of a lot of my personal interests. And then when I got the opportunity to be a part of one of the first startups that I was, it kind of then veered me into the lane of the actual like CPG product space. And so I think when we had worked on all these brands, we got the chance to see it all firsthand from being, being raising at a really early stage, being on shelves or being D to C brands, Austin worked on a lot of very fast paced D to C brands. And so getting to see all those things, we wanted to start standard because we wanted to be able to pull all of what we'd learned from working with so many different companies, teams, leaders, products, what worked and what didn't work and put it into what we have standard is today. You mentioned this earlier, but basically you guys went to school for entrepreneurship. So when I went to school, that didn't exist. Exactly. When I was in grad school, it finally, it was like a new thing, right? And so I guess the way I looked at it was, how could you teach entrepreneurship? It kind of blew my mind at the beginning because the amount of like, how can you teach something that requires so much risk and belief in yourself? And it was an interesting thing. And then when I went to business school, I kind of realized, well, no matter what you're in, entrepreneurship or business, they're still business. They're still building blocks, right? So you still need accounting. You'll still need to know some finance, raising capital. You can for sure teach people that so they don't like mess up or there's certain, there's rules to the game. Right. And so when you guys were in entrepreneurship, though, what did you like? What did you not like? Because in some way, an entrepreneur just wants to be in the sandbox. Exactly. Right. You don't want to be in a classroom. Exactly. Which is fun because it's both of our experiences is completely different, but I think we had the same mindset going into it. The outcome was the same. I'll just share the short story of mine so that he can jump in, but I actually didn't finish. Okay. You dropped out. That's the holy grail. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So the start of that. You tottered too well. Well, when I got into it, I actually loved school. I was always kind of a nerd and loved school. And so I tried to hold out for as long as possible and tried to stay in school. Our school tried to be really flexible with me because I got involved with the startup like from the very, very beginning and ended up being on the leadership team there. And so because of that, I kind of got to a point where everyone else had dropped out of school and I was the only one on the leadership team that did not. And sitting on executive team and being able to build all the board decks and just being in all the main decision makers of the company. So either I needed to make that choice or I needed to step away or take like a lower role at the company because it just wasn't a fair partnership if that was the case. So I had to make that decision in my sophomore year of college. So I made it through a year while doing both. I think they always knew I was on, he's like, no, but they always knew. Yeah. I had done things. You were probably like, I'll go back. Yeah. But I also, I always kind of did things very unconventionally and my family is really unconventional in the fact that like my parents pulled us out of school when we were young because they wanted, they wanted us to homeschool so that we knew how much time that we had in a week because my dad really thought unconventionally he didn't want us to think like, so when you have school and you have sports, you basically have no free time between like social time or whatever extra things that you're doing. So he just, he wanted us to see like, wow, you can really get your school done. Like me and my sister would get our school done on Sunday and not have anything during the week. So during the week we would use that to work on art, work on things that were interesting to us. Shout out to your dad. That's really smart. And so that's why like my family wasn't so surprised when I made that decision. And also the company was growing super quick. We were in every major retailer basically and we had raised some money too. So it was in a good healthy place at that time. But yeah, there was definitely some, my grandma mostly I would say who was like, are you sure? Are you okay? Yeah. What was your experience in school and then sort of having to transfer it to real world application? It was interesting because I played sports like my whole life, right? So I didn't really have time for school after school, like I didn't have time for homework. I didn't have any of those things. I always found like a good path of like getting good grades, but also hated it. Like I was not like the be the book smart. I always tell people like I spent, or my parents, I should say spent a lot of money on an LMU education. I ended up finishing and I didn't really bring, I didn't buy a lot of the books because I was like, I'm paying a lot of money for someone to teach me this. And I believed is exactly what you said is like, it's not teachable by the book. There's certain things, finance, things like that, that there's rules to right, that you're not supposed to break. We'll put it that way. But in general, my best learning experiences were just experiences of others and how they did their entrepreneurship. The building blocks that they taught me at LMU specifically was like, go out, build a deck, build a product, at least a minimum viable product, right? Where at least you could like show it to people and show the function and then go out and raise money. I did none of those when I got out of college, right? And I started working like her, I started working at a startup before I even graduated. So I got kind of the double standard because I realized like, it's not like you have to do this, this and this, right? It's about you do this, you see if it works, and then you build on that, you do this, you see if it works, and then you build on that. And that's a big part about failure and entrepreneurship, right? But I never really truly believed I was like the black sheep in my family, I'll put it that way where I always knew I was going to go out and do something different at the minimum. I had an opportunity to like go play college soccer or study business and I don't know what possessed me to do this, but I was like, I got rides to places, they were scouting me and then I was like, but there's no money, like what's the end goal? There's no real money at the time in the MLS, right? So even if I were to do like top tier, I was never going to be messy Ronaldo at the end of the day. And I knew that my acumen probably wanted more than that. And that's when I took the risk. I was like, okay, I'll go into entrepreneurship. And I really just did that because I knew I wanted to be in business, but I didn't know what I wanted to do in business. Well, when they taught me like, go out, build a deck and then go raise a bunch of money and blow it. I was kind of like, my conservative money values didn't align with that. I was kind of like, that seems sketchy. One, I'm probably going to disappoint some people on the monetary side of things, especially being like 22 right out of school. You don't know the world, right? Nor have you ever kept a job with any structure. So when I kind of found that job with Suja Juice and they had sold within a year, I think I was there their second year when they just sold the Coca-Cola. So in two years, they sold for like $280 million for Coca-Cola. And I got to see that whole process from kind of like the grassroots marketing area, because I ran a team of like 10 girls that would go around and do events for them. That was their whole main marketing play was like, get the juice in people's hands. When they see it to Whole Foods, they'll remember it and they'll go buy it again. Right? So just giving out juice, giving out a juice, built out a team there. And I just got to see like the more amount of people that you could reach the better, right? At the end of the day, people will know your brand. The thing that I really realized though, even with a team of 10 at the time and doing school, I could only reach so many people. And that's when I kind of made the transition from like field marketing to digital marketing. Because in digital marketing, you can put an ad out there and reach millions. Right? And that was kind of my thought process of going more into the D to C space. But I knew I also love stuff like this, healthy products, because I was a fitness freak, right? I played soccer my whole life. And what we saw in the back end of marketing was kind of crazy. And that's what led us to even create these products was that it's not black and white. And we wanted to make it extremely black and white from a marketing perspective, meaning that yes, you can focus on a biggest thing in like Whole Foods is like USDA organic. I use this as an example all the time, because it's the most extreme. And this is why we say raising it to a new standard and a level that's like beyond what I would say the average consumer thinks of or can even understand most of the time is USDA organic only really certifies you up to 95% organic. My first thought when I see that as an entrepreneur, I'm like, make it better. What does that mean? It should be 100% organic. So that's why we came up with the list of knows to make it very easy for our consumers, specifically health conscious consumers to understand what we're putting into the market and why they should buy us over some of our competition. Yeah, that becomes part of the identity 100%. We're all about education. If you look at our Tik Tok, it barely even has anything to do with the product and more like what you should do in your everyday life to keep a routine because we think routines are massive for your self care and your mental space. So yeah, I think that's like literally the identity of our brand. It's just formed through our experiences. I love that. What was the first product you guys either tested or came to market with? We actually launched with all three, which you're super proud to have three to launch with. There's some other fantastic brands that also our friends have started where they're skincare and they only had one product for a few years, which and they still crush it. So we knew if we could have products that we really truly tested, loved and thought were the higher standard that we would launch with them and we had three that were ready to go. And what are they? What are these three right here? Yeah, so we have a cleansing balm. We have a daily moisturizer here and then our Omega Plus silver generating eye cream, which is like an eye treatment we call it. And it's very anti aging. We've done a lot of amazing testing on that product as well. Really great clinical trials. So and it comes back to the theme of a routine because like as Hannah will tell you, like we built a unisex brand because we knew one, we started with like two male co-founders. And then I was like, what are we missing? And it was obviously a female. That's when I reached out to Hannah and I was like, we need you. But we wanted to create a unisex brand because we also saw that there was like a huge lack of skincare in the men's market, right? Like now it's a little bit bigger, but it took us two years to formulate this. And while that was going on, we probably saw one other brand pop up. So we saw opportunity there. Saw opportunity in like, Hey, even for like couples, right? When you're not going out and shopping at Target as a male and being like, Oh, this is my perfect like eye cream, right? Normally you're going to like, I steal hers, right? I'm going to steal hers. I'm going to test it out. I'm going to love that product. And then I'll go buy it. So we really wanted to formulate something that was available to everybody. Accessibility is huge. And then three products is just more from the routine of a self care standpoint, right? If you can have a consistent three step easy use routine, we know that males would prefer that versus Hannah's 20 step routine every night, right? Cause males just don't function like that normally. We're efficient. We had Ollie Walsh on the podcast so long ago and he, he created, well, he was like the frame, you know, Ollie, yeah. Yeah, because his wife, our products are in formula fig. Yeah. Exactly. And so that's his wife. And so Ollie, I think was one of our first guests on the podcast and he had just launched what was called the assistant. And it came with like multi vitamin pills too. And so I was like, dude, this is perfect. And it's all, all my problems. But then I was thinking like, here I am. I'm kind of lucky where I have a podcast and I can get sort of educated by you guys and people like Ollie without this podcast, I'm not, I'm pretty confident. I'm not putting anything on my face. I'm like, I'm done. I'm really dumb. I don't know what I'm doing. Yeah, exactly. I'm just have dry skin. Don't know why. Like I'm like a mess. And even being married doesn't solve that problem, right? Or like having you grow up and cause it's the same as like, you're just reminded of when you were a kid and your mom's like, lathering your face with sunscreen. And you're like, this is annoying. Why do I, you know, that trust went away. And so it's interesting. Yeah, that's what we also thought about with the actual physical branding of it too, where it's like, okay, even if you're not the guy who is buying it, but your girlfriend or your significant other has these products, we would, we wanted you to feel comfortable even like having it in your hand. Cause I know even like for my brother or other people in my life, like if it's a product that is too feminine anyways, they're not even going to pick it up because they're like, oh, that's definitely a girl's product. So I think there's just a few things that we had in mind when we were thinking of the brand name, the product packaging. Who's your customer today? Like if you had to break down male female, how does it, what's the split? It's actually a way more even split than we anticipated because it's like, it's all working. Yeah, most of that has to do with platforms. I would say like, we got a lot of females from like think dirty, which is like a leading con leading, I would say marketplace and identifier of like health and clean beauty. But then out of nowhere, we started just like, we test everything because that's what we do as entrepreneurs. We try and if someone throws us an idea and we're like, can we test that for cheap just to see? We put it in a gaming marketplace and didn't really even market it that differently, which we had ideas around, but we just kind of said, okay, we'll try this out, see if anybody does it. The amount of guys that bought from there is probably our single most like guy oriented channel and they order so much. And we give them rewards based on their gaming convention, their gaming platform in order to order more and you get this loyalty kind of cycle going. And then even if that's not why they bought it, right, they end up using it and liking it. And then we come back coming back or they end up sharing it with their partner, right? And they like it. So it's really just about getting your brand out there in the first place. We provide like a pretty heavy discount considering we're D to C, right? We just want to get in people's hands because we know that we've created a great product. If you can create a great product and get in people's hands, they're always going to come back for another order. Did you guys raise capital to do this or have you since or is it just bootstrapped? What's what's been the trajectory on the finance side? Yeah, the finance side is pretty light, I would say we definitely consider it bootstrapped. But our third partner, who actually like we started the idea together, already had pretty much set aside an amount of capital that we could use. I would normally say like back to my original statement, that's not our normal way of doing things because Hannah and I own agencies and we just combined our agencies to do a venture studio to go do this type of thing for other people and help other entrepreneurs get their brands off the ground that may not be as familiar with entrepreneurial space, right? Maybe they want to leave their nine to five and focus on their own product. But I think at the end of the day, like we felt comfortable with that type of capital, because we knew what we did at the time, right? You never know everything, but I think we had been through it enough times be like, okay, now I don't feel like I'm risking someone else's money. Like I feel like I know the exact steps to take and go out there and do that to actually create the brand to make it profitable. That being said, we do not have like some massive marketing budget, like every other skincare brand out there, right? We focus on education versus just pushing brand out there. Summer Fridays is a great example of like their brand is so well recognized and as like cult followings, whereas ours won't until we really get the brand out there, educate every consumer there. But I think once like you stack every brand up against, we want to be the leading example of education within the skincare space. That's why we even started in skincare. We created that list of knows of what we didn't want our products and we said, what's the largest target that we can go after? The skin is the largest organ in your body. Let's go for that immediately. Will you guys keep it this way or will you try to raise capital maybe later this year? Yeah, I think that we will later this year. We just haven't done any formal rounds at all. I think for us too, it's kind of what we were talking about when we first got in here, but we just wanted to make sure that we've really proved the concept and have a really strong brand before we went and took on any money and also just we tested so many things now. We've really learned a lot about our products and a lot about our consumers and also like the skincare market changes all the time. Like the products that are trending are now becoming whatever the TikTok trend is and they're coming in and out of style so quickly, almost like fast fashion. So I think we wanted to take a good amount of time to make sure that we really knew exactly what direction that we wanted to go with the brand. And for us too, we also work on a lot of other brands at the same time. So we wanted to keep the stability of the brand by none of us taking a salary and being able to grow it slowly and smartly and not having to put that pressure on it. And then when the time is right, yeah, we want to raise and we want to be able to really blow it up. When you guys were in school, how much time do they tell you that it'll take per say? So you're outside, right? And so that's a two year, you see that that's kind of lottery ticket stuff. Yeah, they tell you you're going to raise money really quick and then you go there and find out immediately the opposite. But what we, the path that we took even backing up before standard was very different, I would say. And that's why I said we came into it with a whole different perspective of like why we wanted to bootstrap this too is because before that we focused on helping entrepreneurs build theirs, right? Which is more of a service-based business. You do not need any dollars or cents to start a service-based business. That is the best part about service-based businesses. And we started those realizing, oh, you don't need it. We don't need to go out and create a deck and do it. You might need to create a deck for your partners. I didn't even at the time. I literally sold my knowledge to get clients and they came in because they trusted you, right? And then you prove that with results. You can make it very profitable, very quickly there. And as long as you can support yourself and you're a go-getter and you want to learn as much as possible, chances are you can support that like service-based business that you want to build. And product is a little different. You almost have to take investment, especially if you want something that's going to like be beautiful first time, right? We went all out on this one because, again, we thought we had enough knowledge to do that in the general sense of things. But you need money to create the product to sell, right? Versus your service or you need the knowledge. Yeah, that's why we keep all the other work that we all have. Our other co-founder also works so that we can funnel it into building standards. So that's kind of how we think of it. What do you guys have on tap for 2024? Like what are the big things? Raising capital, you said later this year. Yeah, let's say raising capital. We have some really interesting partnerships that we just launched with like more influencer types and people that are going to brand out there. From a D2C perspective. Formula Fig probably has the biggest update. Want to share about that? Yeah, so with Formula Fig. Over on Sycamore. They're great spot. So great. They also have a second location now in LA, Culver City. Beautiful location there as well. But yeah, we're going to be the featured first product in all of their facials now, which is going to be really great. They've never edited the facial routines since they launched. So ours will be the first product kind of swapped in and that'll also include all of their Canada locations as well. So we're really excited about that. I think when you're used inside of a facial, it's definitely, those are the products you end up using. Because you come out glowing and you're like, oh, well, what did you use on me? And then you just, you get all those products. It's a multiple field marketing mindset. We can only be in so many places at once. So like if you can have your brand being used by someone in the space that knows what they're talking about and can educate the actual end consumer and use it on them, it's a no brainer for us. But that's also what you need capital for because it takes a while to support retail accounts in general. This is what we see is like with a small team, we're not a huge team. We have like four people max right now. And what we focus on is trying to make like something small go big efficiently. Right. So like if we were to go into a target right now, right, we'd have to go raise capital immediately to get teams out there. Exactly. We see formula figs an amazing, amazing stepping stool into the retail space. Yeah, because for us, it's a low amount to support, but it has, it can scale really quickly. And they're really great partners. But kind of what we were talking about earlier too with all of our experience, I was a part of multiple startups that were very fast growing and launched all the retail accounts very, very quickly raised all the money, did venture money from the beginning, had board seats from CAA and all the top ventures at the time. And those were a mess. And they actually did not work out. So after seeing those, I think that's also what we when you think about that, right? And you think about the way you guys are starting your company and it's sort of going about it. Yeah. What did you think that they did wrong? Like I'll give you an example. This is the way I look at it. So when someone I had, when I had my first company, I think I was like 22. So I went to school for civil engineering and I was in Boston. And in Boston, the first question woman at a bar will ask you is like, what do you do? It's the first question. It's how it works in New England. That's how it operates. And so I was like, oh, I'm an engineer. That crickets after that. It was over. And so my first company, and I say this like to give entrepreneurs a real window, I needed to create a better pickup line. And so I started my first company. So I had a better pickup line. And it worked. Yeah. That's it. And so when I say that, it's like, I'm being honest about why I did it. And so in that scenario, when I hear about a founder who's got all these, the right investors, the right board members, all the things, it's like, were they really chasing the business or were they chasing some vanity metrics? There's definitely a lot of points inside of it. But that started up the specific one I'm talking about. I was also a founding member of it. So I got to see every side. But because I was so young, it really was the best experience for me, because all the original investors, I still have really great relationships with. And they respect me. They actually respect everyone on the team, because we were all really young and hustled so hard, worked like 20 hours a day. And it was our life. And we tried everything we could to make it happen. When you talk about what went wrong, it's actually, I actually love talking about it, because I think that's what's made me do anything that I have done since then is because I kind of have always known now what to ask and what questions to ask, because I've seen it fail. And I saw it fail from, I mean, there's a lot bigger failures that you could have. We had raised three million. There's a lot of other companies who lost a lot more than that. But for us at the time, I still think like you learn so many questions that you kind of don't ask when it's just like you're having a lot of success and vanity metrics and things. And so I think one of the biggest things is with the original investment we got, they were flashy names that got involved. They were not necessarily very knowledgeable about the actual space that we were in. So the pressure that some of those original investors put on us and they actually, we actually ended up dissolving the company. So it was doing well. It actually had like some really great aspects to it. So fast growing was the youngest brand to ever launch into Kroger Ralph's. And yeah, had so many great accolades to it, but the board ended up making the decision to dissolve it when it did. And that was a board decision. And that's because they really, like I said, like certain, I won't name like exact names, but certain of the board members were in a totally different world and they were just adding their input to it from a financial perspective, which you have to respect them to because you accepted their money at the end of the day. But I think that does make you think about who you take on as partners because you end up being partners. You're also married to them for the whole extent that their money is with you. So yeah, definitely changed my perspective on raising. That's great learning, by the way. That's huge because I didn't even understand that until you really told me about that because everything that we did had sold at the time when I was 23, right? Like I didn't understand like the bigger you raise, the bigger your expectations from investors are. And if you don't hit those, you're pretty much gone because they're just like, dude, you told me you're going to do this and you didn't, right? So you have to manage those expectations. And if you got a lot of money in it, you know they're coming after you immediately. So it was, it was a very interesting, but very thoughtful way of thinking about entrepreneurship. And honestly, to some extent, I think that's why we did what we did with this. That's why we've done what we did with the service-based businesses that we run. If you can become profitable, especially right now, if you can become profitable at a very young age of the business, it seems like you're doing everything you can correctly. Whereas like if you're just taking on more funding, taking on more funding, it almost seems like a deeper and deeper hole that you're digging yourself from the expectation perspective. And that's not every, that doesn't match up with every single brand. Don't get me wrong, but that's how I've always looked at it. And I'm like, let's get this thing profitable as soon as possible. So one, even if we go, can't find an investor, right? We're still okay at the end of the day. We're still managing cash flow. Everything's good to go. Yeah, we might hit some hiccups here, but it's always, you can even finance those. There's more options for you to finance and still not dig yourself a hole versus like, okay, we just raised 3 million. Our valuation has to be this in two years, right? Or has to be this for us to raise another round. That's a lot of pressure. And I've found that a lot of people do not work that well, including your own employees, do not work well under a ton and ton of pressure constantly, right? And with standard, we want to be really good stewards of everything from the product to the money that we put behind it. And back to what you were saying about retail. And when we were talking about that, that first brand that we've raised a lot of money with and didn't end up working out, one of the things that we should have done is have a lot more nose. So we said yes to retail expansion because it was really great. And it had a lot of, it kind of proved that we were on this skyrocket. And I would say looking back, like we didn't have the team to support that. And even though we had raised money, it is very hard to support national expansion when you have limited resources, when it comes to marketing. So both have to match just because you get an answer from a big national retailer. That's not the golden ticket either. Because if someone in middle America is not prepped for a very natural product, you're going to have to spend a lot on education. We've even said no to a lot of brands and standard and it's not because we've like disliked them, we just know we're not ready. Like at the end of the day, like Costco, we've had a protest, Target, we've had a protest. And we're sitting here like, dude, we're four people. Like if we take on, if we say yes, we're pretty much digging ourselves a deep hole, right? Like we want to one set expectations for our retailers because I always tell people it's way easier. People always think is the hardest part is to sell into a store, right? Being like, Hey, you get a PL. That's the easiest part. As soon as you get in, how are you going to sell out to your customers, right? Because you don't have anyone there selling your product for you. So you have to spend money to sell out. That's why you need the financing. That's why you need the funding to really get even and the team members to even get in and get out. What are the top things you guys have learned so far, just in terms of like digital marketing that you've seen really work for the brand? Like if someone's listening, trying to start their own company, like what are the things that these things definitely work? And so whether it's a strategy of obviously you guys have chosen educating your consumer. Yeah. So TikTok is great for that. But what have you guys seen work and what advice would you give an entrepreneur? One thing I would say is Austin is really good about this, like leading the rest of our team that we manage on standard at least is like is not dogging any ideas when it comes to digital marketing. I think that's something he always heroes is testing everything and nobody's idea is insignificant when it comes to it because especially with digital marketing, things change so quickly and you'd never know what's really going to work until you test it. So it's testing a lot of things, but obviously doing it in an accurate way too. 100%. And the thing about testing a lot of things is it gets very expensive very fast, but it gets more and more expensive and it's gotten more and more expensive over time. I'm a big believer in the entirety of the marketing funnel, like top down. It's going to take whereas I would say Facebook, when Facebook was like really, really considered like the Holy Grail, if you're on Facebook market, you're making your 3x ROAS and you're really killing it, that's not the same today, right? What is the same is it's going to take you about two to three times the amount of touch points with a consumer to really even sell them on your product. Especially in our space, the wellness space, you have to make your product be the healthiest seemingly. You have to hit them 10 times over the head with almost the same information said differently to get them to buy your product at the end of the day. That's why we focus so heavily on education. It's not to stack ourselves up against different brands, but it is to definitely say like we're different and this is why. And this is why we are the healthy brand, the holistic brand versus like, hey, we're just gluten free or hey, we're just vegan or hey, we're just one of these things. We have so many touch points that we can educate on whether it's one single ingredient, whether it's our list of knows, whether it's how to use the product that that's how we formulate a story and that's how we do the touch points and make it like actually fun. I hate it when people are just like throwing the same thing in your face 24 seven. It's not technically good marketing, but really what we've realized is get them in your marketing funnel. One, I always tell people and this is not just for standards for everybody, get their information. That's step number one top of the funnel. People often think of like brand awareness as that brand awareness and digital marketing is actually like, I don't mean to say in a bad way, but it's sometimes fraudulent because of fake clicks, right? Like people can make clicks out of nowhere. There's bought farms. There's a ton of things that people do to kind of manufacture those things and a lot of them are actually supplied by the platform itself. But if you get their information and can remarket to them consistently for cheap, that's what you want to do. Get their email, get their phone number and consistently hit them with whatever you can do to get their product in their hands. Like that's why we have such a massive first time discount. Like I was talking about like, Hey, what is it? What's the first time discount? We'll have one for you. Yeah. We won't break that up. We'll give you one to you for sure and everybody listening. But that's why we have that is because we truly believe like, Hey, whatever it takes to get this in your hands, you're going to like it, right? And it's harder. I think if you're selling one, we're in the cosmaceutical space. We're not just an average cosmetic. Like because of the efficacy of our product, technically speaking, other brands have better other regular cosmetic brands have better margins. We focus on efficacy, which means we have to put more expensive things and it has to be clean. And it's results driven. So it has to be top tier ingredients, right? I would say one that allows us to be great product wise, but it also makes us spend less money because we don't have the margin, right? So you always kind of have to weigh those pros and cons and say, Okay, if I'm building a better product and it's going to cost me more, my lifetime value, my customer might be more, but I'm going to spend a lot more upfront and my product margin is great, right? So you have to weigh those and really decide what you want to do when you're building the brand. I mean, we spent two years building this just because it was during COVID manufacturers were down. We were shipping things everywhere. Hannah wanted the right color blue, but it's a long-term approach in the sense of like, you're adding the stickiness into the ingredients. Exactly. Versus into like the digital brand. 100%. A lot of brands out there are really cool. Don't get me wrong, but also like when you dig deep, you learn more. Put it that way. What do you guys price it at? So ours is about half, that's what I was kind of getting at too. It's half the average cost of like a regular Cosmaceutical, right? So when you look at like Skinceuticals, not to name brands, but a lot of them are up there in the $100, $200 range. The closest star eye cream gets is $98. 85. 85, you're right. 85 is the eye cream. Yeah. And then 56. For the cleansing balm. And then 78 for the moisturizer. And then the whole collection is 185. Nice. You have a bit of a discount if you get all three. And where can people find you right now? Obviously, formula fig online. Yep. Online. We're in some smaller estheticians as well. Nice. And then online. We're also Wolf and Badger in LA and online. We'll close on this. What have you guys learned about money as it relates to like when you first got into school and then how you view it now as like entrepreneurs that have been with a few companies, you have your own. How have you sort of changed your mindset around either raising capital or just money in general? I love this. I think for me, you go first. Because I'm going to be a bad example here. I think for me, I just learning how to, my grandpa's favorite saying is be the captain of your own ship. And he always tells me in my siblings that my brother even got a tattoo of it because it's just something that we always talk about. But I do think more and more every year that goes on, I think about that. I made the decision really early on to drop out of school. And I had to become the captain of my own ship. And I think every year you figure out what that means, I guess, and what that pressure is. And it's, it's a pressure that I've learned to love. And being able to be the captain of your own ship, I think it also makes your destiny in your own hands, but you also have to work really hard because it is you at the end of the day. But I think if you put that time in and you're willing to put in those hours and do what it takes, like I did drop out of school, but I was also asked to come speak in guest lecture in the entrepreneurship school at my school now, even after not finishing. So I do think that you can bet on yourself, but you also have to be willing to put in all the work it's required. I'd say I love to spend money. That's why I said it would be a bad example. But that's just common digital marketing, right? Like the more you market your product over all the brands, we probably, we spend millions and millions of dollars. And that's like monthly. It's really exciting and really scary. That's what I would say about it. But honestly, it comes and goes. And if you can create a consistent formula to ensure that it comes month over month, then you're make marginal improvements, never make a major one that could sink a ship, right? Because you, like I always tell people, AB test, AB test, AB test, keep everything constant, choose one low small variable to tweak, and it can actually make a really big improvement, especially if you're spending large sums of money, that 1% adds up to a good margin at the end of the day. So as scary as it can be, also don't expect your ROI to come the next day, because it never happens. It never happens. That's why I say it takes 10 touch points to sell the consumer, get their information, keep remarketing, keep remarketing. Some of our best consumers bought on the 10th time, and now they buy every month, right? Whereas others just will never buy. That's just the name of the game. Focus on your conversion, focus on creating good constant contact. We were talking about TikTok and Reels and all this stuff earlier. You got to post as much as you can. So it's excessive, I would say, but at the end of the day, it is a money game and you need to see ROI. Make sure you're as positive as you possibly can be. Standard soft care to a higher standard. Thank you guys for coming on the podcast. Of course. And I have a code for you, yeah? Yeah. What do you guys want to drop? Yeah, it'll be start up to store front 40, for 40% off. Start up to store front 40. Sweet. Your first orders. We'll put a, we'll boost that. We'll throw some ads on it too. We appreciate it. We appreciate it. Let us know what else we can do to help get it in you guys' hands. We're always willing to listen. I'm excited to try. Thank you for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, share with your friends, your family, or anyone you might think might benefit from the conversation we've had today. And if you haven't already, please take a moment to leave a review on your favorite podcast platform. We'd greatly appreciate it. Your feedback helps us improve and reach more people who can benefit from our discussions. The best way to stay connected with us and get the latest updates on future episodes is through our social media channels. You can find us at startup storefront. We'll be back next Tuesday with another great episode. See you then.