55:45Sweat Equity · Interview
How To Build a Brand So Magnetic, Corporate Giants Beg To Buy
Brian Mazza on selling HPLT to Life Time, building community-first fitness experiences, and the brand playbook that made a corporation come to him.
May 20thThe argument in one line.
In a saturated market, being 10 percent different beats being 100 percent better — pattern disruption, not superior quality, is the mechanism that moves products off shelves, content up feeds, and founders into retail buyers inboxes.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- A founder with a physical product idea who does not know how to get a first retail placement.
- A brand builder posting on TikTok and going viral but not converting to sales.
- Someone waiting for the right conditions to start — enough money, time, or confidence.
- A content creator trying to build a product brand alongside an existing audience.
- Anyone applying to TikTok Shop or chasing affiliates before they have proven demand.
SKIP IF…
- You run a software or services business with no physical product component — the retail and packaging tactics will not apply directly.
- You already have retail distribution and are past zero-to-one — this is an origin-story episode, not a scaling playbook.
The full version, fast.
Charlotte Trecartin grew two consumer brands to ten million dollars in revenue without paid ads or investors by obsessing over pattern disruption — the discipline of being noticeably different in every category where sameness is the norm. Her method: interview 100 strangers before building anything, prototype cheaply, build community through daily TikTok presence and weekly Zooms with top customers, and treat viral views as meaningless unless they correlate with actual sales. She walked into Target via a LinkedIn DM to a buyer, survived losing millions by spending nothing, and rejected Shark Tank deals that did not fit. The second half translates her story into 9 standalone principles from finding white space to the winner mindset.
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Create a free account →Who's talking.
00:14guestCharlotte Trecartin
00:00hostTiffany Guillen
Where the time goes.
00:00 – 01:46
01 · Intro and show pitch
Cold open hook, show intro, call for dream submissions
02:26 – 05:03
02 · What makes someone stop scrolling
The unexpected as the core scroll-stopping mechanic; reply-to-comment, comparison, and street content formats
05:03 – 06:19
03 · How the algorithm works in 2026
TikTok equals discovery, Instagram equals nurture; interest-based niche content strategy
06:19 – 09:55
04 · Pattern disruption — the core brand framework
Three types: packaging, marketing, product. Dude Wipes, Kitsch, and whipped-cream sunscreen as case studies
09:55 – 14:35
05 · Product show-and-tell
Vacation sunscreen, Liquid Death, and Wall Candy demonstrated hands-on as pattern disruption examples
14:35 – 16:57
06 · Validating your product idea
100-stranger interview method; TikTok as unfiltered product feedback
16:57 – 19:51
07 · Gimmick vs lasting brand — community as the moat
Stanley vs Bloom Soda; TikTok live and weekly Zooms as community tools
19:51 – 27:18
08 · TikTok in 2026 and TikTok Shop timing
Why new brands should not rush TikTok Shop; affiliate flywheel only activates after proven demand
27:18 – 30:36
09 · Viral views vs sales correlation
15M views with zero Shopify sales; how to track which marketing channel actually converts
30:36 – 35:16
10 · LinkedIn for founders
How LinkedIn got Charlotte into Target; anatomy of a good outreach; posting cadence and credibility signals
35:16 – 38:22
11 · Biggest brand misconception
Skip website and Shopify until demand is proven; first steps are get product, see if people want it, sell it
38:22 – 56:56
12 · Live retail pitch deck walk-through
Charlotte walks through her actual Walmart deck: story, press, social proof, viral content, collaborations, product proposal, in-store mockup
56:56 – 59:11
13 · Rella sponsor integration
Improvised live on-camera ad for Rella social media tool
59:11 – 1:08:40
14 · Origin story — CharCharms
From COVID boredom to Etsy gap search to mall prototype interviews; insurance job funded the startup
1:08:40 – 1:15:08
15 · TikTok growth and first retail orders
$300/month TikTok coach; Stanley blows up; Urban Outfitters then Dick's; handmaking product through first retail orders
1:15:08 – 1:18:38
16 · Alibaba sourcing and the Target order
How to vet Alibaba suppliers; $30K wire to China; Target buyer LinkedIn DM; $10K order becomes $1.5M order
1:18:38 – 1:24:00
17 · Losing millions and Shark Tank
Business partner holds $2M of profits; survived because she had not spent it; three auditions; rejected Mr. Wonderful and Damon John
1:24:00 – 1:24:36
18 · What makes a successful person
Willingness to sacrifice; Charlotte's dream: Char Brands as a billion-dollar holdco
59:30 – 1:24:36
19 · Anatomy breakdown — 9 principles
Host solo segment: Find White Space, Customer as Co-Founder, Understand Audience, Start Before Ready, Do Things That Do Not Scale, Recruit Superstars, Art of Attention, Save for Rainy Day, Resourcefulness and Mindset
Lines worth screenshotting.
- People are 20 percent more likely to buy a product with better packaging, and the same psychology applies to thumbnails, websites, and personal brands.
- A video series with 15 million views and zero Shopify sales is a dead end — virality and revenue correlation is the only metric that matters.
- Interview 100 strangers, not your friends. Friends will be nice. TikTok commenters will not.
- TikTok is for discovery; Instagram is for nurture. Build audience on TikTok, then migrate them to Instagram where the niche sticks.
- Do not go on TikTok Shop until you can generate hundreds of sales immediately — a dead product page trains the algorithm against you.
- The dancing monkey trap: if TikTok live is the only way your business makes money, you have a performance, not a business.
- LinkedIn is a B2B acquisition channel that most founders ignore — the buyer who put CharCharms in Target messaged Charlotte on LinkedIn.
- Being 10 percent different is all you need — you do not have to invent something new, just do what exists with one unexpected twist.
- Brand community is the only moat against trend cycles. Stanley fizzled because the community was influencer-driven, not founder-built.
- Do not waste time making the right decision — make the decision, then make it right.
- Posting about industry expertise on LinkedIn is a faster credibility signal than a website, press release, or pitch deck.
- In retail, show the buyer a mockup of your product in their specific store aisle before pitching — most brands skip this and lose.
- Momentum creates clarity. Starting before you are ready is not recklessness — it is the only way to learn what you actually need.
- The founders who scale fastest do everything themselves first, so they know what good looks like before they delegate.
- Saving for a rainy day is not advice — it is survival. Charlotte lost 2M and survived because she had not upgraded her lifestyle when revenue grew.
- Affiliates swarm to products already selling. You have to create the flywheel of demand yourself before expecting anyone else to carry it.
Nine principles from a ten-million-dollar no-ad brand.
WHAT TO LEARN
The most counterintuitive lesson from this story is that pattern disruption — not quality, ad spend, or investor capital — is the actual mechanism behind every breakthrough.
01What makes someone stop scrolling
- The unexpected stops scrolls. Reply-to-comment videos borrow social proof from the comment itself; street interviews borrow unpredictability from the subject. Both exploit the same mechanic: the viewer cannot predict what happens next.
02Pattern disruption framework
- Being different beats being better in every category with established norms. Packaging, marketing, and the product itself are the three levers — change any one by 10 percent and you get attention without outspending anyone.
- Study competitor mood boards before designing anything. The colors, fonts, and shapes that no competitor is using are the white space where your brand can own a corner of the shelf.
03Product validation and customer research
- Interview 100 strangers before building anything substantial. Use multiple choice and checkboxes — open-ended questions at a mall get ignored. The goal is pattern recognition, not anecdotes.
- After initial validation, get 100 people to use the product and watch what they say on social media. TikTok comments are the most unfiltered customer feedback loop available.
04Community building and brand longevity
- Community is the only brand moat that survives trend cycles. Stanley generated billions in sales and fizzled because the community was influencer-dependent, not founder-built. Brands with regular founder-to-customer touchpoints hold through every trend cycle.
05TikTok Shop and affiliates
- Do not enter TikTok Shop until you can generate hundreds of sales on launch day. A slow start teaches the algorithm your product is dead, and recovery is nearly impossible.
- Affiliates follow top-selling products, not good products. Create the flywheel of demand yourself first — then affiliates arrive without being asked.
06Viral views vs revenue
- Virality and sales are orthogonal metrics. Track the correlation between content and revenue, not views. When they diverge, stop making that content no matter how many people are watching.
07LinkedIn for founders
- LinkedIn rewards consistent posting about industry expertise. Posting before doing outreach is the credibility layer that makes cold DMs land.
- Mock up your product in the specific store aisle of the retailer you are pitching. Buyers see dozens of generic pitch decks. Showing them exactly what the shelf would look like in their store is the differentiator that closes the meeting.
08Origin story and do things that do not scale
- The manual unscalable work is not a workaround — it is the foundation. It teaches you what customers actually want, what good production looks like, and what to delegate once you can afford to.
- Founders who delegate without doing the work first lose quality and do not know why.
09Mindset and resourcefulness
- Resourcefulness fills the gap that resources cannot. The problem you cannot solve is almost never a resource problem — it is a creativity problem.
- The winner mindset does not assume everything will go right. It assumes that whatever goes wrong, you will make it right. That is the only sustainable version of confidence in business.
Terms worth knowing.
- Pattern disruption
- A brand strategy of being visibly different from all competitors in a category — through packaging, marketing, or the product itself — by just enough (often 10 percent) to make someone stop and look.
- White space
- An unmet need, unexplored angle, or underserved audience in an existing market that competitors have collectively ignored or assumed does not exist.
- TikTok Shop
- TikTok native e-commerce platform where users buy products directly inside the app; requires consistent sales velocity to surface algorithmically.
- SKU
- Stock Keeping Unit — a unique identifier for a distinct product variant. High SKU counts increase fulfillment complexity but can also mean higher cart values.
- SBA loan
- Small Business Administration loan — a US government-backed small business loan. Charlotte tried to get one for her Target order; the six-month approval window made it useless.
- Flywheel
- A self-reinforcing growth loop where each element feeds the next — TikTok views drive sales, sales attract affiliates, affiliates drive more views.
- Reply-to-comment video
- A TikTok and Instagram format where a creator responds to a viewer comment as the video premise, lending instant social proof by showing others were interested enough to ask.
Things they pointed at.
Lines you could clip.
06:21
“Pattern disruption is the most important thing when you are building a brand today. This applies to everyone even if you do not have a product.”
10:52
“People are 20 percent more likely to buy a product just because the packaging is more interesting to them.”
49:18
“I have had series that have done 15000000 views with no sales. That does not make sense to dive into that series even deeper.”
12:52
“What you need today as a brand is you need viral worthy moments built into the products themselves.”
1:03:56
“Are you gonna be the dancing monkey forever?”
1:33:00
“Do not waste time making the right decision. You just have to make the decision that you make the right one.”
16:57
“Brand is all about the community that you build around it. Trends come and go because there is not a community that is built.”
Where the conversation goes.
00:00 – 02:26sparseIntro and show format
02:26 – 05:03denseContent strategy and social media tactics
05:03 – 06:19steadyAlgorithm and platform dynamics 2026
06:19 – 14:35densePattern disruption framework
14:35 – 16:57denseProduct validation and customer research
16:57 – 19:51denseCommunity building and brand longevity
19:51 – 27:18denseTikTok Shop and affiliates
27:18 – 30:36denseMetrics — viral views vs revenue
30:36 – 35:16denseLinkedIn as acquisition channel
35:16 – 38:22steadyBrand building misconceptions
38:22 – 56:56denseRetail pitch deck live demo
59:11 – 1:08:40denseOrigin story CharCharms
1:08:40 – 1:15:08denseTikTok growth and first retail orders
1:15:08 – 1:18:38denseSupplier sourcing and Target deal
1:18:38 – 1:24:00denseFinancial crisis and Shark Tank
1:24:00 – 1:24:36denseHost principles breakdown 9 principles
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metaphoranalogystory
00:00The social media landscape has changed to interest based content. And so if you're a creator or you're a brand and you're speaking to a certain audience, like, speak to them. As soon as I did that, revenue grew from 0 to $10,000,000.
00:12So what I did was Jesus. With okay. Meet Charlotte Jakarta, the founder behind two breakout brands taking over social and retail.
00:21And today, she's gonna reveal her secrets to building a brand people obsess over. What can someone do to make their brand stand out? The first way is packaging.
00:29People are 20% more likely to buy a product if the packaging is good. And this applies to your website, your digital ads, even your personal brand. So when you think about your packaging, you want it, and how to win at social media to break through in any dream.
00:42Most people barely post on LinkedIn. The average person on LinkedIn posts when they get a job or when they're looking for a job. And so if you're a founder, you can make so many sales from that.
00:51I'll see you on LinkedIn.
00:53ChargeDorms was not a success from the very beginning. It's gonna make hydration so much more fun. I probably should've Hey, y'all.
00:59I was going on TikTok three times a day, building the community, and literally building based on what they like. Comment below if I should do that. So it took us, like, six months to be getting consistent sales.
01:08And then 2023 was the year that Stanley blew up. I got a Stanley.
01:13And we're really like the water bottle accessory company. Urban Outfitters saw us on TikTok, and the company continued to grow. And then we got an order from Target, and she's like, let's do this for an online test.
01:23Two weeks later, she goes, we're gonna do this nationwide, and this went now from a $10,000 order to a 1 and a half million dollar order. And at the time, was 24 years old in 400 square feet with, like, a half of an employee, and I don't have the money to buy the product.
01:39That's where things really took a turn. So what happens next?
01:46If you're new here, we have a project called what's your dream where we pick one person and helping them make their dream come true. However, we decided to also open it up to various dreams that we can help with in small ways. So that can mean connecting you with someone that you need in your dream or even just meeting with you and helping you along in your journey.
02:05And we have been getting some great results, and we are so excited to share them soon. That being said, if you are interested, let us know in the comments what your dream is, and make sure that you guys are subscribed, and you might just hear from us.
02:16Alright, guys. Let's get back to the video.
02:26Charlotte, what do you feel like actually makes someone stop scrolling? For me, it's the unexpected. Okay.
02:31Not knowing what's gonna come next. That's what I look at and that's what we create for of whether it's creating content in public when you're asking someone random and the viewer has no idea what that person is gonna say.
02:42Or I'm dipping a chicken nugget into cane sauce in my Stanley and people are like, what the heck is this? It's unexpected. So that's really what I look at.
02:50Going to that, what type of content do you feel really works on social media nowadays for anyone that's watching? The content I love and our team just dives into is reply to comment videos. It shows that someone else was interested in the video because there's a comment you're responding to.
03:03It's like instant credibility when you scroll and you see a comment that's being replied to. There is a website if you just Google like TikTok comment generator and you can like generate your own comments.
03:13Oh, okay. Which is like amazing. So life hack for anyone out there.
03:17So we will generate our own comments. And we'll make them clickbait where it's like, what the heck is this?
03:23I've never thought like seen this before. And so you make it something where you're like, oh wow, someone asks that and then you're responding to it. Number two, early on when you're starting your brand, I love comparison videos.
03:33So you're talking about us versus them. What do they do? What do we do?
03:37And if you do it in a way that's engaging and entertaining, maybe there's a little bit of hate built into it or you say something that's kind of controversial and like why are you better than them? Are you really better than them?
03:46Mhmm. Or are you just saying you're better than them? And so I would make a lot of videos in the early parts of Char Charms of oh, this hook is so strong it can hold like a whole milk jug but like so could the competitor but even though they were the same I would still say we would win.
04:02And so people in the comments would be like, wait, you're not actually better than them and we would just get hundreds of comments and it just fueled virality. After that is content in public.
04:12So when you're going out on the streets and you're doing raw interviews, you're asking people questions, you're playing games with them, the reason this works is because the viewer has no idea what that person is going to say or how they're going to react. And ideally, you go out and you film a 100 of these, you're gonna get some hilarious answers and that's what you end up posting.
04:30You post the funny ones. There's a lot of things that you can do to make your videos go viral and there's the old school like say something incorrectly, spell something wrong.
04:39You just want people to be commenting because that's what's going to fuel the algorithm to continue to push your video especially on TikTok. Right. I mean it just I think speaks to the fact that I think nowadays people are like thinking that they have to be polished and perfect and sure like there's a whole rallying.
04:53I know for us we take very seriously, I will say that like organic really does work and it doesn't have to be this like big overthought production. Right?
05:01Yeah. The more real. So I know a lot of people are probably wondering this.
05:03Can you explain how the algorithm works today
05:06and and then how could that influence their social media strategy? Yeah. Gary Vee talks about this all the time how the social media landscape has changed to very like interest based, niche based content.
05:16And so if you're a creator or you're a brand and you're speaking to a certain audience like speak to them because they're gonna see it and then they're gonna continue to see it over and over again. I also think what's really interesting about social media is how TikTok is so much on the discoverability and Instagram is niche interest based where they're gonna wanna continue to see your content and you can build that same fly allele within the same audience.
05:40Right. And so I look at TikTok and Instagram very very differently especially when building my business and even my personal brand because what you can post on TikTok to go viral and get the audience, then your goal is to get them onto Instagram to build that audience and to like continue to nurture them. And so that's where you can nurture.
05:58I have found that the videos that go viral on TikTok, they reach so many different kinds of people and so many more people, but not all of them care. And then as soon as I bring them to Instagram and I'm like, hey, this is where I'm really nurturing this audience, everyone that follows me is following me because I'm posting about x x content.
06:15But I think Instagram is where I'm seeing this like super niche audience. In 2026, I just feel like every single market is so oversaturated. What do you think that someone could do to make their brand stand out?
06:27Pattern disruption is the most important thing when you're building a brand today. This applies to everyone even if you don't have a product. It applies to your website, your digital ads, your commercials, your app, even your personal brand.
06:40And so I have some examples to show you later but there's a couple of different ways to do this. The first way is packaging and people are 20% more likely to buy a product just because the packaging is more interesting to them. And so when you think about your packaging, you want it to be something that is different than what's already out there.
06:58And so what I like to do when I'm building a new business is I am taking screenshots of every single other competitor out there and I'm building a mood board of all the other competitors and I'm looking at what colors are they not using, what different fonts or different shapes or different sizes can I do? But you don't wanna be too different either because 10% difference is the only thing that you need when it comes to packaging changes.
07:24And so maybe this makes the packaging easier to use, maybe it's just color, but you wanna take the customer to a point where they're like, oh this is cool and different but I can still functionally use it. It It makes me actually think about when we started this channel
07:36at the beginning without really knowing what I was doing. I like literally put together like a little deck and I put all the thumbnails of all the other like podcasts in our space. Right?
07:44Like the immediate instinct was to copy but then it's like wait a minute Yeah. I'm just gonna blend in. And I do think that there's something to be said where it's like I'm talking about packaging on thumbnails.
07:53Yeah. You're talking about packaging on product. This look genuinely does apply to anything.
07:59Totally. Even content creators.
08:01There is though I do think there's a benefit to copying in the very beginning when you're learning. And I know that's a hot take, but that's the best way to learn because when you're learning you don't know what the options are.
08:13And so when you're learning you kind of can just look at what's out there and say okay, how do I just remake this? And now I can kind of branch out and do my own thing based on what I know. So other different kinds of pattern disruption that you can use is marketing and there's so many brands that do this really really well.
08:27Let's take Dude Wipes for example. Dude Wipes did an amazing job with marketing pattern disruption. No one used butt wipes except for babies.
08:37And so what Dude Wipes did is they took butt wipes and they said, we're gonna market this to dudes. And we're gonna make poop the best thing for men. And so they take this whole market and they make it manly from the black packaging that they're using to the font to the different types of marketing.
08:54I mean, think they sponsored UFC and like all these really cool sporting events. No other butt wipe company is doing that. And so I think Dude Wipes is a really prime example of marketing pattern disruption that you would have never seen before.
09:07Mhmm. And the third example when it comes to pattern disruption is just the product in general. Kitsch hair care did an amazing job with this.
09:15So Kitsch is known for their like hair scrunchies and headbands, and so they've always been in the hair care space, but they hadn't ever entered into shampoo or conditioner. And so a couple years ago, what they did is they looked at their customer base and their customers were talking about, you know, too much waste with shampoo bottles and how the plastic was pollution to the earth.
09:37And so what they did is they made shampoo and conditioner but in bars. And so they had solid bars of shampoo and conditioner that you can take on the plane with you, easy to travel with. There is no pollution because there's no plastic
09:51and that absolutely transformed their business and now it's the top seller of their company. That being said, you you did bring some physical products to show us. Yes.
09:58Right? So let's take them out if you want. Before we start I I do wanna say that the psychology of what we're gonna go into applies to literally like any business.
10:07So I do think that even if you're watching you're like, I don't have a physical product, this is still applicable to you. So
10:12yeah, let's dive in. And so this is the first one. Literally looks like whipped cream.
10:15My God, that's so crazy. For those who can't see or not watching, I'm literally looking at sunscreen in the packaging of whipped cream. There's a lot of things that's working here especially when you see this on a shelf next to all of the standard sunscreen options.
10:30This one stands out for a lot of different reasons. So number one, it's whipped cream format. So they're taking what is normally in a spray or in a like actual lotion and turning it into something completely different that no one's ever done before.
10:43And then the second thing is that when someone sees this and they pull off the cap and they spray this whip sunscreen on them, that is a viral worthy moment. And in 2026, what you need today as a brand is you need viral worthy moments built into the products themselves.
10:58So anything that you're creating, does that go viral on camera off the bat just the product itself? My only comment here, you know, whether you put this in or not, is it's way more expensive than regular sunscreen and not even just minimally significantly.
11:13And so that's something where, yes, people will pay more because of the marketing, because it's viral, because it's cool. But when it comes to retail specifically, you still need to play in the price range that's in a Target or a Walmart.
11:25And so I think that's where, you know, a brand like this might potentially struggle in retail. That's a really good point. Alright.
11:31What's next? So next we have Liquid Death and this one is just iconic for what they've done with marketing. They did something in the water industry that has never been done before.
11:39A, not only did they now market this to an entire new audience, but b, they put it in a completely different format that you were not drinking water out of. The thing that I admire most about Liquid Death is how amazing they've done their marketing and I think they were one of the first brands to really go super disruptive in a way where people were really questioning it.
11:59Especially on this death side. That is very very polarizing and when you're looking at the marketing you're like woah, what is this?
12:06For example, there's this awesome liquid death commercial with Kylie Kelsey where she's drinking out of a keg while she's actually pregnant and saying that she's drinking while pregnant but it's just water. And then the rest of the commercial goes on to people drinking while they're driving, drinking on the job, and so it just continues to prove this polarizing point of like, oh my gosh, it's just water but it's a really entertaining brand.
12:28And when you're thinking about marketing your product or your brand, if you can be a little polarizing, I think you can win a certain audience. So next, what I have here is Wall Candy and this is my brand and my product which I'm really excited to talk about.
12:41So Wall Candy is a stick on wall hook. Years ago while I was in college, I'd be walking through the Target aisles and it was just aisles of white.
12:50And so I was always thinking like there has to be something cuter and better here. And so year after year I was having this thought that I was really focused on Char Charms so I couldn't work on this side project. Essentially, I got to the point where I'm like, okay, have money and I have time, and now I can go after this idea that I've had for years.
13:07And a lot of what we did when it came to wall candy was how do I put this in the same aisle as all the white ones and how do we make this pop? We wanted to take a different approach with wall candy and market to the like fun personality, gen z, gen alpha consumer that maybe might look at the white options out there and say, is this really the only thing out there for me?
13:28And ours is enough different where they can say, do I want the white or do I want the cute colorful ones? And that was the only question that we wanted them to ask. Business is a lot simpler than we make it.
13:40And so the fact that you understood like this entire aisle has been the same for forever. Yeah. And this is what disruption looks like.
13:48Exactly. And it literally is like a few tweaks what you're talking about. Now, you did a prototype with that as well.
13:53Right? Yeah. We painted it with nail polish.
13:56You see like even though you had the money and the resources like you still started with the basics which is create the version yourself Exactly. And then go from there. Anyone can do this.
14:06Anyone can go into a Target and look at an aisle
14:10and say what is missing? What can I do differently here? And that should be the spark for your business idea.
14:16And this goes for anyone whether you're a service based business, you're building an app, an agency. Look at what's out there and see how can you make it different. Whether it's how you present your product, the color of your app, the color of your uniforms,
14:29you can change so many different things. Just fill a gap that's not already there. So let's say that you know someone does start, they're like, okay I'll take your advice, I'm gonna start my product, I'm gonna have that prototype and it doesn't work.
14:39How do you evaluate if it really is like something that you should keep going with or if it's something that maybe you know you need to just tweak a few things? That's a great question. I am not the customer of my products
14:51and I never have been. And so when I started my business I just knew that this was a product that doesn't exist yet and I think there's an audience for. And everybody I talk to, I tell them you have to do this one thing when you're starting a business.
15:06You have to interview a 100 people and ask them what they think of your product. And what that means is you go up to them with an iPad at the local mall or the local downtown and you say, what do you think of this?
15:17Can you answer 10 questions about it? A, what do you think of this product? How much would you pay for this?
15:22Any other variations. So for me, I would ask them like what kind of different charms would you want on this water bottle? And also, you have to make these easy to answer.
15:30So check boxes or slide a scale or multiple choice only. No one's gonna be typing in answers for you for free when they're out and about shopping. And then you're asking, have you dealt with this problem before?
15:42Do you think this product would solve it? And so you go down the path of like, well if I'm building a product for people with this problem, what kind of questions do I want answered by those people? And then after you've done that, that process continues.
15:55So the next step after initial validation is now you have a product, you need to get a 100 people to use it and give you feedback on that. And this is why social media helps a lot. The people on TikTok will tell you the absolute truth.
16:08They are not holding back on social media. And so if you're getting positive feedback especially on social media or in real life, that's the path to continue. This is super helpful.
16:17I mean, I know that I've made this mistake is that I focus so much on what I want the product to be. Right. You know, we'll get feedback that is maybe not what we wanna hear.
16:25Right? And then you resist it and you're just like, no, they just don't understand it. But as opposed to really understanding that that is really the of like kind of understanding where your business maybe should go.
16:34Now that being said, I am curious because you know, when it comes to let's take like the sun screen example. Right? When you look at a product like that, know, it's easy for it to kind of almost come across as like a gimmick.
16:45Mhmm. So what
16:46differentiates a gimmick or like a trendy product from a product that is a long lasting brand?
16:52Brand is all about the community that you build around it. So whether the product is gimmicky or not, if you can build a community around your brand and your business, you'll have something that's longer lasting. Trends come and go because there isn't a community that's built.
17:06And so I think that's the really big differentiator here. For example, Bloom Soda. They do an amazing job here in building their community and I would say even better than Poppy.
17:18And the reason why is because they have this founder that started with a problem. And Mari, the founder, she had gut problems and she created these super greens. And so she had this community built in that was like bought in on the problem that she was solving.
17:31And that community just continues to build and spiral. So there's other brands. Let's say do I say it?
17:37Say it. Well, there's other brands like Stanley that we all know wasn't up and down very quickly and they still are a phenomenal brand.
17:47They've done a great job and my brand was built around Stanley so it's kind of sad, know. But there's brands like Stanley that were clearly a trend. They blew up and then they really fizzled out within a couple of years.
18:00And the reason why they blew up was because a couple of influencers posted about them. They had this massive spike for two years and they just couldn't maintain the community to keep it going and keep building for that community. And I so I think looking at them there's a lot of things that they could have done differently to continue riding that high and building for that audience.
18:18And so now they've kind of fizzled and I think Stanley Quencher is kind of a trend of the past. Community has come up so much in like just figuring out what the anatomy of a dream is.
18:28Mhmm. What different ways can someone build community at the very beginning? If you're already a founder that's hosting about something that you're going through or building, that's a very natural way to build your community because it's the people that are following you.
18:40So there was a time with my company where I was going on TikTok three times a day and I was doing TikTok live a couple times a week, and I had a community. There were people that were on every single TikTok live, and they're there, and you're talking to them.
18:54The community is the back and forth. It's the, hey, Charlotte, like how was your day today? And I'm talking to them and they're talking to me and like that's a big part of community, it's relationships.
19:03And then I stopped and community kind of fizzled a little bit. And then a couple years ago, we brought back our Char Charm ambassador squad. And every single week, I would hop on a Zoom call with, like, our top customers.
19:16And they loved it. And it was, how are you doing? What are you excited about?
19:20Hey. This is what we're building. What do you guys think?
19:22What would you choose here? What's your favorites? And so I'm listening to them, and I'm literally building based on what they like.
19:29And so whether it's on TikTok live, whether it's on a weekly Zoom call, you can build community in a lot of different ways. Right. People just want parasocial relationships,
19:37and people just wanna feel like they have friends and there's a lot of loneliness in our in our world today. And you're totally right. Like, we are in an epidemic where people are very, very lonely and I think it's really beautiful to think that, you know, even a product, right, can be the thing that unites people.
19:51I know you got your start like with TikTok specifically, but I am curious because I know I've heard you know even from like other business owners that TikTok has changed tremendously. At least for on my end I'm telling you like TikTok is like a desert for us. Like no one watches anything.
20:05I sometimes feel like I shouldn't even post there, but how has TikTok changed
20:10especially if you have a product? Everyone says it's a pay to play game. I think it's true for bigger brands, but you can really win on TikTok as a founder without the pay to play aspect.
20:22And I don't think you need to be on TikTok shop immediately. And if you can be a founder and post on TikTok, people will resonate with you because of your personality.
20:30But I don't think you should go on TikTok shop off the very bat when you're building your brand. Wait. Can you explain more why you shouldn't go off the top on TikTok shop?
20:39Okay. So this is a hot take but
20:41when you start your brand you wanna build a little bit of like sales and momentum. If And you get on to TikTok shop and you have no sales for six months, like that's just telling the TikTok shop algorithm that like this is a dead product. So you wanna get on and make sales immediately.
20:56And I mean like hundreds of sales. Like this isn't, you know, 20 sales. If you can't go on to TikTok shop and generate some revenue, I think you should wait, build your community, build your brand, build on Shopify, build on Amazon, build in retail.
21:09And when you have people on TikTok that you know are gonna buy, you hit them on TikTok shop with an exclusive product at an exclusive price and you build the TikTok shop. There's a lot of benefits of being on TikTok shop. It gives a lot of awareness to all other channels.
21:22Barely any brands are profitable on TikTok shop. There's maybe a couple but they use it for discoverability and they use it because they know it's gonna give them a lift on Amazon and retail so it's tough to be profitable on TikTok shop and I don't think you should do it if you're a new brand.
21:38When it comes to
21:40even just like affiliates because I know affiliates obviously are very big on TikTok shop. Should a brand already start developing those affiliates and have them ready to support before or do you launch it and then start looking for affiliates? It's very hard to get affiliates right now for free.
21:53Affiliates right now and I've reached out to hundreds.
21:56Most of them want money off the bat. No one is doing this for free because there's so many brands coming in saying, we want affiliates to post for us for free. And their affiliates are getting hundreds of samples for free.
22:07There's so many brands that they can promote and there's a lot of brands that are willing to pay. The caveat here is that affiliates will all go to top selling brands.
22:17They'll like swamp to them. So if they see a product that's like blowing up on TikTok shop, they will absolutely request a sample for free and start posting about it for free because they know that it's gonna start selling well.
22:27So you kind of need to create the flywheel of TikTok shop on yourself first. You're the affiliate. You need to start posting for your brand.
22:33You need to have an audience that's excited about your product and get people to buy. And once you have that, then you go on TikTok shop and your own video should be feeding your TikTok shop sales. And as soon as it starts blowing up you're gonna have so many TikTok shop affiliates.
22:47Okay. So starting
22:48because it really sounds like you're saying just start with yourself basically. Right? You're you're you're your first content creator.
22:53You're your first affiliate. Mhmm. Can you just walk me through how you balanced starting a business but also
23:00basically becoming a content creator? It was the only thing I was doing. Okay.
23:04For me, when I started, my number one job was making content. And so I was making three pieces of content every single day. You need to be going all in on learning, testing new things, trying new things because that marketing is what gets you to sales and sales is the goal.
23:18Right. And how are you tracking what was working, what was performing, what was not? I mean, I've done it where I've just create the content to create it but then three months pass and I'm like, have no idea why it's working and why it's not working.
23:29So what how are you tracking that earlier on? I have had series that have done 15,000,000 views with no sales.
23:36That does not make sense to dive into that series even deeper because it's not doing for me. And you can clearly see it. I make a video.
23:43It gets 5,000,000 views, but my Shopify is at zero. I'm not gonna continue that.
23:48Just because you're going viral doesn't mean you're bringing in sales. You have to look in the correlation of like, we go viral. Do we have sales?
23:56If not, don't make that piece of content again. So when you start, you find out what's your marketing channel. Is your marketing channel TikTok or is it paid ads or is it something completely different?
24:05You need to spend all your time on that because you need to sell your product. I have friends that their only thing is Facebook ads. They spend all of their time editing ads, making really good content.
24:15That's their job. Like they are the founder and that's how they're building their business. In the beginning, choose a marketing plan that works for you and if it's TikTok, go all in on TikTok.
24:24It doesn't have to be TikTok. Okay. You can go and talk to people IRL at events and like if it's LinkedIn for b to b, go all in on LinkedIn.
24:31If you are a super niche product that you can only reach those customers at trade shows, go to trade shows. And you can make so many sales from that. Now I do gotta ask because you mentioned LinkedIn and I know you love LinkedIn.
24:42I love LinkedIn, yes. I used to be a LinkedIn hater actually. Really?
24:46Yeah. Okay. So why do you love LinkedIn so much now?
24:48I had a very big change of heart when I realized like how am I gonna get into Target? Oh, they're on LinkedIn. I need to start posting on LinkedIn building my credibility and so that was when I started posting and everything changed.
25:00And so how do you build credibility on LinkedIn? You post about what's working and you post about wins and you post about losses. It's about posting.
25:08The best founders are posting like three times a week. Most people barely post on LinkedIn. The average person on LinkedIn posts when they get a job or when they're looking for a job.
25:17But if you can be someone that posts more often about whatever you're experienced in and you just talk about that,
25:24you can build credibility. And you don't necessarily have to be the number one expert in whatever you're doing. I also think it's like in terms of like standing out on LinkedIn, it's a little easier sometimes just because everyone is just AI ing it and it's just very boring so I do think that the ones that stand out are people who are just like a little bit more honest and real.
25:40Yeah. Business wins are like the easiest.
25:43We're launching a new thing, we hired someone new. If I can't think of that then I'm thinking about personal wins. Is there an event I'm going to?
25:50A podcast I'm on? Like this, like I'll definitely post about this on LinkedIn. So personal wins are really easy to post.
25:57And then after that, my best LinkedIns have been talking about my industry expertise in something interesting that I'm doing that's working for me.
26:07So if there's something that like really works for you, something like unorthodox, post it on LinkedIn and share it to that community and they'll start sending it to their friends and be like, oh my gosh, we should try this. And if you're posting and like let's say I'm hiring you for brand marketing and you're posting consistently about like your takes on this brand's marketing and this brand's marketing, woah.
26:26I've I've never seen anyone talk about it like this. And I'm like, that's really interesting and I'll look at them as an industry leader.
26:33So I always say, man, you should be posting on LinkedIn if you want to get somewhere in life. Real talk. So we have an agency and basically all of our clients for the most part have either come through referrals or from emails, But LinkedIn, you would think it would have been easier and we would have gotten more of our clients through LinkedIn but we haven't so clearly we're doing something wrong.
26:50You've obviously had success on LinkedIn. What do you feel like is like the anatomy of like a good reach out? This is so bad.
26:56This is so bad. I'll dm everyone.
27:00But for my example primarily, everyone in the department that matters for me. I'll look at every single retail buyer and I will message every single one of them and usually one will respond.
27:11So it's kind of a numbers game when it comes to LinkedIn at least in my perspective, but you do it as you, so you do it as the founder. I have not found the same luck if like a salesperson goes out and does that same outreach.
27:23It works way better if you're like, hey, I'm Tiffany. I'm the founder of this company. I saw that you're doing this project.
27:30So cool. Love what you're doing. Smiley face.
27:32Would love to help you out. Let me know if you're interested. Happy to send over a deck.
27:35Best Tiffany. I think it's great if you can mention someone that you've worked with that's comparable to them. So if I reached out to Walmart, I said, hey, we're in Target.
27:44They're gonna be just more interested in us because of that. And then something that I always like to talk about is like, oh, I think this can be very like additive to what you're already doing so I'm not here to replace anyone.
27:55I'm just here to add. I'm just saying like, hey, you're doing great at what you're doing but I think you can do a lot better like we'd love to help. Yes, it's a timing game.
28:03It's a follow-up game and it's a numbers game. As long as you're reaching out to everyone that you could possibly reach out to at that company and then hitting them over and over again, not too annoying though, and you just eventually will hit them at the right time and you have an opportunity. One more thing is if you're gonna do outreach on LinkedIn, you should also be posting on LinkedIn and you should also be commenting on people's LinkedIn and reposting their stuff.
28:24Like if you reach out to me and I go onto your page and you have no posts in the last year I'm be like, what? Like what does she even do? So start posting first and then do the outreach and then keep that going.
28:34Alright. So moving along here. Charlotte, what do you think is the biggest misconception
28:38when it comes to building a successful brand?
28:41I built my business from 0 to $10,000,000 with no paid ads, no investors, and a really small team. A lot of people think you need all that other jazz but you really don't.
28:52You don't have to set up a website. You don't have to set up your Etsy or your Shopify yet. There's a lot of free resources to see if people buy it before you go all in on branding and marketing and website which that's something that people do way too early on.
29:04And so I think people get it really twisted when they're looking at the steps of starting their company.
29:09That's not in the first 10 or even 100 steps. The first couple of steps are like get your product, see if people want it, sell it. And so do you think that like we're long past the days where you would used to hear like you know people just would have ideas and they would just get investors off of ideas.
29:23Do you think that now more than ever especially with social media that it's more required to have that proof in demand? I don't think so. I think there definitely are still categories of businesses where investors are giving money with just an idea but that's AI and SaaS and software.
29:40When it comes to consumer products, I just think that investors want to see some sort of demand in that category or they wanna see a founder that has done it before. So I think this is actually a really good moment to
29:50actually have our show and tell
29:53and see actual pitch deck that you sent to Walmart. Yeah. Let's do it.
29:57Alright. I have an announcement. Wait.
29:59Wait. Are you recording this? Yes.
30:01You're gonna have to give us a heads up. Wait. Hold on a second.
30:03I think he's fixing his hair. Okay. Okay.
30:05Okay. Go. This episode is sponsored by
30:09Rilla. No way. What?
30:11First what?
30:12Milt, are you crying? Congratulations.
30:17want to see if you guys can help me write the actual Rilla ad. Do you wanna pull up Rilla? Sure thing.
30:22I think something that we should talk about is the fact that it's a project management tool for social media teams. I can't even explain, like, how much this has helped us. I mean, the fact that it's an all in one social media tool where we can literally build our content calendar, brainstorm content ideas, and have all of our social media accounts in one place is what has changed the growth of our channel and company.
30:43So what is everyone's favorite feature about Relo? My favorite aspect of it is the auto post feature just makes it so easy. Everything's gonna post at 6PM on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.
30:53I have one. I love that we can share links with clients and team members, and you don't have to give them password information.
31:01Also, the fact that it, like, can help us, like, look at our previous content that's working and then come up with new concepts. You talking about Ella? Yeah.
31:07Is there anything you wanna add, Daniel? My god. You put me in the spot here.
31:11There's
31:11the reporting of the analytics from all of the channels. Yeah. Can you write that?
31:16Ella, what is the CTA again? Go to getrela.com
31:19and use code anatomy. You get 10% off your first three months or annual plan, and you get to see why social media teams are ditching the tool chaos. Nice.
31:29I guess the last question is when are we planning on filming? We just recorded this. It's pretty solid.
31:34We literally did that last time. We can't keep doing the same exact commercial. Mel, are you still crying?
31:39Just how? Oh my god. So
31:42what I'm gonna show you, I've never shown before, but basically, this is my pitch deck for reaching out to retail buyers which is really exciting and I think a lot of people are gonna really love this. Number one, you customize every pitch deck for every retailer. So like custom colors, put their logos on it, all of that.
31:58You don't want one pitch deck for one retailer. The first thing I like to like paint the picture of like who are we and why are we even pitching you. So this is kind of where I mentioned you know, we're a water bottle accessory company, strong manufacturing and very trend forward.
32:12So next, I like to have an our story section because it paints the picture of like who am I and like why should a buyer be even interested in me and maybe do they wanna help support me in what I'm building and like it kinda brings that personal touch to it. Maybe they see that you know I was on Shark Tank and Bloomberg so this is your opportunity to kind of paint a little bit of that picture.
32:33These next couple slides are obviously optional. If you don't have press you might not have any press to add but if you do it definitely brings credibility. By the time you're reaching out to retailers, you should probably have some press or something.
32:45Then you go into social media. This does matter for retail because when a buyer is considering you, they're asking themselves, is this company going to be able to bring in new customers into our store?
32:57For example, we have a huge community with 300,000 followers across different channels. As soon as we launch into, for example, a Walmart, we're talking to our customers and telling them, go into Walmart.
33:07Go into Walmart. And so that's enough credibility for a buyer to know, like, yes, they're gonna be bringing people in. After that, I like to highlight some of the viral content because some brands have fake followers and so this is my opportunity to say, we actually create really good viral content.
33:23And it's even better if some of the content is made in retail stores. So like there's one video here with 6,700,000 views that was made in a retail store you can see and so the more of that that you can showcase I think the better here.
33:35As you see this whole beginning part is like you're just building the trust and so now we get into collaborations and partnerships. You might not have this as a brand but what we've done is we've done a lot of collabs. We've collabed with Poppy, with SmartSuites, other water bottle brands, Bloom, Hydro Flask.
33:49So they're seeing this and they're like, oh, they've been around. This next slide of target collaborations I think is maybe slightly controversial to have in here because you don't necessarily always want to show your competitors in a pitch deck to a competitor.
34:03But again, this is trust building and showing like we've done so much at Target that you should consider us for Walmart. Then we go into a little bit about the purpose behind Walmart and Char Charms. So I just talk about potential for new markets, tapping into trend, increase in sales revenue.
34:18I mean, are all obvious things but spelling it out for them to be like, ah, yes, these are the reasons why we should bring them in so that they can tell their uppers. They have managers and those managers have managers, so you wanna have proof in the pudding for like what they can say. But again, anyone that's building something like this out, they can mention different things.
34:35You know, completely new product to the market, updated packaging from what's already out there, way cheaper than current options.
34:42Like, there's different things that you can put here based on what your product is. The last two slides here are just our product proposal. So this was our spring twenty twenty seven proposal.
34:51Again, most people are gonna have one SKU, so maybe you have a hero image, some stats about the product, some lifestyle photos. Like you really wanna showcase like this is our product and it's amazing.
35:01And then I think this is the most underrated slide in this whole deck is showcasing the product in store. Most brands do not do this and you absolutely need to do this.
35:11You need to go into the store before you create a pitch deck, take pictures of exactly where your product would be and then mock up your products in that exact space so that the buyer can then picture what exactly that would look like. And so we do this every retail pitch deck before we even send this. Because otherwise it's like, well, have you even looked at our set?
35:29Why are you pitching us if this doesn't make sense there? So that's all part of this and that's it. Do the work to get the deal.
35:36Yeah. And ideally if you do the work and they can see it and they're like, ah, this is exactly what it would look like. I like it or I hate it.
35:43They could, you know, they don't have to love it. But as long as you can show them like this is exactly the picture of what you're gonna see in stores, if you like this we can do it for you. This is super helpful.
35:52Thank you. Of course. I hope it's helpful.
35:54So take me back. Take me back to when you had the idea of Char Charms. You had it while you were in college.
36:01Right? Yeah. I had the idea while I was in college but before then I was studying exercise science.
36:06I thought I wanted to be a physical therapist and I was a bodybuilder at the time and then I was doing insurance sales and then I had the idea for Char Charms.
36:14You were bodybuilding? I was bodybuilding. That was like 18 through 23 years old.
36:20Bodybuilding was like my life. I got really into fitness after my mom died when I was 12. I'm sorry.
36:25It was a long time ago but I really turned to like fitness, school, being the best that I could and COVID hit and then I switched to door to door sales.
36:35And then during that summer, I came up with Charge Charms. I was sitting at home bored out of my mind and I was looking at my water bottle and I thought, what if you could like accessorize it? Random thought popped into my head.
36:48And so I Google like accessories for water bottles and it's nothing. And I look on Etsy like water bottle accessories, nothing.
36:56Amazon, water bottle accessories, nothing. And I'm like, okay, that's weird. Like no one's like putting stuff on their water bottles.
37:03This was 2021. So Stanleys were not a thing, Awala was not a thing, it was Hydro Flask and like the Starbucks tumbler. That's what people were using.
37:12And so I start like sketching out like a hook to put on your water bottle and I text my friends like, hey guys, like what do you think of this? And they're all like, I don't know if I would use this.
37:23I'm like, okay. Like why elaborate?
37:26And they're like, I don't think people would want stuff dangling from their water bottles. Is it too much noise? Would kids want this?
37:31Like overall negative vibes. But I kind of had this like gut feeling that I had to keep going even though my friends were like not for it.
37:40I'm like, you're just not the target audience for this clearly. And I started coming up with like how am I gonna prototype this thing because the goal was that you have a water bottle and then there's a hook that sticks onto it and you could hang stuff off of it.
37:52I started working on it and then my junior year started. And so Char Charm sat as a picture on my pin board for the entire school year that I would stare at and I just could never shake the idea.
38:03And so when my junior year ended I was like, okay I have to go after this for real. And the first thing that came to my mind was like, think I need to patent this. And there's a website called meetup.com where there's like online meetups.
38:16And I was looking for a meetup around like patents and IP law. And at the end, they're like, and this meetup was sponsored by the Small Business Development Center, which also provides free mentoring. And so if you're looking for a mentor, reach out to us.
38:29And I'm like, perfect. I will. And so a mentor named Andrew Fogarty started meeting with me every couple of weeks and was like, okay.
38:36Well, you kinda need to get this to a point where you can like sell it. So I started three d printing the the product and I started getting it to a point where I'm like, okay. This is more functional.
38:45Like, what do you think of this? And he's like, well, do you think people would buy that? All he did was just ask me questions and I had to answer them.
38:53But that's what a mentor does is they like reflect your problems back to you to help you solve them. And so over the course of that summer, I went from essentially a very rough prototype to products that I could sell online.
39:07And that was the summer that I went to the mall and did interviews. And I remember I had a picture of Char Charms like what it was what it could be. And I was on an iPad and I was still a student.
39:17And so I had my student badge on a lanyard and I would go to my local mall with my iPad and I would lie. And I would say, hi like I'm a local student and I'm in part of an entrepreneurship class and like this is our business idea like would you mind answering some questions about it? And I would get dozens of responses.
39:35But it was so funny because like I would get kicked out of that mall every time. I had to avoid security guards. Like I would see a security guard at like going the opposite direction because you're not allowed to do that at the mall.
39:45So I was doing that that summer and then coincidentally, I had remembered that I had a friend in college that was doing resin art.
39:54So I reached out to her on Instagram. I was like, hey, I have this product.
39:57I think we can make these hooks out of resin. And this was exactly how we were able to hand make them. Another friend of mine had mentioned to put like little bead charms and pom poms and so I like bought some beads from Hobby Lobby, beaded some stuff together, bought pom poms bulk on Amazon and that was my first product that I launched charcharms.com with.
40:17I was a senior and so we launched and then school started. And I'm like, okay, well I have to make money. I'm not gonna go back to campus because I wanna keep building this business and I needed to get a job.
40:29And so I had met someone that was doing life insurance sales and they're like, yeah, you can make a lot of money and you can do it remotely and like I think you'd be good on it. So my entire senior year, I rented a small office space in a random town near me, 400 a month.
40:45I was there every single day from 7AM to like 10PM and I would do my insurance job. I would do my schoolwork and then I would do Char Charms.
40:54And my insurance job helped me fund Char Charms. And by the way, Char Charms was not a success from the very beginning. I probably should have quit.
41:01Like there was nothing there. I was posting on Instagram every single day and we would get like one sale and then we get like two sales. And so it took us like six months to be getting consistent sales like, I mean consistent like at least a couple a week.
41:14And when you say us. Me. Me.
41:18Us meaning me. I always say us because like you know there's always a team it.
41:23Of course. And so it took us several months to get to the point where it's like consistent sales. And then someone mentioned TikTok to me and I was so bad at it.
41:31Like cringe worthy, zero views, very very bad.
41:36But I hired a TikTok coach and so I paid him $300 a month and we went from zero to 10,000 followers to 20,000 to 30,000 to 40,000 to 50,000 and revenue just like skyrocketed with it. And the only thing that he did was he kept me accountable to posting a lot. And so every single day he's like, what are your three posts today?
41:54Every single day he's like, hey, this is a viral sound. You need to hop on it. Hey, this is a comment that you got that you should definitely do a reply to comment video with.
42:01And so that was the best $300 a month that I ever spent because revenue grew with it exponentially. And so by the time I graduated college I was doing like $20,000 a month.
42:13During that time I was able to hire high school kids for like $10 an hour to make these little bead charms, to switch the clasps, like all this very like manual labor. And they would come over to my dad's house, go into the basement with me, and it was like a setup.
42:26Like it was cool. We had like a beverage fridge and they would like have their little workstation and they would work for two hours, three hours.
42:34Like it's like an after school job, very low pressure. So it was the first two years that we were hand making our product. So I never went to mass manufacturing until we absolutely had to.
42:44So I graduate college, spring of twenty twenty two. I'm building the business, starting to go way more into TikTok, TikTok live, building the community, and we had grown throughout that year to 300 different charms and accessories.
42:58And the reason why is because all of our customers were asking us for like different types of charms. So when someone went on our website they'd be like, oh, I want my initial, I want my dog. I'm a teacher so I want a teacher charm.
43:09I want the pom pom. I want the chapstick holder. And so they would shop like seven different charms on our website because it felt so personalized to them.
43:15So that was really like our brand motto and feeling. But did it complicate things on your end by having so many SKUs at such an early stage or did you feel like it didn't complicate it so much in terms of like because it's still charms at the end of the day. It was all still charms at the end of the day, so we just had like a bunch of little baskets with the little names on them so it wasn't that hard to fulfill it like it was one wall of accessories.
43:38If it was massive items and now you need warehousing and if we sold out, we sold out. So we grew a lot and I had a new mentor at the time and he said to me something that basically impacted me a lot.
43:50He said, Charlotte, are you gonna be the dancing monkey forever? And I was like, damn.
43:58That feeling of like, wow. Am I gonna live on TikTok live for the rest of my life and that's gonna be the only way that I make money? I don't want that.
44:05I know people that that's their life and that's totally fine. That's what they want in their careers, but I wanted to scale. So initially, it was like, okay, how do I start doing wholesale?
44:14So I started diving into wholesale. I found a new mentor that could teach me wholesale again through the Small Business Development Center. And so he really taught me and then 2023 was the year that Stanley blew up.
44:25And we're really like the water bottle accessory company. There's no one else doing it. There's no competitors out there.
44:31And Urban Outfitters saw us on TikTok and they were like, hey, we're starting to sell Stanley tumblers. We'd love to have some accessories with it. I'm like, okay, great.
44:39Like first retail order, that's perfect. This was the first opportunity for me to figure out retail packaging, like what is that gonna look like? How am I gonna even like send this to a retailer?
44:49I had no idea any of the processes and so it was really nice that it was only 200 products because if it was more than that, I don't know how I would have done it.
44:58So we fulfilled that order. It goes great, sells well, they order again. And then Dick's Sporting Goods sees us on the Urban Outfitters website.
45:06So we went from 200 units to Urban Outfitters to a thousand units to Dick's Sporting Goods and it was in 70 stores as a test and it went amazing. And that was the Black Friday that Stanley Tumblers sold more than everything else at Dick's Sporting Goods combined.
45:23So after that they said, come to our offices in Pennsylvania. We wanna talk to you about how do we like expand on this product line. And they're like, we love your stuff but like we don't wanna just sell these charms.
45:31Can you do like the other things that people are buying with their tumblers? Like can you do the straws and straw toppers and stuff? And I'm like, of course I can do all of that.
45:39And I had never done any of it. I had no idea where I was gonna source it. I had never bought anything like that from China but I said, abso freaking lutely I will do this.
45:48And I did. And so that was how we then landed a nationwide order at Dick's Sporting Goods because they ordered all of the different products.
45:57And I remember when they placed that purchase order with us, I had to find all these suppliers in China. So through Alibaba, love Alibaba, I was finding like huddle boot suppliers, straw suppliers, and we'd have to customize the product and the packaging and make it for Stanley.
46:11But like those products were already out there, so it's not like I had to invent it. And at this point, four of your charms were had you outsourced that already by that point when Dick's? No.
46:20So you were fulfilling all of that yourself? Yeah. Urban Outfitters was handmade product.
46:25The Dick's Sporting Goods test was handmade product. Jesus. Yeah.
46:28Okay. Wow. Okay.
46:29So that's when you were like, okay, I'm gonna have the charms and all these accessories. I have to outsource this now. Yeah.
46:34It was not fully outsourced by the way. Like, it it the products came in separately. The packaging came in separately.
46:39We still had to like put it together, assemble it, like put the label on the back. There was still a lot of manual labor. But I remember I was sitting at a Starbucks on a Saturday morning and I had to place this order for like 40,000 straws, tumbler straws.
46:53And I'm sending a wire for $30,000 or something. It was the first time that I'd ever had to send that much money to China.
47:00And it's Saturday morning I'm like, this is either going to go really well or I'm never gonna see this money again.
47:09And I sent them the the screenshot of the wire and I said, you got the wire. Let me know you know how it's gonna go from here and it went well.
47:17Had had you like zoomed with them, met with them prior? No. It was literally just like, can you do this?
47:22Yep. Great. Here's the packaging.
47:24Here's everything. What made you choose them specifically? Really good communication.
47:28Okay. Yeah. So if you're looking to source products from Alibaba for anyone out there that's interested, there's a couple things that you wanna look for.
47:34You wanna make sure that they're a verified Alibaba supplier. Wanna You make sure that they've been in business for ten plus years. And then the third thing is you just wanna make sure that they're replying to you fast enough.
47:43So when I go on Alibaba, I'm looking for a new product, I message 30 people and at night, I mess I go like 9PM and then anyone that responds within the first hour, I'll continue that conversation and if they can do what I'm looking for, continue that conversation and if the prices are good, I continue that conversation and just like narrow it down until you get to like your top two or three and then you have you know a couple contenders.
48:05So that's kind of like my blueprint for working with suppliers on Alibaba. So I sent the $30,000. It went well and that was also the moment that I was able to move from my dad's basement into a small warehouse.
48:18And then Target reached out to us. And this was a very pivotal moment in our business trajectory. The buyer messaged me on LinkedIn.
48:26She said, hey, we're looking for hydration accessories. So I went to go meet with her in person and she's like, love this. Let's do this for an online test.
48:35And for anyone that knows retail, you don't really wanna do an online test. That's kind of like the worst placement to get because it's their way of saying we're gonna bring you in but I'm not gonna commit to it. And I'm like, okay, you know what?
48:45It's a win, like I'll take it. And then two weeks later I get an email and she's like, you know what, actually we're gonna do an in store test. I'm like, great.
48:51That's wonderful. And then two weeks later she goes, actually you know what, we're gonna do this nationwide at all stores with 17 products.
49:01And I was like, what the heck are we gonna do?
49:06Because this went now from a $10,000 order to a 1 and a half million dollar order. That's incredible.
49:12Oh my god. And at the time I was 24 years old in 400 square feet with like a half of an employee and she was really great about guiding me through the process.
49:22She knew I was new. She's like, you should probably work with this sales rep. Sales reps normally take 5%.
49:27That's very normal. And she wants these products to launch for back to school season. And I'm like, that's like twelve weeks away.
49:35But of course, how am I gonna turn down a million and a half dollar order? Like I can't. But everyone that I'm talking to is like, Charlotte, why would you say yes to that?
49:44You can't deliver it. I was like determined to make this happen. Twelve weeks is plenty of time to get product in and to do the whole thing and design it and then ship it out to Target like it's gonna go great.
49:55And I realized like the one problem is that I don't have the money to buy the product.
50:03Because in retail, need to pay for the product, and then you just ship it to Target, and then they don't pay you for three months. So I needed to front like several 100 thousands of dollars for this Target order.
50:14I had no idea how I was gonna get the money. And I didn't have enough money for it saved up. I was still waiting to get money from Dick's Sporting Goods.
50:20Everything was a very short timeline. So I had like no money in the bank. I reached out to my mentors, see if I can get an SBA loan.
50:25But like, no, that takes six months to approve. I couldn't get a bank loan because that takes a year to approve. Like everything just took so long, and coincidentally, I had a friend from college who came from a very wealthy family, and in college he had told me as a joke, hey, if you ever need money for a business or something let me know like happy to help you out.
50:46And I'm like, have this Target order. I need a ton of money for it and I'll pay you a massive percentage if you confront me the money. And he's like, sorry, can't help you out.
50:55And this was over the summer and I was visiting one of my best friends in North Carolina and I like cried myself to sleep both nights that I was there. How was I gonna do this with no money? And she's like, Charlotte, I think you have to tell the buyer you can't do it.
51:11And I'm so disappointed. I started coming to terms with the fact of like, it's better for me to say no than say yes and then not be able to deliver.
51:21And so I emailed the buyer and I'm like, hey, can we hop on a call? Would love to discuss the timing of this order. I get on the call and I'm like, I just want let you know that like this timing isn't gonna work for us, I'm so sorry if this is a deal breaker for you.
51:33I hope you would still consider us for the future, like I was kind of trying to like save it in some way, and she comes back to me and she's like, absolutely. Like I thought twelve weeks was way too soon anyways. And I was like, what?
51:45That's insane. And so I go back to that friend that I had called for the money. He was able to help me out, send me the couple $100,000.
51:52I did the order. It was the most stressful couple of months of my life.
51:58Pretty much as soon as she said yes to this order, I'm like, oh my god, now I need space to fulfill this order. And so I'm like, okay, now I need all this space to figure out like where I'm gonna do it and no warehouse lease is less than a year and a guy that I interned for during college in the same area as me was buying a 20,000 square foot warehouse.
52:16And so I texted him like, Kevin, my bestie. How are you my friend? I have a proposal for you.
52:22I will pay you $10,000 cash for me to move into this warehouse for like six weeks to fulfill this order and then it's yours.
52:30And he's like, well I don't know if we're gonna close on it so I'll let you know. Like sounds like a yes. So he closed on the deal and the day that he closed my trucks arrived, dropped off pallets of product, packaging, everything and that was the start of us starting to fill this Target order.
52:48And then the other big problem was all this product comes in, there's labeling, there's packaging and I start to realize like, wait, this is gonna take so long with only the couple people that I have. And so what I do is I post in every local Facebook group saying hourly warehouse work needed, cash paid, you know, $15 per hour, any hours available, like come and work.
53:08And so what happened over that summer was I had four shifts, 6AM to 10AM, ten to two, two to six, six to ten. So I had four shifts working every single day and we had over 70 warehouse workers.
53:22There was no balance in my life at this point, I'll tell you that much. But I was there from 6AM to 10PM every single night and it was the most crazy operation. I mean, I look back on that time of as like the best part of my business career.
53:35We ended up shipping that Target order on time and then of course, you know, we had another Target order and more Dick's Sporting Goods orders And then things really took a turn. And I was not expecting what was going to happen next.
53:47There was a company that we were working with and a lot of the finances flowed through them. And there was a moment where my lawyer emailed me and he was like, hey, things aren't going the way you think they're supposed to be going with this business.
54:03And they are holding a lot of your money.
54:07And that was the first multiple millions of dollars of profit that I had that was in their bank. And I was like, what do you mean?
54:15Like, we're gonna get it back. Right? And he said, maybe, but probably not.
54:23That's all my money.
54:26He's kind of telling me we're gonna fight to do what we can, but
54:31odds are it's not gonna ever show up. What was going through your mind during this time?
54:38Immediate disappointment in myself that it definitely felt like I had no idea what was gonna happen. I think the hardest part like, I've never told my dad.
54:57I think part of me does what I do to like impress my dad because like I grew up and it was just him and so like everything I did was like, dad, what do think of this?
55:09And so like his him his approval I think meant a lot.
55:16And so it was just something that I chose to never really share.
55:21I I I I started to become grounded of like I was really happy that I had not spent any extra money the year prior, that I had saved everything that we had gotten. And so I was just like, okay.
55:33Well, we have enough money to get by. I only had two employees so like not too much overhead. It was kind of one of these things of like, okay, this sucks and this is really, really bad.
55:42But it was a moment of this is gonna be a great story in the future. What was your biggest takeaway from this entire experience?
55:50The biggest thing I learned from that and for business in general is that don't waste time making the right decision.
55:58You just have to make the decision that you make the right one. And so that's exactly what we did. I moved in the direction that I thought would make the most sense.
56:07I made decisions. I moved forward from that and the company continued to grow. So we went from a couple million dollars in revenue to 8 figures in revenue and then we aired on Shark Tank.
56:17I've always been so curious like what is the process of getting on a show like Shark Tank? I applied three times. The first time I applied online because anyone can apply online and I never got a callback.
56:27And then I went to Indianapolis for one of their open casting calls and I go in, I do my pitch and then I never get a callback. And I was like, okay, well I'll just try again. And so then the next year, I flew to Las Vegas.
56:39I felt very confident the third time that I auditioned because I made my story way more like emotional. So I get a callback and they're like, great, you're gonna proceed and definitely an emotional roller coaster.
56:52No one can prepare you for what Shark Tank is. Shark Tank is the Olympics of being a business owner. Did you go into it hoping for a specific founder?
57:01Yeah. I wanted Laurie. I wanted Kendra Scott.
57:04I would have taken Mark Cuban but unfortunately the only two people that gave me offers were none of them.
57:11So I got offers from mister wonderful and Damon John and I did not want either of them. They were giving me terrible offers for not very good reasons on why they wanted to invest in my company and it was very easy for me to say, nope.
57:24I'm good. And I walked out. I was so impressed by that episode.
57:29I can't even tell you. I was like I would have been shaking and you were just like so on top of it and I mean mister wonderful I think you know, unrightly so called your product, what did he call crap? Yeah.
57:40He called it crap 17 times. You know what though? The moment that he called it crap, I had a sigh of relief because I knew my episode would air.
57:48And so it was like the drama of him calling it crap that many times was like, I just knew in my head, this is going to show up on TV. Charlotte, what makes a successful person? Willingness to give up certain things to get what they really want.
58:02You can't have it all and so you either give up your social life, free time, fitness, eating well.
58:10You just have to choose what you want to sacrifice and I think the best most successful people just choose how to sacrifice really well. Charlotte, what is
58:17your biggest dream?
58:21My biggest dream is to build Char Brands which would be it's like a holdco of many different companies into a billion dollar company.
58:30That's my big dream and I think about it every day. And I wanna have a big building that says Char Brands on it and there's hundreds of employees inside working on all the different little retail brands that I wanna launch.
58:43So that's a dream. We'll see what happens. I have no
58:47doubt, like,
58:49doubt. I think we should do a part two to this when that day counts so we could talk about how you did that. Yes.
58:53But thank you so much. Of course. Thank you so much for having me.
58:57This was such a pleasure.
58:58Alright, guys. You know the drill. We're gonna be diving into the anatomy of Charlotte's dream.
59:03We're gonna be going over all of the principles that came up in her journey. And because there are so many that came up, we're gonna be putting up a list of all of them somewhere on the screen, and we'll just be touching on a few that we find the most important.
59:17And if there are any that you want us to touch on again in a future video, of course, let us know. Oh, and by the way, this is Oscar.
59:23He really wants to be in today's video. Oh my god.
59:26Say hi. Let's dive in. So the first principle to come up is find the white space.
59:34Finding the white space is the ability to identify untapped opportunities or unmet needs or unexplored angles within any industry.
59:42And I think that Charlotte is actually one of the gifted people at doing this.
59:47You may remember us talking about how oversaturated every single market seems to be. But honestly, through Charlotte, I realized that there is still so much untapped potential that we have yet to see.
59:59Let's think about Char Charms. She looked at a water bottle, and she found a white space that I think we can be honest and say, it really wasn't the most obvious idea. Here's the thing.
1:00:07The Stanley craze hadn't even happened yet. She didn't jump on this opportunity when the trend came around. She found the white space before the trend validated it, which is honestly pretty insane when you think about it.
1:00:17But with wall candy, she literally saw a white space in the command hook industry, and she noticed something that most of us would have just accepted as the norm. And I think that that's the most important thing about this principle. You don't have to invent something that has never existed before to find a white space.
1:00:33Now here's the thing. Most of you watching probably already have your product, your business, or your dream, and you might be thinking, is it too late? And based off of what we've seen with Charlotte, the answer is obviously no.
1:00:44Because there is always a white space in every single industry. You just have to know how to look for it. But I do wanna say one thing about this principle, and it's that just because you find a white space, it doesn't mean that it's going to succeed.
1:00:57You still have to prove that people actually want what you're putting out there. And we're gonna talk about exactly how to do that in a few principles. But I will say, getting in the mindset of always looking for white space, whether it's in your product, in your packaging, which could be physical or could be a thumbnail, or even who you are marketing to.
1:01:13This is a principle that the most successful people are constantly doing. So here's a little framework to make sure that you're actively doing this. One, map what exists.
1:01:21Look at every single competitor in your space. What are they all doing the same? What does every product, every brand, every service in your category have in common?
1:01:31That sameness is literally where the white space hides. Number two, find what's missing.
1:01:36Ask yourself, what is nobody saying? Who is nobody talking to? What problem is everyone ignoring?
1:01:43And that gap is your opportunity. And before I tell you number three, down below in the description, we've included a downloadable worksheet where you can go through all these questions yourself.
1:01:52And hopefully, you can start putting these principles into action. Number three is you wanna test it cheaply before you build it. Before you invest in anything, show your idea to real people, not your friends, not your family who will be nice to you.
1:02:06You wanna show it to strangers, which brings us to our next principle, your customer is your cofounder. Now this principle is to treat your customer not as someone that you sell to, but as an active partner in what you're building and what you're creating.
1:02:20Their feedback and their pain points are the most honest road map that your business will ever have. This principle is essential, and it's probably the one that most of us are not applying the way we should.
1:02:32Now I mentioned in a prior video that I actually heard this concept in Masterclass with Kim Kardashian where she talked about how her customers help her build her businesses. And ultimately, she includes them in the choices she makes.
1:02:43And in the anatomy of Charlotte's dream, I feel like she understood this in the earliest stage of her business, which I think is what set her up for success. You may remember that she was talking about how she went to the mall, she interviewed a 100 strangers about her product. She did this after her friends told her they weren't so sure about this idea.
1:03:01But luckily, Charlotte went and found people who were, and she spoke to them directly. We so often build things thinking that we know what people want and what they don't want.
1:03:13But the best person to help guide you in your business or dream is the customer that you are serving. At the end of the day, it is for them that we're doing this. And the bottom line is this.
1:03:24If you are building something for other people, they should be in the room when you build it. Not occasionally, consistently.
1:03:30How many of us are really actively doing this? I mean, let's be real.
1:03:34How many times are we really going out of our way to get feedback from strangers? Find time in your calendar now to make sure that you are dedicating time to speak to your cofounder, aka your customer.
1:03:45And so after listening to Charlotte, we decide to apply this ourselves. Roy doesn't know I'm gonna say this. Do I have to build an app?
1:03:53We created a feedback portal so we can continue to build this channel with you.
1:03:59Tell us what we could improve on. What questions you want answered? What type of guests do you actually wanna see?
1:04:04Or what are the resources we could provide? It will be down in the description. And if it's not, call us out because it's gonna be done, which brings us to our next principle to understand your audience.
1:04:16Understanding your audience is going beyond knowing who your customer is to understand why they do what they do. It is not just their demographics, but it's also understanding their psychology.
1:04:27It's understanding what they're chasing, what language they use, what they care about, who they aspire to be. Applying the customer as your cofounder principle, it's gonna allow you to know what your customer wants.
1:04:39But understanding your audience is way deeper than that.
1:04:42It's about understanding the why behind what they tell you. And that's actually gonna be what's gonna allow you to innovate. Now the thing about Charlotte is that she really wasn't just collecting feedback from them.
1:04:53She was studying them. She was looking for patterns. I think that's what allowed her to create the videos that actually converted to sales.
1:05:00And it allowed her to understand what colors to use in the packaging and what licensing collaborations she should explore. Because at face value, Char Charms appeals to people who want to accessorize their water bottles.
1:05:10But the real question is why? What does buying this specific accessory make them feel? Is it a statement to the world?
1:05:17Is it self expression? Because it may sound crazy that we are talking about water bottle accessories, but this is how deep the most successful people think. So how do we do this?
1:05:25Well, there are two sources. First is what they tell you, your surveys, your feedback forms, your direct conversations with them. It's in our comments.
1:05:32We must read them, not once, but over and over, and we have to look underneath the words. What are they really saying?
1:05:39Second, what they show you. It's their actions.
1:05:43What they buy, what they don't buy, what performs, what doesn't, where they drop off because what people do is always more honest than what they say.
1:05:55Now a very good example of this was Natalie, the founder of Rella. She was able to save her company by figuring out that her customers were not influencers. It was the social media managers and founders and agencies.
1:06:07These were the people who, their actions, were actually using the product. And more importantly, they were paying for it.
1:06:14And that also speaks to our find the right audience principle, which we're not gonna go into today. But looking to understand them, sometimes you might realize you're actually betting on the wrong horse. Moving on to our next principle, which is to start before you're ready.
1:06:27And this is moving forward before the timing feels right, or the money is there, or the plan is clear. Because momentum is literally what creates clarity, not the other way around.
1:06:38And I think that Charlotte is one of the clearest examples of this that we've seen on this show. After she verified that there was an audience for her product, she then did something that not many people do while they are in school.
1:06:50She got an office, and she started a business. I think the common thing that most of us do is we wait until after graduation, or we wait until an investor backs the idea, or we wait until we can quit our job in order to go all in.
1:07:04But if you look at Charlotte, she was far from the avatar that would be ready to take on that opportunity. I mean, she could have easily said, well, I don't have the money to start this. I'm a student.
1:07:14But that didn't stop her. Her not being ready didn't stop her from starting.
1:07:19Oxiromozy actually has this quote, and it's if you need perfect conditions to start, it means that your success is conditional. And if you want unconditional success, then be willing to start under any circumstance.
1:07:31The most successful people, they weren't starting in the best of circumstances. A lot of times, they were starting in the hardest.
1:07:38So if you are sitting on something right now, waiting for the perfect moment until you feel ready, the moment is not coming, and the longer you wait for it, the further away it gets. So just start, which brings us to our next principle, which is to do things that don't scale. This is to be willing to do the things that feel small or inefficient because they're what actually gets something off the ground.
1:07:59Now this principle actually comes from a famous essay by Paul Graham, the cofounder of Y Combinator, one of the most successful startup accelerators in the world. The core idea is that in the early stages of building anything, the unscalable or manual laborious things aren't just acceptable.
1:08:15They're often the most important things that you can do. And for startups specifically, there are many ways that we can do things that don't scale.
1:08:23You can recruit your first users manually. You can offer an insanely good service by sending a handwritten thank you note to every single customer. You can build a narrow market like Facebook did and just start with Harvard students before opening up to anyone else.
1:08:38All of them, in the moment, will feel inefficient. All of these are unscalable, but all of them are what separates the companies that make it from the ones that don't. But I wanna focus on one way that you can do things that don't scale.
1:08:49I think it's the one that Charlotte exemplifies the most clearly, and it's the doing it yourself part that Paul Graham talks about. Now in his essay, he references a company called Pebble, which is a hardware startup, and they assembled their first several 100 watches by hand. No factory, no production line, just the founders putting together watches themselves.
1:09:09Being the ones to physically make their own product, that is what made their success possible. And Charlotte did the same thing. You may remember that in the interview, was a moment where she kept saying we or us, and I asked her, and by we, you mean and she was like, I mean me.
1:09:23It was me. She was her own social media manager.
1:09:26She was her own marketer. She was her own manufacturer, her own influencer.
1:09:30She did all of these things herself before she ever thought about delegating any of it. And I think that's a huge part of why she was able to scale the way that she did. Because by the time that she actually handed something off, she already knew what good looked like.
1:09:43Now I wanna be very, very, very clear about something. This principle is not about never delegating.
1:09:50There are also things you should absolutely hand off, your accounting, your legal, things that require deep specialized expertise that have nothing to do with the core of what you're building.
1:10:00So, yes, in those cases, delegate. But the things that are at the heart of what you're building, the things that directly touch your customer or your brand or your content or your product, you need to do those things yourself first enough so that you can lead.
1:10:16Not doing it yourself, especially in areas that directly touch your customer, it not only harms our brand, but it harms our long term growth. I do wanna say this. You might be listening to this and thinking, well, I already do everything myself.
1:10:31I have no choice. And if that's you, first of all, I see you. But I wanna push back a little because there's a difference between doing it yourself because you have to and doing it with intention.
1:10:41So ask yourself, what is one unscalable thing you could do this week to get closer to your customer or understand your product better? Next, what is one unscalable thing you are already doing but haven't properly documented systems and findings so that you can eventually delegate with confidence? What is this teaching me?
1:10:58What patterns am I seeing? What do I now know about my customer and my brand and my process that I couldn't have learned any other way? More importantly, what's working and what isn't?
1:11:10Because if you're doing everything yourself and you're not extracting those lessons, you're just busy. And busy is not the same as building.
1:11:17Alright. Moving on to our next principle, which is to recruit superstars. Now superstars are your employees, your c suite, and even your mentors.
1:11:26They're gonna be the people who are actually going to increase your chances in business. I feel like this is something that Charlotte understood from the very beginning. She talked about how she hired a TikTok coach for $300 a month that helped keep her accountable every day.
1:11:40She also signed up for the small business development center, which by the way is free. We should definitely all be checking this out. Now the part of the conversation I found really interesting is that Charlotte mentioned that for the different stages of her business, she had different mentors for different things.
1:11:54She is not the first person on this channel to bring this up. If you watched our previous episode with Sharon Srivatsa, you probably heard him talk about his seven coaches.
1:12:03I don't think this is just happenstance. Both were, like, so passionate about their mentors. They recruit superstars to support them, people who can see what they can't see yet, people who can compress years of learning into months.
1:12:16So I want you to ask yourself this. Who's on your team right now? Who is coaching you?
1:12:20Who is the person that is one or two steps ahead of you that you have access to right now? Because if the answer is nobody, that might be the most important thing to change.
1:12:29What is one area of your business or dream right now where you are trying to figure something out alone that someone else has already solved? Who could you reach out to this week? And if you watched our last video and you've already applied this, do it again.
1:12:42You can never have enough people in your corner teaching you the next steps. Moving on to our next principle, which is the art of attention. Mastering attention means understanding how to deliberately design it.
1:12:54It's understanding the psychology of human beings and obsessing over the pattern interrupts that make people stop and look. And on this show, we've talked about eight ways to get attention. Number one, do something unexpected.
1:13:04Number two, provide extreme value. Number three, have a strong POV. Number four, be consistently present, like you are consistently posting on social media, like people are just consistently seeing you.
1:13:14Number five, accomplishment. Number six, collaborate with those who already have attention. Number seven, tap into culture.
1:13:20And number eight is to develop an indisputable talent. I'm thinking like a Simone Biles.
1:13:25This one is obviously the hardest one to do because you really have to differentiate yourself from any other talent out there, but that obviously is a way. Now all of these matter. But in Charlotte's journey, the one that came up over and over again is number one, which is to do something unexpected.
1:13:40Not only did she literally say the anatomy of a good hook was to lean into the unexpected, but she also gave us one of the clearest frameworks for understanding it that we've ever seen on the show. And she calls it pattern disruption. The idea is simple.
1:13:54In any market, in any aisle, in any feed, there is a pattern. And the moment that you break that pattern, even slightly, you get attention. Now let's think about vacation sunscreen.
1:14:03Vacation, they put it in a whipped cream bottle, and that's it. That was their whole spiel, and it went viral because it was unexpected. Our brains literally stop when we see something like that.
1:14:13And this is the part that I really wanna emphasize. Pattern disruption doesn't just apply to products. It applies to your content.
1:14:20It applies to your brand. It applies to how you show up online, how you write your emails, how you pitch yourself. Wherever there is a norm, there's always an opportunity to be unexpected.
1:14:30And here's what I love about this. It doesn't really take something extreme to do something unexpected. I think Charlotte mentioned that you really only need, like, 10% of a difference in order to really stand out.
1:14:39When it comes to wall candy, Charlotte walked down the command hook aisle and saw white, and nobody really questioned it before. And all she did was she put patterns on them.
1:14:49That tiny pattern disruption is what makes someone stop in the aisle, pick it up, and buy it. Not knowing what's coming next, that's what makes people stop.
1:14:57Whether it's filming strangers on the street, not knowing what they're going to say, or dipping a chicken nugget into cane sauce in a Stanley Cup, ultimately, it doesn't have to be massive. It just has to break the pattern. So ask yourself this.
1:15:09What does everyone else look like? What is the pattern that everyone follows? What are the things that you yourself as a consumer are bothered by?
1:15:16What feels stale, obvious, or like nobody thought to even question it? And what would the unexpected version of what you're building look like, even if it's just a 10% difference? And on the topic of attention, we wanted to use this time to bring attention to one of your dreams.
1:15:32Now the dream that we want to shout out in this episode is Drea Dome. Although her dream was pretty much to be a musician and this was the thing that she knew she was destined to do, she still gave it up for a few years. Luckily, she found her way back.
1:15:47She finally got the courage to chase her dream and put out her own album, the soundtrack to my twenties. This is a moment in my life where you're experiencing, like, a dream. I'm the luckiest.
1:16:00I truly am.
1:16:04What it took for her to get here is inspirational to me. I think so many of you watching can be inspired by her. I don't know what to do myself.
1:16:12Give it a listen. Go support Drea. And if you are interested in having your dream, shout it out.
1:16:17We will leave a form down below. Talk about your business. Talk about your dream.
1:16:22We really want to shout it out because we all know how difficult it is to chase a dream. Thank you.
1:16:30Thank you.
1:16:33Alright. Let's get back to it. So moving on to our next principle, which is to save for a rainy day.
1:16:39I don't know why I feel so uncomfortable talking about this because I buy Starbucks almost every day.
1:16:45Anyway, this principle is the discipline of resisting the urge to upgrade your life or your business as your revenue grows so that you can always have the margin to make the moves that actually matter down the line. You may remember that Charlotte mentioned that when everything fell apart, when she was literally in her darkest hour, she was grateful that she hadn't spent what she had.
1:17:03And it's the reason that her business survived. Now we have had multiple guests on this show who have talked about literally that. Sharron, the CEO of acquisition.com, he has kept the same monthly budget for fourteen years even though his net worth has grown 50 times over.
1:17:19And that is what allowed him to take risks in business even though some of them didn't work out. And Charlotte did this too. When she lost all that money, she was able to continue operating in her company.
1:17:30I think that a lot of times when we look at saving for a rainy day, so many of us are probably in survival mode that this just feels like something that isn't even feasible for us to do. But I think that in small ways, we can always be thinking about creating runway for ourselves. If you are in that spot where you are trying to survive right now, understand that in the future, when the day comes, when you do have that extra cash, it is essential that you protect it because you wanna give yourself enough runway to survive when rough moments and rough patches happen because every business has them.
1:18:00Ideally, they say you really want around six months of runway at any given time, and that would give you a real safety net where you really wouldn't have to rely on a miracle. Moving on to our next principle, which is resourcefulness. This is the ability to find creative solutions with what you already have instead of waiting what you think you need.
1:18:18I almost didn't add this principle. Why? Because I think it's super cliche.
1:18:22It is one of those things that is so easy to say, and it's so hard to actually put into an actionable step. But I really couldn't ignore it with Charlotte. This girl is unbelievably resourceful.
1:18:35And honestly, when I look back at every single guest that we've had on the show, I cannot think of one who wasn't. I remember years ago, I got a ticket for a virtual Tony Robbins seminar, and he said something that has stuck with me ever since.
1:18:49He asked the audience, how many of you have failed at something? And then he started asking people why. People would say, they don't have the money.
1:18:57The economy was bad. They didn't have enough time. He basically said, okay.
1:19:00So what you guys were telling me is that you lacked the resources. But then he challenged that. And he said, you didn't fail because you lack resources.
1:19:08You failed because you lacked resourcefulness. There are people who built successful businesses in a bad economy, and all of them definitely didn't have enough time.
1:19:18None of us do. What separated them wasn't just luck or circumstances, although luck is obviously a very big thing. A huge part has to be resourcefulness.
1:19:27Charlotte is proof of that at every single stage. She needed workers. She got high schoolers to help her out.
1:19:32She needed a warehouse. She found someone that she knew, and she convinced him to let her use it while she assembled her product. My point is that none of these were obvious solutions, and none of them were in a playbook.
1:19:43I do wanna acknowledge that some of us do have it a lot harder than others. Some of us are starting with less, but resourcefulness is the only thing that will allow us to push past it. There is always something that you have or someone that you know or some way to figure it out.
1:19:59There's always a solution. So ask yourself, what is the problem that you're currently facing that you have been using lack of resources as a reason you can't solve it?
1:20:09Write it down. Now ask yourself, who do I know? What do I have?
1:20:13What could I find that could get me one step closer to solving this without the resources I think I need? But there is no resourcefulness without our last principle, and that is our mindset principle.
1:20:24Charlotte is an incredible example of someone who has that winner's mindset ingrained into her mind.
1:20:33She looked for every upside in every single one of her obstacles. She lost $2,000,000, and her first thought is this is gonna be a great story one day.
1:20:42She decided she was gonna get on Shark Tank, and then she doesn't. And then she's like, alright. Well, I'm just gonna have to audition again and audition again until they let me in.
1:20:50And then she gets on Shark Tank, and mister Wonderful calls her product crap. Most people would hear that and be like, oh, that really hurt my feelings or that really threw me off. But no.
1:20:59She was excited because she knew that meant that her episode was going to air. Her first instinct was positive.
1:21:06Charlotte also said something in this interview that I'm gonna keep coming back to. And it's that don't waste time making the right decision but to make the decision right. And what separates successful entrepreneurs isn't that they make better decisions, is that they are better at fixing them.
1:21:21That takes a certain mindset. It's not a mindset that says everything is gonna be easy, but one that says no matter what happens, I'm gonna find a way. And I'll be honest with you.
1:21:33That mindset is something that I am really struggling with lately.
1:21:39If you saw me behind the scenes, you would see me overthink everything way too much, every single thumbnail, every single question that I ask in an interview.
1:21:51And while on one hand, it's obviously great because we're putting a lot of thought into what we create, on the other hand, there are a lot of decisions that I think we could have just made months ago, but it took me that long to make the call.
1:22:11And then I realized recently after a conversation with Charlotte, I am obviously operating from a place of a lot of fear.
1:22:22Now our episodes are not super cheap to make. And ultimately, at this point, we really can only put out one a month.
1:22:31And so every video feels like it has to be a hit. And there's a part of me that feels like there's only so long that we have to make this work before something gets. And I have so much fear that this won't work for so many reasons, but I don't wanna stop.
1:22:55I wanna keep doing this, and I love this. And I'm sure there's a lot of you that are watching that feel like you have a lot on the line to make your dream a reality. I'll be the first to say that I roll my eyes when I hear this mindset talk because at the end of the day, it is very hard to apply when you are going through the depths of it.
1:23:13When you can't pay your rent and you might have to fire your team or everyone around you doesn't believe in you. While there are a lot of things we cannot control, the only thing we have control over is how we respond.
1:23:31More importantly, how we think. And so right now, if you are in a place where every decision feels so big because you don't feel like you have a lot of chances to get this wrong.
1:23:46What if we had Charlotte's mindset? And I think that's the thing that Charlotte taught me, which is we should not spend time on making the right decisions. We just have to make the decisions that we made right.
1:23:58And so make the decisions. Make the decision that you are enough, that you have what it takes.
1:24:08Make the decision that you know how this story is going to end. That no matter what the outcome is, you'll make it right, that you are going to win.
1:24:19Make the decision that one day, you will reach the anatomy of your dream.
1:24:29Alright, guys. That's enough for me. I will see you in the next one.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Charlotte Trecartin grew two consumer brands to ten million dollars in revenue without spending a dollar on ads. She did it by finding white space in the water bottle aisle, handmaking product in her dad's basement, and posting on TikTok three times a day until the algorithm caught up.
How they asked for the click.
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