3 - Vin McCauley - From Avocado Overload to Legal Blender Battles: The Perishable Puzzles of a DTC Maverick

Jim Banks [00:00:01]:
I remember we went up there and we absolutely froze our balls off. Vin McCauley is the founder of DTC brand Builders. And for those who don't know what DTC means, it's direct to consumer. His company is dedicated to helping businesses achieve success in the direct to consumer space. Vin has a wealth of experience in the world of startups and established businesses. Having been on the founding team of both Butcherbox and smoothie box, Vin offers a range of advisory, consultancy, and agency services to businesses that need help navigating the ever changing online landscape. He has a deep understanding of what it takes to build a successful brand in today's competitive market, and he's committed to sharing his expertise with others. Whether you're launching a new startup or looking to grow an established brand, Vin's expertise and experience make him an invaluable resource and a fabulous podcast guest as you're about to find out on this episode of Bad Decisions with Jim Banks.

Jim Banks [00:00:52]:
So let's join your host, Jim Banks. As I mentioned in the intro, I'm delighted to have Vin as a guest on the podcast today. I've had some fantastic opportunities to spend time in person with Vin. And first off, I'll say hello. Good to have you here, Vin. Lovely to see you again. It's been such a while.

Vin McCauley [00:01:14]:
Great to be here, Jim. Super excited for the conversation today, so.

Jim Banks [00:01:19]:
I'll take people back a little bit of time for the benefits of those listening in. So I actually met Vin in Barcelona trying to think when it was, was it like 20, 18, 19, something like that.

Vin McCauley [00:01:31]:
Right in that area. Right in that, I want to say, 18.

Jim Banks [00:01:37]:
We both had the opportunity to be on stage. I was talking about Google Ads, and Vin was basically putting the business that he was working with at the time up on stage. And he was bearing his soul to Ezra Firestone and Molly. What was Molly's name? I can't remember. Pittman. Molly Pittman.

Vin McCauley [00:01:53]:
Pittman. And it was called the hot seat.

Jim Banks [00:01:56]:
The hot seat.

Vin McCauley [00:01:56]:
They put me on the hot seat in the middle of a heat wave.

Jim Banks [00:02:01]:
So basically, it was Vin bearing his soul to Molly and Ezra for their amusement and fun and the audience to see how Vin was running his business. And I thought that Ezra and Molly did a pretty good job of giving Vin some good ideas and so on and so on. But I was sitting in the audience watching him present and talk about the challenges and issues that the company that he was working with at the time, which company called Smoothie Box, had at that particular point. And what really sprung into my mind was what the product was designed to do was missing from what was actually being discussed when they were on stage. I remember watching a YouTube video quite a while back with Clay Christensen about the job to be done and the mcdonald's milkshake. And I'll leave a link in the show notes as to what that's all about. But it was a phenomenal video for me. I reached out to Vin and said, hey, look, I think this video really encapsulates a lot about what I think your product does in the market.

Jim Banks [00:02:55]:
It. And I think the positioning is different. And from there we got to the point where we went backwards and forwards a little bit. We got to the point where I started to do a bit of consulting and then eventually got to the point where we were looking at the possibility of me helping out. So I went over to Florida. At the time, I was probably about 70 pounds heavier than I am now, but I took to walking along the beach in Florida and that became the smoothie box experience of working with Vin and his partner Justin. And basically we got to the point where I was trying to work on my health, I was trying to help the business grow and we became incredibly good friends as a result of that. So how was that experience for you standing on stage with Molly and Ezra.

Vin McCauley [00:03:35]:
Been so hindsight 2020? It was fantastic. That Barcelona trip, I didn't actually meet you there. I don't know if you remember that we didn't meet the trip. We actually didn't shake hands or anything there. But Nick Shackleford was there. Tim Bird Mikhail from SMS bomb. There was an interesting group there that I'm still connected with. Eric Taz, from my perspective, you had sent me what I thought was incredibly insightful video.

Vin McCauley [00:04:10]:
The clay Christensen jobs to be done theory. And I bad not been familiar with it. And for those that aren't familiar, click the link. Because it's a seven minute video or so. I've probably watched it close to 100 times, certainly shared it a lot. But you shared that video. I found it incredibly insightful. And as you said, that kicked off a conversation, which kicked off an engagement, which kicked off a friendship.

Vin McCauley [00:04:37]:
We ended up. We met in Barcelona and you came to Florida. We ended up in Vegas at one point and then back to.

Jim Banks [00:04:51]:
Vin. Like, I've been involved in affiliate marketing a long time. I said, look, I've got some really cool friends. I think this smoothie product would be a really good play for affiliates. So we made arrangements to meet up back in Vegas for affiliate summit. What was really quite interesting was that because Vin was living in Florida, I don't think you owned a pair of casual long trousers. So she had to go and buy long trousers to travel to.

Vin McCauley [00:05:15]:
I had, my winter clothes were up north because we had moved to Florida when my dad got sick. And, yeah, I had no trousers or still, and I've been in Porto long enough, I still don't like it.

Jim Banks [00:05:28]:
And it's funny, I always remember the first venture out in your khaki pants that you bought. I was walking behind you, and you still had the sticky label down the back of the legs where they put whipped up behind you and just pulled the label off the trousers, which, again, that sounds right. We went to Vegas, we hung out a bit more. I introduced into some friends. The friendship became stronger and stronger as a result of that. I went back to the UK. We then agreed that I was going to go back out again to try and spend a little bit longer with you. We were looking, ideally at the time, to probably look to get me involved on a sort of full time basis to help out with some of the online marketing side of things.

Jim Banks [00:06:09]:
So for me, it was a fairly big life decision that I was looking to make. So Vin was very gracious, put us up in a very nice vrbo on the beach, flew my wife out. We had a phenomenal time. Got to meet his family, his kids. I always remember watching your son sitting on the pitch, basically filling up his glove full of sand and watching these kids play and how bad the parents were towards you. I'm thinking you've given up your time, your coaching, and they're just giving you complete time.

Vin McCauley [00:06:42]:
Welcome to american volunteer sports.

Jim Banks [00:06:45]:
And I could see you getting riled up by these parents. I'm thinking, he's going to launch himself at one of these parents any minute.

Vin McCauley [00:06:51]:
Now since I've last seen you. I did. I ended up coaching soccer and got into it with a couple of parents. Hard enough that I just said to my wife the other day, I love the kids, but I can't deal with the parents. Coaching is not for me.

Jim Banks [00:07:03]:
Yeah, I think competitive parents will always be the bane of any coach's life.

Vin McCauley [00:07:07]:
Yeah, I'm like an advocate and protector for kids, so I go a bit overboard when these overbearing parents come in and pick on someone your own size. Not a good mixture.

Jim Banks [00:07:16]:
So we got to the point where we were about to fly up to Boston, where the main investor of the business was based. I said to my wife, I wanted to meet the main guy, look him in the eyes, see what things were like, see if he liked me, see if we like them. We even had flights booked to go up. And I think we were. I don't know if we were like an hour or so away from heading towards the airport and you received a call to basically say, we just bad. Our first case of COVID don't come. Do you remember that?

Vin McCauley [00:07:46]:
I do. I remember getting really sick in Vegas and leaving a day early and thinking, I might have had an early and. But you came, I feel like a few months later. And I don't remember the specifics, but I remember there being this hurriedness to make a decisions. It's like that old song, do we stay or do we go now? And it was like, jim, are you going to get on the plane or are you going to stay?

Jim Banks [00:08:19]:
Yeah.

Vin McCauley [00:08:20]:
And there was a real sort of angel devil on the shoulders sort of situation that really felt like a fork. I think hindsight 2020. It absolutely was a fork in the road.

Jim Banks [00:08:33]:
Yeah.

Vin McCauley [00:08:33]:
Because for both of our.

Jim Banks [00:08:35]:
We had been told by virgin, we were flying with Virgin Atlantic, and we were being told that there were no more flights out of Orlando. Like, we were on the second to last flight out of Orlando. And I remember saying to my wife, go and split the tickets so I can stay and you can go back. And I remember sitting in the hotel, and I think you were there in the hotel room at the time, and I had tears running down my face because I was like, I want to stay. I want to stay. But at the same time, this seems like a fairly scary thing. But I was like, you know what? It'll be a couple of weeks, we'll sort it all out and we'll be back out. And none of us knew that it was going to be.

Jim Banks [00:09:13]:
What was it, like nearly two years before things really got back to. Even now, I don't even think things are back to normal. Normal now. I think they're just about there.

Vin McCauley [00:09:23]:
You could travel, certainly, but you would have been stuck here. I vaguely remember it coming down to the american healthcare system where you're like, I take a certain medicine and I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to source it. I mean, we were really sort of sharpening the pencil to see, is there any way that you could stay? Not knowing that Covid was going to sort of, at that point, wasn't Covid still a giant question mark?

Jim Banks [00:09:55]:
Absolutely, yeah. Kill us all declared a pandemic. We weren't really sure how long it was going to be. And like I said, I genuinely thought I was going to jump on a plane back to the UK, two or three weeks, it'd all be finished. We jump back on a, get back out there and pick up where we left off and consummate the decisions of what we'd actually made at that particular point in time. In the run up to that, obviously, we didn't get it done. Covid was what Covid was, and we got to the point where we went our separate ways. I think you decided that you needed somebody physically there.

Jim Banks [00:10:30]:
I wasn't able to be physically there, so we just went our separate ways. And for me, I was devastated at the loss of the business opportunity, but I was probably more hurt by the fact that I wasn't going to be able to see somebody who'd become a good friend of mine, and I wanted to continue that friendship. Your wife had gone on well with my wife. I'd loved your kids. There was so much for the relationships that we'd built up in that relatively short space of time because you came across such a genuine person. So let's pick things up for the benefits of the podcast. What's happened to you since then? Because obviously since then, a lot has changed in your kind of situation. You became a father again, is that right?

Vin McCauley [00:11:11]:
Yes. In Covid, while we were sort of stuck in the house as getting older and whatnot, my wife and I were like, hey, should we have one more child? We have two, and we're really enjoying it, and life's good, and we're home a lot. If we're going to be home a lot, let's fill this home with kids. And so let's have one more. And one more became two more because they were twins, and that was a big shock and a huge change of lifestyle that we're still feeling. They turned three in February. I just turned 45, and they have endless energy and they're awesome babies. When you were out here, there was Bella and buddy, pretty much, and they're now turning nine and ten.

Vin McCauley [00:11:58]:
But yes, we had kids, sold the house that you had dinner over and moved into a bigger place for more space.

Jim Banks [00:12:09]:
At the time that I was there with you guys, you were working with smoothie box, but I understand you're now doing something else. Tell me a little bit more about what you're up to now.

Vin McCauley [00:12:18]:
So should I talk about the end of smoothie box?

Jim Banks [00:12:21]:
Yeah.

Vin McCauley [00:12:22]:
Or just now?

Jim Banks [00:12:22]:
No.

Vin McCauley [00:12:24]:
So to segue from you to the end of smoothie box. Smoothie box, in a lot of ways, was a search for conviction, product market fit as you wrestling with personas and really finding the messaging that would work and the jobs to be done.

Jim Banks [00:12:42]:
Theory.

Vin McCauley [00:12:42]:
Daily harvest was doing incredible work and growing at an incredibly fast rate. Venture back. And so we knew there was a market there, but we're having trouble sort of unlocking it. I struggled.

Jim Banks [00:12:57]:
The business being described as sort of like Amazon, but for fresh food. So the supply chain lead time for putting the ingredients together was sometimes 18 to 24 months. So actually deciding how much of a particular product you needed, it wasn't a case of, well, let's just throw another five of them together. Now. You needed to think 18 months, 24 months ahead, because you had to grow the ingredients in different countries and then have it all shipped in and everything else. So wasn't as simple as some people's businesses are in terms of putting it all together.

Vin McCauley [00:13:32]:
I got to a point, I guess the succinct version of the story was a vc sent me a deal to get my opinion on, and it was a hand cream with incredibly high margins, and it wasn't perishable and had a high repurchase rate, and they weren't offering a subscription. It was really a sweet business. And I was looking at how thin the margins were at smoothie box, how hard perishable frozen is in the United States just because of how large of a landmass we have to cover in a short period of time before the ice melts. And so one of the things that I lost appreciation for the additional challenges of perishable e commerce.

Jim Banks [00:14:16]:
I always remember we went up to Jacksonville, where you had one of your distribution centers, where they put the boxes together. So the orders would come in, they would be sent to the distribution center. I remember we went up there, and we absolutely froze our balls off in this west. These guys were putting in dry ice into the box, and you had a dry ice formula that would actually say how much ice needed to be put in, depending on where the particular house was located. Because obviously, if you put a box of smoothies on somebody's doorstep and it's 110 outside, that's going to be thawed in ten minutes, 15 minutes, unless there's a certain quantity of drop.

Vin McCauley [00:14:53]:
Oh, my God.

Jim Banks [00:14:54]:
Because a lot of people would just have it thrown onto the doorstep, and it would be left there until they got home. And sometimes that could be six, 7 hours later. So there were so many moving parts, that particular business, which made the logistics of it so much more difficult. And the Davy harvest model was always like, how much discount should we give somebody to buy it to begin with? And I can remember, I know you and I butted heads on many occasions when I was talking about in order to get people to repeat buy, they need to consume what you've sent them to begin with. We were talking about the bonding sequence of the email, say, hey, here's a recipe. You can make this particular smoothie with. This particular smoothie with. Because if they didn't consume it, they're going to go, you sent me another box.

Jim Banks [00:15:34]:
I've got no room in my freezer and I don't want to have it anymore.

Vin McCauley [00:15:37]:
Yeah, you were right. And the freezer is a hidden spot in your house. So consumption was a challenge that we needed to address and didn't address effectively.

Jim Banks [00:15:49]:
And we're at the point now where at the beginning of the year, a lot of people will be doing their New Year's resolutions. They'll have joined the gym and some of them will just probably say, a member of the gym for a couple of months, not go. They'll pay the monthly subscription for the gym and then eventually they'll get a bank statement and go, why am I paying $80 for a gym that I'm not going to? And really, that's where I think the subscription models sometimes fall down is. People knew almost by accident, they forget that they've got it and then eventually they realize they have. Whereas I think the businesses that are proactive in actually going out there and trying to continually put themselves out there in front of people to say, hey, you've got this gym, this smoothie membership, whatever it might be, you've got the ability to put that in front of people and you need to put it in front of people frequently in order for them to remember that you exist.

Vin McCauley [00:16:42]:
Exactly. Do you recall the Blender experiment that we did to address the hidden smoothies and to encourage consumption?

Jim Banks [00:16:51]:
I do. How did that go?

Vin McCauley [00:16:52]:
Were you when we got sued?

Jim Banks [00:16:55]:
No, I dodged a bump there.

Vin McCauley [00:17:00]:
I guess just for the value of your audience, there's a hypothesis. Or there was this feeling that the freezer is a hidden part of your kitchen or your house, and that we needed to provide a reminder to our customers to consume it, just as Jim's talking about. So we thought, what better way than to sell a blender? The other thing was our smoothies required. And you tell a funny story, Jim, about getting a smoothie from Justin versus, I think, my wife. But the blender really impacted the customer experience. It was a cheap blender. It had a grainy smoothie, but we had a high quality or commercial blender. It got velvety smooth.

Vin McCauley [00:17:47]:
And so we thought, let's sell a high quality one. And we sourced one in India from another guy that was speaking on stage in Barcelona. Sam. It infringed on intellectual property, I would say arguably, my attorney thought, maybe inarguably. And so a prominent blunder company sent the cease and desist. And we did, because I was sitting on, say, $50,000 worth of blunders about a year later, I thought, yeah, I bet we could mark this up again. And the week I turned it back on, they said, whoa, you screwed up. I told you cease and desist, and you started up again.

Vin McCauley [00:18:31]:
And so now it was sort of penalty phase. And they wanted us to throw all 50,000 blenders into a dumpster.

Jim Banks [00:18:39]:
Wow.

Vin McCauley [00:18:40]:
And we ended up negotiating sending them to a troubled woman center because just the thought of throwing them out, big dose, just the waste. So we agreed to donate them to charity. But, yeah, we learned these lessons.

Jim Banks [00:18:56]:
Lesson to learn.

Vin McCauley [00:18:59]:
Yeah. The main lesson of consumption is absolutely spot on when you're in a perishable business. And I think just to piggyback on something you said earlier, I think if a lot of subscription businesses are being really honest, there's some aspect of wanting to fly under the radar. There's sometimes an aspect of wanting to be forgotten or to be at a price where you may fly under the bank statement radar to get a couple extra months. I think that I've certainly met more than a few people that have that cooked into their business.

Jim Banks [00:19:36]:
Yeah, I always remember at one point in time, I was sort of a paid search business, and it was the wild west. Back then, my philosophy was, if you're not getting cease and desist letters, you're not trying hard enough. Whereas I think clearly we're way beyond that point now. I think it's an expensive lesson to learn. So obviously, you had the $50,000 worth of blenders that you had to give away to a worthy home. So what kind of happened then?

Vin McCauley [00:20:04]:
Yes. All right, so the business just stabilized. In Covid, we didn't see this huge spike in business. There was some growth, but we weren't necessarily prepared to capitalize. Part of the reason was for what you said you had to forecast so far in ahead. I'll just skip sort of ahead. We ended up getting pursued by a global meal prep company. So they didn't have breakfast on their off race, they were a dinner meal prep company, and they were looking at adding smoothies.

Vin McCauley [00:20:42]:
And so we started to get into the acquisition exit conversations. And through that, I mentally exited. It was like, okay, we're getting to the end and I'm going to have an exit event. We're going to cash out, and I've got to figure out tax consequences. And that's where my mind was. And during the conversations, daily Harvest had a major daily harvest and the revived superfoods had a major health issue. I don't know if that news made it, but they had a product that they launched through affiliates and influencers. That product made the influencers sick.

Vin McCauley [00:21:21]:
I think some significant, so maybe even argue allegedly, could have caused a death and major lawsuits. All of a sudden we were the number three smoothie company, and it looks like number one and two are on shaky ground. So we hit this just really fascinating situation and we got it to an exit. We negotiated a deal. And it really, I would say, without getting into the details too much, there was a conversation that me and the CEO had, which was, what if we invested, there's a tax consequence to this exit. What if we took that bill and applied it to growth? So I'm going to make up numbers. Let's say the tax bill is a million dollars. What if you took a million dollars and put it in the market? Well, Jim, as you would know, because you saw the inside, that would have changed everything, infusing a large sum of money.

Vin McCauley [00:22:22]:
And so now the question was, geez, can I stomach the tax bill when I think I can actually grow this business further? My stance was, I'm mentally at exited. So it was like, so the CEO's name is Mike. Was like, Mike, you have my support to do anything you want, and I'll help transition if you decide to keep it. But I'm moving on. I had already moved on and I had already started sort of my next. And so he ended up keeping it. It moved back up to Boston. And now Butcherbox has sort of become a bit of a portfolio company.

Vin McCauley [00:22:58]:
They have box as a subsidiary and they just launched butcherbox pets. And for anyone that's interested in subscriptions, I think it's a churn reduction strategy in the sense that if you're getting your food for your humans and your pets, it's a place that you're less likely to churn or you're more like, more think it's, I think it's an active. So, and then not to get too rambly, but I've been doing some consulting, and one of the areas, Jim, that really you and I, I think, also butted heads on, and I really appreciated butting heads with you because it was always respectful. You're definitely the market. But was on content, blog content. And I forget the names, but you would suggest writers to us to study who were brilliant writers. Do you remember, was it.

Jim Banks [00:24:00]:
I mean, again, you've got Gary Halbert and John Caples, Eugene Schwartz, John Carlton. I mean, there's some amazing content writers.

Vin McCauley [00:24:12]:
Totally. So you had sort of educate us on, hey, don't do content for the sake of content. If you're going to do it, do high quality, do it meaningful. This isn't a box that you checked. And while we wrestled, nothing, we published nothing.

Jim Banks [00:24:31]:
I think one of the reasons we butted heads was I was like, let's just get something out there. And you were like, no, it needs to be like, so good, so good, so good. And I think in a lot of cases, sometimes it is better to just get it out there and then refine it. Right? But at the same time, I think some people just sit and do nothing at all. And I think something's better than nothing. Better quality is better than poor quality, but at the same time, other people just do nothing at all.

Vin McCauley [00:24:56]:
Well. And that's like meeting an action bias, just doing it and then improving it. And so we absolutely got stuck in not publishing. And so content really, and more than just smoothie box has always been a murky ROI for me. And it's like, how do you do it? Well, we got to strategize it. It's got to have a content calendar, it's got to be managed, it's got to be in sync with the larger marketing message. It's got to complement churn reduction. It's got to be part of the nurturing phase.

Vin McCauley [00:25:33]:
And so there's all these things that we wrestle with. Oh, also, it's got to be good for SEO. Oh, it's got to be edited, it's got to be approved. It's got to go through some editorial control. Then lastly, you got to give it to the tech guys to install it. And at the end of 2022, like most people, I was playing around with chat, GPT, and although there are major, major flaws with it for written content and SEO and Google, there are some sort of incredible benefits that we found doing tests. And so I created a hypothesis which was, can we use sophisticated prompt progression? Can we pull data out of Shopify via the API and plug it into a sophisticated prompt progression to create really high impact blogs that can increase search rankings, domain authority, topical authority and organic search traffic, and ideally revenue. And so we created Pontinex.

Vin McCauley [00:26:34]:
It's mainly powered by Chat GPT, which I think is like a Ferrari motor when it comes to my tech ability. Mytech ability is like a stone wheel. So to have access really affordably to something like Chat GPT has made my software look far more sophisticated than it otherwise would. And so content x, you can just pick how many blogs you want per month, you can set it and forget it, or you can do a manual mode, you can have them saved to draft or publish automatically. It writes the metadata, it writes the excerpts, it hyperlinks back to your product display page. And our early hypothesis is that it's performing, ranking and indexing.

Jim Banks [00:27:20]:
Well, yeah, I always think like additional content because you have your product display pages, they're great for when people are actually in credit card mode. They got their credit card in their hand, they wanted to buy. They're deciding whether they want a blue or a black one. But most often people that you want to talk to higher up the funnel, and unless you've got content that kind of sits in that playground, you're never really going to get them. And that's always the challenge I think a lot of, certainly direct to consumer people, they focus on the checkout, the payment gateways, all that sort of stuff. And there's so much more that kind of can sit in front of that that helps to explain a little bit more about what the problems it solves. Again, it goes back to the job to be done. What is the job to be done? And I think that's where I think some well thought through prompts that can write content about a particular topic with a decent LLM will do really well.

Jim Banks [00:28:14]:
And I'm really interested and intrigued to see how you fare in the Shopify ecosystem. Because again, I mean, I love the whole ecosystem. Shopify good at what they do. They realize they're not going to be the best at everything. So they partner with other people who have developed boltons or add ons that kind of sit that help add value to people that want to become like a seller of a particular product. I had experience of that through the HubSpot ecosystem. But with Shopify, it's a completely different ecosystem, but does broadly speaking, the same sort of thing.

Vin McCauley [00:28:46]:
To speak to your direction on writers and writers of high quality, one of the things that stood out to me, Jim, and I should have reached out to you in real time, was that I remember doing early prompt experiments and telling Chat GPT to act like the author. You encouraged us to maybe emulate or follow their style, and I was just blown away. That in 15 seconds, it did so much better of a job at what I had asked it to do than I had done in a three month period.

Jim Banks [00:29:22]:
Yeah, I've definitely been a dabbler with Chat GPT. I know some people that use it for everything, right? But I've used it for rewriting bios. If I'm going to go and speak at a conference, I look at my bio and go, wow, that's really horrible. And I'll just say, hey, can you write three or four different variations of that? And it'll give me three or four variations? And again, I'll probably Frankenstein monster. I'll say, I like that bit, like that bit. And pull them all together. So, yeah, I definitely think there's mileage in kind of pulling all that together.

Vin McCauley [00:29:54]:
Yeah. And that's a good use example. I don't think Chat GPT is sort of the answer to a lot of things, but it is good for I don't let it write my LinkedIn post, but I write my LinkedIn post and put it through it and say, hey, where are there opportunities to remove some words? Where can I add emojis? How can I organize post better? And then it feels to me like it comes out with better than I.

Jim Banks [00:30:19]:
Yeah, I look at this, I mean, we're recording a podcast episode. And again, podcast is a new thing for me. It's something that I just had a little bit of time on my hands and I wanted to see. I think for anyone that's sort of listening, I spent the whole of 2023 walking more than 10,000 steps a day, and I wanted a new challenge for 2024. And I've adopted becoming a podcaster as part of that. And again, it's always one of those things. You'll read the kind of the J. Klaus's J.

Jim Banks [00:30:49]:
A. Kunzo. There's loads of different people, Amy Porterfield, who are making tens of millions of dollars, like as podcasters. Great, fantastic. But for every one of those, there's like tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who are making no money at all as a podcaster. And all they're doing is spending money on all the podcast boltons that kind of help add different things to what you do as a podcaster. So there's all the different bits that will help you with getting guests and all that sort of the ecosystem that pulls it all together. And if you fill your business with the right tools and people to help support it, then I think it'll go well for you if you put the effort in.

Jim Banks [00:31:30]:
Similarly, I think in the line of work that you're in, there's, again, probably tens of thousands of people that have got Shopify add ons. And I think a lot of it is the way in which you position. It's not even so much what it does, it's like how you position it and who can become your champions that will take it and move forward with it and give you the anecdotal case studies to be able to then say, hey, this is phenomenal and you should use it. So again, if you had a big shopify store that used your app and then you got a referral review or what have you, that could be game changing in terms of what you have. As it was when smoothie box, we had the emails that would go out from Butcherbox, and as soon as they put the smoothie box thing back on their email sequence, all of a sudden the orders were coming flooding through because there was huge amounts of volume there. And again, it seemed like such an innocuous and simple way of generating incremental revenue. But I understand the reasons why people may not necessarily want to put it in there because they're potentially cannibalizing or plagiarizing their existing business that they have.

Vin McCauley [00:32:37]:
Yeah. Although they have since added a marketplace where they leaned into it. And so now they do offer other products that I think I would assume take a cut of those, just get in on the action versus not do it. One of the thoughts that I was thinking, Jim, was that there are a ton of small stores out there, and it's hard to get a good roI on content, especially when some of these things are hypothesis that might take six or nine months to sort of play out. As you see how Google indexes it and how it reacts, SEO is just a slower game. So one of my goals was not to create sort of a thing to replace your content team, but maybe a thing that can create a lot of foundational content, topical authority. And as you said, not everyone's ready to click and buy. And I think a lot of DTC stores lack that supportive content for other parts of the buying.

Vin McCauley [00:33:36]:
So my hope and the bootstrap, I don't need it to be, I don't have vcs telling me to hit targets. And it doesn't need to be huge to be a good sort of lifestyle app. You're a brilliant marketer. There are so many apps for sale that I could see you scale among 7 million.

Jim Banks [00:33:59]:
Again, I've always worked on, I know the things I'm good at and I know, the things I'm not good at. And people have always said to me, I'm frightened to tell you all this stuff because you could become my competitor. I'm like, I promise you, there is no way on earth I'm ever going to become a direct to consumer store owner. I mean, it just doesn't float my boat at all. I mean, you mentioned Nick. Nick's got his fingers in 50 different businesses. He's competing with himself in a lot of cases. I don't know how he has had time to get married, how he's had time to get his whole body covered in tattoos, but he has.

Jim Banks [00:34:33]:
He's clearly doing something better in terms of time management than I ever would be able to. Right. But I think from the point of knowing what you're good at, not knowing what you're not good at, again, I think that was always one of the things, I knew what I was capable of. You and I butted heads a little bit because there was this, who's in charge here? And everything else. And for me, it was always, you're in charge. But sometimes I didn't like the direction that you were going. And rather than just accepting that, I would always fight my corner, because I think sometimes that's the healthiest way you've got of ensuring that you arrive at the right place or you accept the outcome of the conversation that's taken place. And sometimes I'd be right, sometimes.

Jim Banks [00:35:20]:
But I'd be wrong. And if I was wrong, I'd be the first to admit that I was wrong, and we'd move on. But at the same time, I would hate to follow somebody to a particular destination that, you know, was going to end up hurting a business or people or whatever it might be. I'd rather fight the corner, dig the heels in, and say, no, we're not going down there, than to end up there and go, oh, at the end of it, go, told you that wasn't a good thing to do. That would be pointless. There's no action in sort of standing there at the end of it.

Vin McCauley [00:35:52]:
Interesting perspective. Interesting perspective. One of the challenges from my side was running smoothie box that at times felt like I was fixing a plane while flying it. And I started the role thinking I had been a pilot and a mechanic, but when you really unpacked it, I had it. I bad owned a web agency, and I'd been affiliated with a lot of success, but I hadn't been the direct catalyst for it. So then all of a sudden, with full responsibility, that was really why I flew up to Spain was to get some vision and clarity. What it created was a situation which I'll never do again, which was like me learning in front of a live studio audience. And so feeling like I had the consequence of the decisions, but not the knowledge.

Vin McCauley [00:36:46]:
Now, a smart guy, if you're a b player, you bring in an a player and you delegate to them. And that's maturity. I think I'm just getting now that it's, no, you got to delegate. Jim's the brilliant marketer. Even if he's wrong, his call is.

Jim Banks [00:37:05]:
Better than you mentioned bearing your soul on stage. I mean, I still, from time to time, will rewatch my video because obviously, I spoke about Google Ads, and I'm horrified at how big I was and how sweaty I was, because, again, I just couldn't cope with the bulk that I was carrying at the time. And I watched your video, and again, I absolutely admired your humility, bearing your soul to Ezra and Molly to get some ideas on what you could do with the business. But, yeah, I mean, for me, Vin, like I said, I was truly touched by the generosity and friendship that we had when you kind of shared your family with me, and I introduced you to my wife and introduced some of my affiliate friends, and we had some of them come down to Clearwater, and we went out for dinner. We had a great time. Again, for me, I've always said that they're not my friends, they're everyone's friends. And I'm happy to make those introductions. I think so many people are trying to be sort of self centered, keep everything to themselves.

Jim Banks [00:38:11]:
And I'm like, I just don't think that the world of business works that way. The more you share, the more you get back in return, for sure.

Vin McCauley [00:38:19]:
Do you remember me complimenting you on that? Yeah, I used to compliment your generosity with your okerolobex, and I've come to learn that it's an abundance mind where you think there's just plenty to go around, so why wouldn't you be super inclusive? But that always super struck out to me about you and everywhere we went. Obviously, there's this sort of legend of Jim Banks that had decisions with Jim Banks echo in the whispered halls of the chandelier bar in Vegas and secret pizza. But I was always genuinely impressed with your openness with your other long term friendships. It seems like everyone you've done business with you become friends with, which I think is pretty telling.

Jim Banks [00:39:17]:
Yeah.

Vin McCauley [00:39:18]:
To the type of guy.

Jim Banks [00:39:19]:
And it's funny, whenever I travel on business, people always say, are you on business or pleasure? And I always say, well, to me there's no difference. The kind of two go hand in hand. I always find when I'm on a business trip, I will quite happily make friendships. And there'll be like lifelong friendships in a lot of cases. And we'll have good times and we'll have a few drinks and we'll make some bad decisions. Equally, when I go socially, sometimes the social stuff, if I go away on a family vacation, quite often, I'll meet people. I met a great guy recently here in the local town where I live. Just this guy happened to be sitting reading a book outside a wine bar.

Jim Banks [00:39:54]:
I got chatting to him. He's involved in the industry, and I'm a sort of stalker on LinkedIn now. Watch all of the stuff that he's done. At some point in time, we will have the opportunity to meet again at the wine bar so we can catch up and see where he's going within his business. But I'm never looking for what's the return financially for me. So for me, if I make an introduction of you to somebody else, I don't go, where's my cut? What are you going to give me? I just do it because law of reciprocity, I just do good things, and hopefully good things will come back my way. And really speaking they have. And that's all I've ever tried to do.

Vin McCauley [00:40:35]:
I don't know, when I think of you, that's the first thought that comes up. I mean, first is sort of brilliant marketer, but the other one is sort of jovial connector and incredible storytelling. One thing that I miss about seeing you more often and just chatting was the stories. You've got incredible stories. You tell them in an incredible manner. I think that's part of your marketing prowess is your ability to tell a story effectively.

Jim Banks [00:41:07]:
But you say that again, I've become not obsessed. I don't think obsessed the right word, but I become very aware of the whole, the premise of trying to become a youtuber. And people say, you need a three second hook. You got to cook them in in the first 3 seconds, have great titles and thumbnails. And I agree. I think I tell a good story, but the stories can sometimes be quite lengthy, and I don't think unless you have the ability to get them in in the first place. Let's say click on the title and thumbnail, you're not going to get them into the story ever. I could be telling the best stories in the world, but if people aren't going, oh, that looks quite interesting.

Jim Banks [00:41:44]:
I'm going to dive into that one. You never know. So I think sometimes, yes, you have the ability to tell a good story, but you also need to be able to hook them in to begin with. And that's probably, I think has probably been one of my Achilles heels. I mean, once we get going, I'm fine, but it's just getting the hook in the mouth and hooking them in to begin with is always the hardest bit.

Vin McCauley [00:42:05]:
I have an opinion on who I think does this brilliantly, and it's a YouTube channel called Vin Wiki. Are you familiar with that?

Jim Banks [00:42:15]:
No, I'm not, but I'm going to be after this.

Vin McCauley [00:42:17]:
Vin Wiki tells car stories. So if you're a car guy, he interviews car people, but he'll take, like, the best 10 seconds and lead the whole podcast with it, and it'll go something like this. And that's why Ferraris catch on fire. And then it goes into the podcast. You're like, wait, what did this guy just say? The Ferrari caught on fire. And now I'm listening to the whole podcast to hear the story behind the Ferrari that caught on fire. He does a brilliant job with pulling out hooks on their podcasts. And what's that? Hot wings.

Vin McCauley [00:42:54]:
The hot wings, where they interview people with escalating hot.

Jim Banks [00:42:58]:
Oh, yeah. I saw Nick Shackleford do that. He looked very.

Vin McCauley [00:43:03]:
Yeah, yeah. There's all email to you when it comes to me, but they do good pulling out. What's it. Oh, my gosh. Ezra. Okay. Ezra Firestone, boom cosmetics. He used to tell a story.

Vin McCauley [00:43:20]:
He told it in Spain, interviewing his clients. And this one woman said, I walked in and my husband said, wow. And then he just sort of picked that thing and ran an ad and ran gangbusters. But I think you're brilliant, man. I think of the Viagra story. I've told that story a bunch of times from an advertising perspective, and I don't know, I would go with your gut over. Everyone says it on these podcasts and YouTube channels. You need a thumbnail.

Vin McCauley [00:43:53]:
You need to look like you got a shocked face. You got to point at something. You got to have an done. So now I go on YouTube, all the thumbnails look the same.

Jim Banks [00:44:02]:
Yeah.

Vin McCauley [00:44:04]:
And I'm tempted to do it because everyone says it works, but I just feel like your gut, man. If I'm Jim Banks, I'm going with my.

Jim Banks [00:44:12]:
I think. I think there's probably a little bit of. I probably need to be a little bit closer to what is considered to be best practice and less what's good for me. But at the same time, like I said, I have zero expectations around the whole podcasting thing. For me, it's just, again, it's a new thing. I wanted to see how it all fits together, because again, I think so many businesses, it helps to personalize what they do. It helps to peel back the onion a little bit, see a few layers deep into what's going on. I mean, the whole bad decisions with Jim Banks, I was sitting the parasol up and down bar with some friends, and this friend of mine, Rob Snell, he said, jim, you should have your own tv show, and it should be called bad decisions with Jim Baxter.

Jim Banks [00:44:53]:
You just seem to make all these dreadful decisions about different things. And it stuck with me ever since then. So quite often, if I'm sitting doing something, I mean, again, I always recount the story of sitting, playing blackjack with some spanish people at seven in the morning, and I'm on stage at 09:00 in the morning speaking at a conference. The only reason we were able to communicate with the spanish people on the table is we could all count up to 21, and we all knew when somebody had won. I didn't understand the word they were saying. They didn't understand the word I was saying. We were having a great time and high fiving each other, and I'm sitting there going, it's a really bad decision to be sitting here at 07:00 in the morning playing blackjack. So consequently, I don't do any.

Jim Banks [00:45:33]:
If I ever go to Vegas, you will never see me playing cards or anything like that, ever. It just doesn't happen for that reason.

Vin McCauley [00:45:41]:
Well, I love the premise. Of course. I was familiar with the hashtag just knowing. And I think as the podcast developed, I think there's a real opportunity for people to actually share bad decisions. Yeah, you know where I really screwed up? I got paralyzed. Jim was telling me we got to be action biased, and I was stuck in perfection. I think there's so much sort of backslapping, especially on LinkedIn, of all the DTC sort of marketers. And some of it's good.

Vin McCauley [00:46:19]:
Hey, this is what's working for me. It does come across as a bit of a humble bragget at times, and mine as well. But the real lessons, at least in business for me, have been the screw ups. The things that I go, yeah, I never want to do that again. And honestly, one of them is perishable food. I'm like, I just don't appreciate the extra challenge. Business is hard on its own. Why do I need these additional challenging variables of spoilage, carrier of reliability, how.

Jim Banks [00:46:49]:
Much dry ice to put in there? And again, we have this kind of situation where there's all this global warming. Again, some of the smoothie flavors would be, they would have pineapple in them, and you'd have to rely on the pineapple stock being available when you wanted to have it. And if a whole place got wiped out by a fire or something like that, then you could end up like having a shortage of that particular product and people just wouldn't appreciate it.

Vin McCauley [00:47:16]:
And the flip side of that coin, talk about a bad call. We had an 18 wheeler full of avocado puree, which spoils a tuboi and our velocity of sales, we over forecast. So all of a sudden I'm trying to, on the secondary market, sell an 18 wheeler full of avocado. And it's not even close to any of my skill sets. I'm like, I'm laying in bed thinking, how am I going to get rid of all this avocado?

Jim Banks [00:47:42]:
Yeah, there ended up that would be.

Vin McCauley [00:47:44]:
Wind up to a story about a company.

Jim Banks [00:47:47]:
That would definitely be a difficult one to tell a story. Yeah.

Vin McCauley [00:47:53]:
So it's just I'm so appreciative. I feel like 80% of my marketing foundation came from you.

Jim Banks [00:48:06]:
Well, I appreciate that. And again, like I said, for me, the whole experience I had with meeting you guys and spending time with you and spending time with your family, and seeing what a genuinely nice guy, family guy, heart in the right place, good business ethics, really looked after people. There are not very many people with the qualities that you possess in this world. So again, I'm very grateful to have you as a friend, and I'm glad that we got the opportunity through this podcast. If nothing else, I've managed to reconnect with a good friend, and I'm very grateful for that.

Vin McCauley [00:48:41]:
That might be kind to say. I agree with all that. I agree with everything you said. This has been a wonderful morning for me. Good.

Jim Banks [00:48:49]:
Well, Vin, I'm going to leave the people listening to the podcast to the rest of their days. Thank you so much for being on with me. And hopefully at some point in time, we get the opportunity to reconnect face to face. I might have some microphones with me and we can maybe do some impromptu Bad Decision with Jim Banks on the fly interviews. That'd be great.

Vin McCauley [00:49:09]:
That'd be fantastic. Sick.