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Hello and welcome to the advice line on how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz. This is the place where we help try to solve your business challenges. And each week... I'm joined by a legendary founder, a former guest on the show who will help me try to help you. And so if you are building something and you need advice.
Go ahead and give us a call, and you might just be the next guest on the show. Our number is 1-800-433-1298. Send us a one-minute message with your name, a bit about your business, and the issues or questions that you'd like help with. Or you can send us a voice memo at hibt at id.wondery.com. And make sure to tell us how to reach you. Also, don't forget to sign up for my newsletter. It's filled with insights and ideas from the world's...
greatest entrepreneurs. You can sign up for free at GuyRoz.com or on Substack, and we'll put all this info in the podcast description. All right, let's go. Joining me this week is Joe Jebbia, co-founder of Airbnb. Joe, welcome back to the show. Welcome back to How I Built This. Guy, thank you so much. It's great to be back.
All right. So you were one of our very first guests on the show, as you know. Back in 2016, OG came on to tell us the origin story of Airbnb, which many people listening will know. So it's just great to have you back.
Well, thanks for having me, Guy. It was a memorable conversation, and I can't tell you how many people have come up to me since saying that was their favorite episode. I love it. By the way, we'll put a link to that original interview in the episode description if you haven't heard it. And you can also easily find it.
just by searching how I built this and Joe Jebbia with a G. Lots of really great and valuable insights in that episode, including why you guys had so much conviction and an idea that a lot of people were skeptical about. originally. That's right. We wanted to build a website where people would post pictures of the most intimate spaces inside their homes on the internet. And then complete strangers would book their homes and pay them money to stay there.
Now, today, you look back on it and you're like, no brainer. But of course, that wasn't the case in 2007 and 2008. I know that today you are an advisor to Airbnb. And more recently, you launched a new startup. That I'm very interested in talking to you more about builds backyard guest houses or ADUs accessory dwelling units that are, you know, popping up certainly all over California because the housing crisis and people are putting them in their backyards and renting them out.
The company's called Samara. Tell me a little bit more about it. Well, it was a genesis that started actually inside Airbnb. I had this R&D group that was thinking about ideas for the future. And in California, as you mentioned, ADUs are one of the fastest growing housing segments that exist. And hosts on Airbnb were actually...
listing these places. And I thought, that's interesting. Who's staying there? And it's actually people for 30, 60, 90 day stays, people coming for months at a time, rotations at the company they work at, et cetera. And I just thought like. There's got to be certainly a high-end version of these ADUs, a prefab factory-made version. When I looked out at the market, there was nothing. It was all, in my mind, fairly cheap, not well-designed.
At this point, I was also in the market for one of these myself. And I thought, well, I'm just going to wait around until the Tesla or the Apple of this product category emerges. Guess what? It didn't emerge. And so why not build it myself? Solve your own problem.
I've been looking at the website. It is awesome. And it makes so much sense for you to do this because you have a design background. I mean, that was really what you did at Airbnb. Your focus was around design. Well, design is – I define it in a very specific way.
A lot of people think design is the way that something looks. Design is actually the way that something works. Like when you look on Samara's website, design is certainly the piece of architecture, the home that you're looking at. But design is also the process of...
How do we handle the ordering process? How do we take care of all the permitting? How do we pour the foundation? How do we actually bring the home into the land where it's being installed? And so design is actually a very end-to-end. way to look at something, a very holistic approach to designing a product or service. It's so cool. And these houses range from 400 square feet to about a little under a thousand square feet, I think, right?
That's right. Yeah, we've got five different models from the studio, 400 square feet, all the way up to two bed, two bath at 960 square feet. And they're ready to go. They're turnkey. Once they're done, like you just, it's got the kitchen, it's got. Everything in the bathroom, it's all in there. Guy, our last install in California, from the time it arrived on the truck and we took it off with the crane to the time it got installed on our foundation was 23 minutes. Wow.
I love it. It's so cool. I'm going to talk to you about this because I've got a little bit of land in California that I'm thinking about. Anyway, we'll talk about that later. Joe, before we bring our first caller, I want to ask you just... One thing about your story when you originally came on, you mentioned this idea that great ideas usually start out as polarizing, right, which is what Airbnb was. Some people just couldn't understand it and some people loved it.
You know, we're going to be talking to people who are starting businesses now, and there's going to be skepticism around some of their ideas. When a founder hears criticism, right, sometimes it's warranted. Sometimes it's right. Sometimes it makes sense. From, you know, sort of from your perspective, when do you know that you should stick to your vision rather than versus like completely adjusting course or massively pivoting to a completely different idea or model?
I think this is one of the toughest things about being an entrepreneur. You have to nurture the connection with your heart and with your gut because there are times where it gets really tough and the world is against you and really smart people are telling you you're crazy. And if you don't have some signal coming from deep within you, a conviction, you're going to get sucked into what other people think and what other people say. And I think, you know.
look, I'm no expert at this. This is something that's honed over a lifetime. I think it's just about listening to your body, listening to your heart. And in Airbnb's case, that's what we did. And I can't explain, there's no scientific method behind it. It's just a feeling that we had something. And I'll tell you why, Guy, it's because we experienced it firsthand. We had those three guests.
stay with us that one weekend in San Francisco. And for every person who said that will never work at scale, I just thought to myself, well, they haven't experienced it yet. Yeah. We did. It's absolutely amazing. I mean, especially what's happened since then and even since when we spoke in 2016. I mean, absolutely amazing. Anyway, we should probably take our first caller. Joe, why don't we bring our first caller? You ready? Let's do it.
All right. Hello, caller. Welcome to the advice line. You're on with Joe Jebbia, co-founder of Airbnb. Please tell us your name, where you're calling from, and a little bit about your business. Hi Guy and Joe. So excited to learn from you both today. Thanks so much for the opportunity. My name is Marina Lido and I'm calling in from Austin, Texas.
I am the founder of Luthien Friends, where our mission is to get kids excited about learning a second language through the power of music. And our flagship collection features board books that sing, which we currently offer in French, German. Italian, Russian, Spanish, and Ukrainian. Wow. So these are board books that when you open them up, there's like a computer chip and speaker in there and it plays, it sings a song.
Yeah, essentially. So each of our books has six different songs, and each song has kind of an illustration to accompany it, and then the kids will sing along, dance along, that kind of thing. Cool. And where are the books sold right now? We primarily sell our books on our website. loopyandfriends.com. And we also sell a little bit on Etsy. We previously sold on Amazon. My question is a little bit related to that, but about 90% of our sales are through our website. We do a few local bookstores.
But we've really focused on DTC. And tell me a little bit about the origin story of the business. Yeah, absolutely. My husband is from Argentina, and I was born in Russia and immigrated to the U.S. when I was about four years old. So when we had kids, we were super excited for them to be multilingual, but we very quickly discovered that it was much harder than we expected.
to get them excited about it what we noticed is that music really resonated with them but as many new parents are we were pretty much terrified of exposing our kids to tv to phones, et cetera, and we wanted to find a different way for them to engage with music that didn't require a screen. So we kind of took Joe's solve your own problem approach and we developed books that sing so that they could learn through music and at the same time.
and develop a love for books. We started with a Kickstarter campaign to fund our first run of Spanish language books. And yeah, here we are today. Awesome. Marina, is this your full-time job? This is not my full-time job. This is my nights and weekends. This is your side hustle. Yes. What do you do during the day? I am a user experience researcher. I actually work for Meta, which has been very valuable for me as just...
a way to learn too about how ads work. So that's been awesome because Facebook ads are actually one of the best ways for us to generate revenue and attract new consumers to our brand. So that's been kind of an added bonus. What's the goal for the business? I mean, do you see this as sort of a fun side business or do you see this as something that you can maybe shift and transition into full time?
Oh, that's a very tricky one. You know, I love my job. I actually really enjoy my day job. I love my night job as well. You know, it's so interesting. I think maybe this comes from kind of the way I grew up, but I have a very unique combination of like entrepreneurial spirit and risk aversion. And so it's very hard for me to take that kind of like a leap.
you know, growing up with my parents moving here when I was four and kind of seeing like how hard all that was. I do think maybe someday down the line, that would be something I'd love to explore, but it's not in my kind of like immediate plan. And so are you and your husband writing all these books or doing all the design and everything? So that's actually been one of the most rewarding pieces of this is...
No one wants me to be singing in any book. I can promise that that would not keep any babies happy. We'd be like lots of crying babies. But we work with artists and illustrators from around the world and musicians from around the world. together to select songs that resonate that people can connect with and then kind of have them bring them to life, bringing in some of the unique aspects of their cultures and of those songs. I mean, I love it. I've got a bilingual family, so we're...
My kids both speak French, but we did that because we forced them into French schools from the time they were little. But this is a great way to expose kids to language. There's no question about it in my mind. It's awesome. Tell me your question for us today. Yeah, so my question is, we used to sell on Amazon, but we moved away from it actually this year. As a mom, I love Amazon, you know, life-saving. Yeah, we found that the fee structure at our volume levels just didn't pencil.
our website sales, which is where we can actually generate a little bit of margin, where we can get better feedback from people because we get kind of that two-way conversation. But I know that when a competitor comes up on Amazon, people are likely to gravitate towards that option because of just
how easy Amazon makes everything. So my question is, how can we build a brand to withstand potential Amazon competitors? Or should we embrace Amazon and just focus on finding ways to thrive there? And if so, how might we approach that? That is a very tough question and specific one. All right, Joe, thoughts about first about Luffy and Friends. Yeah, it's very cool. I was just looking at the website. This is a very cool idea.
You know, there's a lot of people out there who are looking for things to give their kids that don't have a screen. So I think you're in the right space. Now, you made a comment just now to Guy, which perked me up about potential and competitors. Are there competitors today or are there potential competitors? There are competitors in the Spanish language and there are obviously books.
that are musical in english and um we did really well on amazon the first year and then saw a number of spanish language competitors come up um so our Spanish language performance hasn't been very strong since then. I see. Is your customer, I'm going to guess their moms? We do obviously have a lot of parents, but one of our big... customer segments is actually grandparents so we have a lot of grandparents who um maybe
immigrated to the United States and had kids here who are wanting to pass the language along to their grandkids. The books really resonate with them because a lot of our books feature traditional songs. And then we do also have a segment of... Parents that are just interested in exposing their kids to second language, even though they may not have had that exposure themselves or maybe had it later in life. They are very excited to share a piece of their culture with the next generation.
Can you give us a sense of roughly like what your sales are every year? Are you selling more than $10,000, $20,000 worth of these a year? Yeah, actually. We took it slow the first few years, but this year we are on track to hit $200,000. Wow. So very excited. We've had a good year. Awesome. Obviously our margins could be better, but we're profitable.
room for growth, I think. So you have a really nice, so you've got some traction. And have you sort of, I mean, I'm assuming you're gathering information or at least emails from the people who are ordering. Yes, absolutely. When they make a purchase, they can join our newsletter. We also have other ways of collecting at different stages in their journey with us online. So you've got a newsletter and you're communicating with your users, with your customers regularly? Regularly.
would definitely be a stretch. The goal. Yeah, I mean, because you want to remind people that there are other languages and there are other kids to buy these for, right? I mean, it seems to me that custom retention... that is often more valuable than customer acquisition, right? That that's really where you actually grow and expand by retaining customers initially and then...
And then keeping them happy. And then, of course, pursuing an acquisition strategy as well. Yeah, that's a great point. And I think something we definitely need to put some more effort behind. I do find that people will connect to that one language and kind of. not necessarily think of us on other occasions. So we definitely could do a better job of giving them a nice little nudge. Joe, what do you think? I mean, I think that she's got to be on Amazon. It seems that way at this stage.
I think the idea is that eventually over time you build a brand that people recognize and you grow out of your reliance on a platform like Amazon and you have your own distribution channels that are independent. But I think at this stage, if it's about reach and sales and growing the company, I wouldn't be too picky about where somebody wants to buy my book. Do you go everywhere, right? You'd be everywhere. I think I'd go everywhere. I would try to figure out, how do I get this in front of...
my core customers, if that's the grandparents or the parents, obviously it's like, you know, is it on like one of the morning shows or somewhere where they're like consuming content and you get to appear. And I think, um, now as I'm looking at your brand, I'm reminded of one of Seth Godin's books. It was called All Marketers Are Liars. And this was like my template early on when I first read it back in 2005, 2006, somewhere in that time.
I think it's probably worth reading that because it would really, it might spark an idea of how you can take the brand that you already have, which is already in a great spot and elevate it to the next level to get people's attention. And the kind of thing that like, what would get you on a morning show? Yeah.
And there's a way to do that, Joe. I mean, I've got a I'm not trying to promote it, but I've got a whole kids podcast and a whole kids science business. And we just released like toys. So we've got exploding volcanoes and. Stomp Rockets and they're sold in shops and on Amazon. And we basically did.
A whole day, two, three days of just back to back to back local news interviews, me and my partner, Mindy Thomas, you know, you just basically hit up every local news channel talking about this thing. I mean, your story is great. And local news needs to fill time. I promise you that. You can go to every, I mean, from South Carolina all the way to Eugene, Oregon and beyond. I mean, it's going to take a little investment, not as much as you think, though.
Great. Yeah, definitely. We'll look into that. I know we looked at it a little bit early on and it felt like it was a huge investment, but maybe we're ready for that. Yeah. Got to invest in marketing, but that money will come back to you. One thing real quick is I'm thinking about the Seth Godin hat on of the purple cow of making something that's really distinctive and really stands out.
The songs I saw in here are expected songs, which is great because that's maybe how you want your kid to learn. But what if they weren't expected songs? What if they were like very unusual? Like something that would be very unexpected to be in a children's book and translate into another language that people would turn their head and go, wait, what was that? You need something that's going to stop people in their tracks that would get you very easily onto... Good Morning America, for example.
Yeah, I love that idea. We experimented a little bit with creating our own songs for our Spanish language books and we have like songs about routines. But that doesn't, that's not like a stop in our tracks kind of thing. So I love that idea. It's very inspiring, fun. All right, Marina, the business is called Luffy and Friends, books to teach kids how to sing in foreign languages. Good luck. Thanks so much for calling in.
Thank you so much, Guy and Joe. I just really appreciate all the inspiration today. Always can't wait to put these ideas to life. Good luck. Take care. Bye-bye. Yeah, you could do like, when you said like weird songs, I was like...
You know, like Shel Silverstein, he has some weird poems. Like people think of like where the sidewalk is, like the giving train stuff. But like you go into his back catalog, there's some weird stuff in there. Like he was super countercultural, like some of that stuff. And so I'm thinking like. What if he had a song that was super weird like that, you know? Right. Yeah. Or something, I don't know, like something iconic that you just would never expect in a children's book.
Yeah, and there's a lot of iconic stuff that does not require any license anymore. So worth a try. We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, another caller, another question, and another round of advice. I'm Guy Raz. Stick around. You're listening to The Device Line on How I Built This Lab. With the new Lloyds app, you can do it all.
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or wherever you listen to podcasts. Or you can binge the full season of The Spy Who Infiltrated Auschwitz early and ad-free with Wondery+. I'm Afua Hirsch. I'm Peter Frankopan. And in our podcast, Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history. This season, we're looking at the life of the most famous Queen of France, Marie Antoinette.
Her death is seemingly more well-known than her life, but her journey from the daughter of the Austrian emperor to becoming the most hated woman in France is just as fascinating. So we're going to look at the ways in which her story was distorted during the French Revolution and dig deeper into her real experiences in a troubled, difficult time. Marie Antoinette is one of...
the most well-recognized but least well-understood names in history. And we'll talk about how her death led to the way that she was spoken about in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. Follow legacy now. from wherever you get your podcasts. Or binge entire seasons early and ad-free on Wondery+. Welcome back to the advice line on how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz and my guest today is Joe Jebbia. He's the co-founder of Airbnb and we are taking your calls.
Let's bring in our next caller. Hello. Welcome to the advice line. You're on with Joe Jebbia, co-founder of Airbnb. Please tell us your name, where you're calling from, and a little bit about your business. Kai and Joe, thank you so much for having me. My name is Ray Ricky Rivera. I'm the founder operator of Norwalk Brewhouse, a self-distributed craft beer brand.
We launched in January of 2022. Nice. And we work with local established breweries to produce our product. And then we wholesale direct to retail. And I handle all of the sales. Distro, marketing, branding, all of that. Everything. Everything, yes. You do everything. You're the company.
You're the whole company. I am. Can you call one person a company? Yeah, absolutely. Okay. I'm a one-man company. But you know, on your business card, it should say account executive. So people think that it's a really big company. Noted.
I'm Ray. I'm an account executive with Norwalk Brewhouse. So my brother-in-law did that when he started his business like 30 years ago. It was a very smart idea. All right. So tell me about the beer. What kind of beers are you making? So we're a, what I like to call a Latino forward. So I like to tell the entire world that this is owned and operated by a Mexican-American because there's not that many of us in the craft beer industry or in the beer industry rather. But we make...
light lagers, Mexican style lager. Our flagship beer is called Bidi Bidi Blonde Blonde, which is a blonde ale. So in general, it's your typical beer styles that... tend to do well in the market. Awesome. And before we dig in a little bit more, tell us what your question is for us. So obviously I'm tiny. but I've been having some success in my local market. I have decent demand. This is in the LA, in like LA area? Yeah, in Los Angeles County, a little bit of Orange County as well.
But I've been struggling with scaling. I've had some great opportunities to land bigger retailers, but I haven't had the proper capital to scale and really take advantage of these opportunities that have been coming my way. When I launched this brand, the seed money I gathered from selling off old DJ equipment, I launched a small Indiegogo crowdfund campaign. And off I went.
And my issue is I don't have any established credit. I don't have bad credit. I don't have any established credit. So I can't get a loan. I've been applying what feels like for over 100 grants. Back in 2022, I managed to land one, which was amazing. But other than that, it's bootstrapped, super lean, super scrappy. And I need help or ideas.
In that area, like, what are my options for finding funding? This is an interesting challenge. Okay. Before we get to tackling this question about cash, right? Tell me how you got because you mentioned that you sold DJ equipment to finance this business. So I'm assuming you were at one point making some money as a DJ. How did you get into brewing? Like, how did this start? So I have like a solid 20 years of.
being in the music industry. And back in about 2012, 13-ish, I was managing local bands here in the city of Norwalk. And I noticed that there was no local venue to book these live acts. So I thought, hey, maybe I'm the one to open up a venue and book local. live entertainment. That sort of led to me thinking that it could be a...
bar and grill serving California craft beer. Fast forward to 2014. My wife was giving birth to our daughter. There was some issues there at birth and we found ourselves 45 days at the hospital. So I needed something to do. Picked up some books. One of the books was Brewing Up a Business by Sam Calagione. Dogfish Head, who was on the show, yeah. That's right. I love that episode. Anyhow, that book really inspired me to think about...
potentially building something more than a bar and grill. And in 2015, I co-founded... a homebrew club called the SoCal Cerveceros, which became the largest Latino-based homebrew club in the country. Nice. Diving deeper into the homebrew hobby, I'm starting to realize there's this huge void in the industry. There's not very many Latinos on the ownership side. So I saw there was like...
a potential opportunity there for a brand to come out and really speak to the Latino consumer. And during all this time, I'm managing and I'm DJing on the side. So when the pandemic hit, any DJ work that I had happening was completely gone. So I just figured, hey, here's an opportunity. I might as well go after it. Started selling off my equipment, microphones, mixing boards, and speakers.
I made a few thousand bucks, launched an Indiegogo campaign, and I think I got somewhere around 20 grand and launched this brand. Amazing. I love that story. Joe, all right. Ray is at a crossroads. There's demand, but he's got to raise money. He's got to raise capital in order to try to scale this thing. But he hasn't had any luck with loans, and he's trying to figure out what to do.
I have some thoughts. Where should we start? Hey, Ray. Great to be with you today. My question is, what percent is selling for tap to bars and what percent is retail and cans to consumers? Well, if I'm selling a keg to a bar, they're purchasing that for me for about 180. It's probably costing me between 120 and 130 a keg, depending on the style. At retail, it's cans only. And I think my margin there is somewhere between 40% and 60%. Right, right.
Yeah, I just want to get a sense of you think there's more upside in the future on the B2B side or is this more of like a get to retail stores and expand there? Is that the real opportunity? I feel the real opportunity is to be in direct to consumer. And long term, that has been my plan. I really want to open up Norwalk Brewhouse, the physical location.
And if we're selling beer direct to consumer over our bar, then our margins are the biggest there. So the reason why I chose to go the contract brewing route was because it was lower risk. lower investment. But it's a really tricky time right now when the pandemic hit.
Everybody went from on-premise to off-premise. So retail sales were through the roof. Now a lot of that has shifted. And on-premise or going after draft accounts, it's super hard. It's a challenge. Because, you know, I've had experiences where I've managed to land accounts. and then the bigger distributor will come in and remove my keg from the tap. And with what you're doing...
You got to work with a big distributor, otherwise you get swallowed. And just out of curiosity, are you in or have you approached like some of the retailers like in California, like BevMo or Total Wine or any of those places? I have not. And it's mainly because.
I, I'm, I'm confident that I could land those accounts, but if I do land those accounts and I'm going to have a huge purchase order, that's going to take significant, you know, capital up front that I don't have. Yeah. So I, I've been slow to go that route. Well, you know, I think, Ray, I look at you now as you're a food and beverage entrepreneur. And, you know, that's going to attract a certain type of investor that's, you know, not a tech investor. It's not Silicon Valley.
there are investors for food and beverage obviously so i feel like that's the space that i would go network in and explore and really try to surface some names of like who's out there who's you know even local to you, kind of, you know, regionally based or expand beyond that. And I don't know, I would start reaching out to people. I would start to find connections to food and beverage investors.
probably at the angel level, but maybe at the PC scale. And I would start to have conversations with them to just put your idea in front of them and start to make pitches. Right. So what you're saying is find somebody. who's in Food and Bev, maybe another founder, like somebody who created the Obama O's, somebody like that? Somebody like that, maybe, yes. Somebody with definitely more experience than the guys who created the Obama O's. Touche, Joe.
I think that's really good advice. You know, Ray, we did an episode you may have heard not too long ago about athletic brewing, which is a non-alcoholic beer, and nobody wanted to work with him. You know, he couldn't even find a brewmaster to work with him because it's a non-alcoholic beer. And he went around to every single person he knew, teachers, friends, family, friends, anybody, asked anybody to invest in the brand. You're now working on a product. I mean, look.
Let's be honest, Mexican beer is having a moment. And so there seems to me like there's an opportunity here with what you're doing. You know, you're doing a Mexican style beers, lagers, IPAs. I don't even know if anyone's doing Mexican style IPAs in the U.S., right? Technically.
That's not a thing, like a style. Yeah. But we can make it a thing. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Like my flagship, Bidi Bidi Blonde Blonde. And for all the Latinos listening, they'll understand that reference. Bidi Bidi Blonde Blonde. We marketed it as a Mexican-American blonde ale. Technically, that's not an actual style. Yeah. But I'm saying, hey, I'm a Mexican-American and this is our beer. There you go. This is our beer.
You're making a style, right? You're making the style. So in terms of fundraising, I mean, look, the reality is everybody has a network, even if you think you don't. And it's... It's, you know, the person that you see at Starbucks or, you know, a friend of a friend or someone's parent or someone at your, like, church or community center, somebody. There are people.
that you can talk to and find out if they'd be willing to put in a small investment. Because I get it. It's hard to ask people for help. But here's a trick I use. If you think of what you're doing, which it is, as a mission, it's not about... Ray getting rich or Ray serving himself or his interests. It's about the mission that you are pursuing, which is building this brand that you believe in, that you believe a lot of other people will believe in and get value from.
And just putting yourself in that mindset might actually help a little bit when you're asking people for help. I mean, it's the hardest thing about fundraising. It's asking. Most people have a hard time asking for money. But it's if you can get. past that and just be prepared to hear, you know, 99 no's for every yes, it's eventually going to succeed. Yeah, I think you'll eventually find that person.
And I don't have the sense that, Ray, you have an issue with asking people for help. You're on this call with us right now, as an example. I'm definitely getting better at it. I do struggle with asking for money, to be quite honest.
But I know it's definitely necessary and it's something that I just got to do. Well, Ray, this is your call to adventure here because if you're going to be an entrepreneur in this space, you got to be comfortable asking for money. And look, you're going to get a lot of no's.
And I will share an equation with you, actually. This is one I learned back at school. I snuck into an entrepreneurship weekend at Brown University. This guy was giving a presentation on failure. And he put up this equation, SW squared. plus wc equals mo and he broke it down and he said when you're selling a product you're asking for money in this case some will want to give you money some won't sw squared plus
WC, who cares? Equals MO, move on. You just got to keep going, man. And I think you just got to get out there and start cold emailing people, showing up at events. This is where the hustle, you got to get into hustle mode to cross the bridge between where you are now and where you want to get to with regards to fundraising. That's good. Thank you for that. Yeah, that's helpful.
The brand is called Norwalk Brewhouse. Ray, Ricky, Rivera. Good luck, man. We're rooting for you. Cheering you on, man. Guy and Joe, I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Cheers, Ray. Thanks. Thanks for calling in. I got to say, looking through their website, he's got... He clearly has authorship. He knows how to create something distinctive. These cans are really nice. They've got the lotterias from the cards from the Mexican game Loteria. It's cool. There's authenticity to it.
He's working in his favor. I feel like he's not too far away from, you know, reaching, like, you know, there's cult brand status for him out there somewhere. I think so, too. If he can just get to the right investor. Yeah, I think so, too. And that's how it starts, right? For sure. All right, we're going to take another quick break, but we'll be right back with another caller. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to The Advice Line right here on How I Built This Lab.
On January 5th, 2024, an Alaska Airlines door plug tore away mid-flight, leaving a gaping hole in the side of a plane that carried 171 passengers. This heart-stopping incident was just the latest in a string of crises surrounding the aviation manufacturing giant Boeing. In the past decade, Boeing has been involved in a series of damning scandals and deadly crashes that have chipped away at its once sterling reputation. At the center of it all?
The 737 MAX, the latest season of Business Wars, explores how Boeing, once the gold standard of aviation engineering, descended into a nightmare of safety concerns and public mistrust. The decisions, denials, and devastating consequences bringing the Titan to its knees and what, if anything, can save the company's reputation. Now, follow Business Wars on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can binge Business Wars The Unraveling of Boeing early and ad-free right now on Wondery Plus. Welcome to the Offensive Line. You guys, on this podcast, we're going to make some picks, talk some s***, and hopefully make you some money in the process. I'm your host, Annie Yeager. So here's how this show is going to work, okay? We're going to run through the weekly slate of NFL and college football matchups, breaking them down into very serious categories like no offense.
No offense, Travis Kelsey, but you got to step up your game if Pat Mahomes is saying the Chiefs need to have more fun this year. We're also handing out a series of awards and making picks for the top storylines surrounding the world of football. Awards like the He May Have a Point Award. for the wide receiver that's most justifiably bitter. Is it Brandon Ayuk, T. Higgins, or Devontae Adams?
Plus, on Thursdays, we're doing an exclusive bonus episode on Wondery Plus, where I share my fantasy football picks ahead of Thursday night football and the weekend's matchups. Your fantasy league is as good as locked in. Follow the offensive line on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can access bonus episodes and listen ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus.
Welcome back to the advice line on how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz, and today I'm taking calls with Airbnb co-founder Joe Jebbia. So Joe, let's bring in our next caller. Hello, welcome. Please tell us your name, where you're calling from, and a little bit about your business. Hello, Guy Jo, JL Thorpe, founder and CEO of Gameday Social Apparel. Thank you so much for having me on the show. I'm excited to be here. The company's based in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
We launched in 2021 to produce top quality, trend-forward sports apparel exclusively for women. And to date, we're featured in around 2,000 retailers across North America. Wow. And these are, just to be clear, these are sports for college, professional, both? Our licenses are with universities currently. Universities. Okay. So you have licenses with universities and you make sports apparel.
Primarily for women. So so like if you it's Michigan, it would be like Michigan sweatshirts for design for women. Yes, yes, precisely. That was probably a massively underserved market. Tell me how you started this business. How did the idea come about? Yeah, well, no, big time. So my background is small brick and mortar retail. I really cut my teeth in the fashion industry, owning a women's boutique. And through that, I started producing.
A few graphic tees for our local university, and that really came about. There just was never anything that my friends and I wanted to wear to games. What was the university, by the way? South Dakota State. Nice. Okay, so you started making them just for you and your friends, like cool shirts and sweatshirts that look better, because a lot of them are really kind of designed for the male fan, right?
Yes, you understand my industry perfectly, it sounds like. So I owned these two women's stores in South Dakota. And so I started producing shirts to sell through the stores. And I think pretty quickly, I recognized there just was a much... bigger opportunity than what we could sell to South Dakota State. Amazing. And tell us, before we ask you more questions, what's your question for us today?
Yeah, absolutely. So like I said, we're about four years in and we've experienced a pretty incredible sustained growth rate. And so as we get the right people and the processes in place to... just create stability and to continue to grow. I keep looking at the next stage and I just know that that scrappy mentality that got us from zero to here.
is not going to get us from zero to 50 million. And so as we consider growth, I would just love to have a conversation with both of you on how you recommend that we assess the opportunities that come our way. Before I bring in Joe, just can you... Briefly, give me a sense of what is your revenue right now? Around $10 million. $10 million. You must be the biggest small business we've had on the advice line. That's amazing.
That's incredible. Congratulations. I mean, most of the businesses are doing, you know, 10 to 50 grand a year. Okay, Joe, I want to bring you in. First of all, amazing story. It really is. It really is. Well, I still have plenty, plenty to learn. That's why I'm here. So, JL, like when you think about what, I'm always curious when people think about their company and their brand, what do you think is the core idea?
behind your brand i mean really guy kind of summarized it it's product built exclusively for women and so i mean what i love about you and your background and what you built and the disruptive nature of it is that the whole idea was design, a lot of where that started. And so to me, it's all about design and quality. And as we scale, that obviously gets more difficult to preserve that design and quality. But I think that's, I mean, that's our...
Our secret sauce is just creating products that are so unique and distinctive that they stand out. That all makes sense. I want to push a little bit further, though. What is it about game day social that? a woman buys from you and not somebody else who also makes for women, women's wear? Well, I think one, one area that we spend a lot of time on is the fit.
and the silhouette. And I think that's really what it comes down to for women is when you pick up a piece, it's all about how it lays, how it feels, how it drapes. And a lot of the sports apparel out there is really men's garments. a little bit different spin. So when you talk to your customers, I'd be curious, like, what are they saying they feel like? What is wearing one of your garments do for them emotionally?
Like what have they said to you over the years? Yeah, no, I love that question. We say that, so our tagline is we're for the social fan. And the reason that I picked that is because I personally am not – I'm actually not a sports fan, which is kind of funny that I wound up in this industry. But honestly, that's kind of – really part of what makes us special is that I wanted to be able to go to games and feel like part of that.
environment, part of that social experience. But I don't know anything about the team. I'm not paying attention necessarily to what's always happening on the field. And so I think really what we're able to bring is this just sense of of belonging in that community to a female fan, but also just in an elevated way where she's representing her own personal aesthetic.
I feel like I'm looking at your website here and looking at all these different universities and the designs are basically, my assumption was you would just have these cookie cutter designs with the different school names. Every single school has different designs, which is pretty remarkable. Thank you. And they're really cool. And are they sold? Are you selling? What's your main channel? Are you mainly wholesale or DTC? We're very predominantly wholesale. That was the strategy that we.
started off with. We'd love to grow the D to C side, but that's a slower build. And you are, so you're sold in like shops on campus or around the campus. Campus stores. We sell to a lot of boutiques, small mom and pop shops. That's my roots. So I'm faithful to that customer base. But we also work with a lot of national retailers as well. And have you taken on any investment yet?
No, I've been able to get to this point without diluting the equity. So the goal is to keep it that way. So you own 100% of the business? That's correct. Wow. So now, all right, so you're talking about where to go next, right? Because obviously you want to grow. Joe, what do you think about? I mean, there's a lot of different directions you could take this in. Like, do you seek out?
investors, right, at this point? Do you slow down growth? Do you speed it up? We're about to have an episode where I interviewed Michael Rubin, founder of Fanatics, right? Biggest sports apparel brand probably in the world. And you're going to be a lot for you to learn from that episode. But, you know, multi-billion dollar business. Joe, when you think about about growth at this stage, eight million dollar brand, really good.
College sports, it just seems like there's endless growth. What do you think? What should she be thinking about? Well, JL, you've already done the thing that I would have advised, which is to bootstrap as long as you can. You know, that was one of the best things that we ever did at Airbnb.
is that we built up value, you know, scraping by without giving out, you know, too much of the company too early. And so as we went into fundraising, as we knew it was time to scale, as we approved out our model. on our own dime, effectively. It allowed us to go into investor conversations having a real seat at the table, having a full hand of cards to work with.
as we got into discussions with them and it seems like you may be at that time you know you've got years behind you you've got clear you know success you've got you know real revenue and i'll give you one other piece of advice which is The best time to go raise money is when you don't need it. And so if you're in a position where you've got, you know, ramen profitability, where you're able to cover your expenses and your costs, and it's effectively unlimited runway.
you have a unique advantage to go out to seek investment at this point. And so I think it's really where I would start is, where do you want to end up? What is your biggest dream for where you could take this company? And I'd work backwards from that. Yeah. And honestly, I would love to hear more from you about that process of, like you said, when you got to that point where you had the hand of cards and you had the seat at the table of...
Also, just looking at what were you guys looking for in terms of that investment? How did you weigh those opportunities? What did that kind of look like? Well, we needed a seed round so that we could hire people. It was still just the three of us working out of our three bedroom apartment. And so we went out to meet a couple of investors. And sure enough, one of the first two that we met with.
want to take a big bite of the apple and you know the fact that like we didn't necessarily have to take their money it's not like it was sink or swim our life didn't depend on it you know it gave us some leverage in those conversations It sounds like you may be in a similar position. Yeah, no, that's extremely, extremely helpful. You know, the other thing that I was thinking about when I was just thinking about you and your story and that like diversification and looking at new.
revenue streams or categories, I would love to hear you talk about your decision as an organization to add experiences. What was the decision-making process for let's add experiences to the platform and not vehicles? office spaces or something else, if you really need to share that. The experiences was born out of us listening to our customer base and also our own vision for wanting to offer more than just a place to stay, a trip.
is many things. The stay is just one of a dozen things that people need in order to have a great vacation. What are all the things that we could do through our lens of providing local authentic Accommodations are local authentic experiences. How could we extend our platform to allow hosts to offer those experiences when you travel? Really just answering the question that people have. Okay, you helped me get here. Now what can I do?
And let's answer that in a very on-brand way by allowing our hosts to host. Yeah. That's awesome. I think that makes a lot of sense. Jail, I think, and sort of doubling down on Joe's point here, I mean, you know. How many employees do you have now? We're a team of about 20. 20 people. That's awesome. Okay. So 20 people. And I'm assuming you are. Are you profitable? Yes. Yes. Okay. But probably your margins are not, they're probably still not super high. Not quite yet. Yeah, correct. Yeah.
Apparel is tough. It's tough business. But with bringing a good strategic investor, and you're going to want to think really carefully about who that is, right? You're going to want somebody who has experience in apparel if you bring somebody on or experience in licensing. and design, that gives you the opportunity to really scale up the designs, right? Because I'm sure that's a challenge, right? You probably don't have enough designers.
You know, that's actually something that we've really managed to create processes around outsourcing to be able to scale that out, which I am. proud of because, again, that's so critical to our brand is the design. I would say, though, the piece to that that we need to scale out that's just taking time is to diversify our manufacturing base. We really need more manufacturers, and that's a...
Long process. And so, yeah, I would say those would definitely be would be important pieces. Yeah. And of course, given the political. sort of winds of change, you may have to think about where you get those manufactured, of course, if there's issues around tariffs and things like that. So that could pose a challenge. But, you know, there's obviously solutions to that as well.
Yes, we've been talking a lot about that. And yes, a lot of our manufacturing right now is happening in China, but we've added a great partner in India. But again, that's a lift. I mean, that just takes time and cash. And so, yeah, I know this is super helpful. Cool. JL Thorpe, the brand is called Game Day Social. Congrats. It looks like you're doing a lot of things right. So good luck. Keep it going.
Thank you so much. This was such a treat. Guy, my 10-year-old son, a budding entrepreneur, and I love to listen to your show together. You're just so exceptional at what you do. Thank you. Joe, really enjoy your perspective and just love that you took the time to do the show. So, so good to meet both of you. Take care. Thanks, Jail. Thanks. Awesome. I love that business. I love that idea. There's a product. It's serving a...
a lot of people, right? I mean, sports, apparel, college sports apparel, it's such a massive business. And it seems like it just never stops growing. No, there's always more alums graduating from schools that want to stay connected. And people spend so much money. We had a whole episode on a hotel company that you may know of, the Graduate Hotels. It was really started out in college towns. Ben Weprin just started a hotel. He's like, hey, you know.
Parents, alumni, people kind of visit. Why don't we make a hotel in the college town, but decorate it with the college, like colors and themes and sports heroes. And now there's like 50 hotels. They sold it to Hilton. So people love college that they're so committed to it. Well, there's probably more out there besides college, WNBA and others. Exactly. Joe, before I let you go, it's a –
Version of a question I ask everybody who comes on to help me out here, which is you've got Samara and you've learned. I mean, I'm sure because you learned so much with your experience at Airbnb, you probably went into. You're, you know, into this business with obviously a lot of experience and perspective, probably still made mistakes. Everybody does, you know. But if there was something that you could have told yourself.
back in 2008, you know, when you were building Airbnb that might have made things a little easier or would have given you some perspective? Is there something that you can think of that would have been helpful? Well, I'm going to answer that by saying. The piece of advice I give myself is to have more mentors because starting something as exciting as it is and sounds, it's also at times extremely lonely.
especially if you're doing it for the first time. And especially if you aren't exactly sure what you're doing. And I eventually found mentors, of course, along the way. I just wish I had found them earlier. I feel like they, once I did find them, they really helped me avoid some pitfalls and some landmines on the road of entrepreneurship. And I'm like, man, I wish somebody told me earlier on, take the time, go reach out to people.
And find some folks who have seen the movie play before and can provide advice and perspective so that you're not on your own. That's good advice. Joe Jebbia, co-founder of Airbnb. Thanks so much for coming on. Guy, it was a pleasure. And by the way, if you haven't heard Joe's original How I Built This episode, you've got to go back and take a listen. We'll link to it in the podcast episode description. And here's one of my favorite moments.
from that interview. We ended up going from zero to 800 homes in a matter of four weeks. And I have to tell you, I thought that this was it. Like this was our... Rocket ship to the moon. You thought, we made it. We're here. We got it. Right. If you build it, they will come. And look what's happening. And so we get introduced to 20 investors in Silicon Valley. 10 of them replied to our email. Five of them eat us for coffee. Zero invested in us.
Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. And by the way, please make sure to check out my newsletter. You can sign up for it for free at gyros.com or on Substack. And of course, if you're working on a business and you'd like to be on this show, send us a... You can send us a voice memo at hibt at id.wondery.com.
call us at 1-800-433-1298. You can leave a message there and make sure to tell us how to reach you. And by the way, we'll put all of this in the podcast description as well. This episode was produced by Carla Estevez with music. composed by Ramtin Arablui. It was edited by John Isabella. Our audio engineer was Jimmy Keeley. Our production staff also includes Alex Chung, Chris Messini, Elaine Coates, JC Howard, Devin Schwartz, Catherine Seifer, Carrie Thompson, Neva Grant, and Sam Paul.
I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to The Advice Line on how I built this lab. If you like How I Built This, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. UFO lands in Suffolk, and that's official, said the News of the World.
But what really happened across two nights in December 1980, when US servicemen saw mysterious lights in the forest near RAF Woodbridge and claimed to have had a close encounter with an actual craft? Encounters, a new podcast available exclusively on Wondery Plus, takes a deep dive into one of the most famous and still unresolved UFO encounters to ever take place in the UK. Featuring shocking testimony from first-hand witnesses, hosts, journalist, podcaster and UFO researcher Andy McGrillan.
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