EE 339 - From Zero to €5 Million in 4 Years - eCommerce Entrepreneur John Larkin

2021, we did like 30 grand. 2022, we did like 500 grand. 2023, we did 2 million. I would hope to hit five this year. And that's still been made 54 soaps at a time the exact same way I used to make it in my kitchen, because it's the only way I know how to make soap.

How are you? Welcome to the entrepreneur experiment podcast with me, gary Fox. Today, my guest is John Larkin, the founder of the Black Stuff. He started making soap in his kitchen during lockdown. He spent 30 grand to get it off the ground and he's going to turn over 5 million euro this year. Here's how he's doing it.

Yeah, yeah, it's been entertaining already. Yeah, you've had a wild ride. Yeah, I've never had a conventional job in my life. That's what we love to hear.

Yeah, what was your first job? So your first non-job.

I'm going to call it. Yeah, my background is marketing advertising. I did a masters in advertising once, back when I was 24 or something.

So how do you become a professional poker player?

Extreme competitiveness, a willingness to learn, a willingness to lose, a willingness to study. So when I started out, it was literally the dawn of online poker. There was no resources. I had to buy books from guys who wrote them in the 80s, while West poker and learn and people viewed it as gambling, let's say, and they played it as if they were gambling, whereas I've never actually bet on horses in my life or sports, even though I played poker for living for 10 years.

And was this online in person, or what way was it?

I'd say over the 10 years it was like 95% online. I did play a bit in real life, I suppose as well. I went to Vegas a few times, played the art open a few times, various degrees of success, but my game was kind of cash online.

Yeah, yeah. What does a day in the life of a professional poker player look like?

Well, that is a question I've always wanted to ask about what I used to do was wake up at 5am or 4am on a Sunday morning and sit down, refresh and play poker against Americans who are coming home from the pub on a Saturday night. So that was one of the big tactics was use the time difference to your advantage.

I love that, that's the strategies, don't worry about the book. Yeah, exactly. And that's like the experience, yeah, yeah. And what would your week look like then? If that was one day or one afternoon or one morning? I should say yeah, or the rest of the week.

So I tended to kind of work nights because of that, so I was up half the night playing cards. Sometimes I didn't go to bed for a few days. It wasn't very structured, put it that way. I remember my wife kind of coming home once and saying come on, we have this thing we're going to, and I hadn't been to bed in two days because I've just been waiting for this guy to lose his money and there was no way I was leaving that table until my target, let's say, went broke, which they did eventually.

How much money were you talking about?

Like five figures.

Yeah, a substantial amount.

Yeah, yeah, that's 40 hours well spent. Yeah, it was. Yeah, well, yeah, I can tell you some funny stories about that, but one of them involves going to a prenatal class. I'll tell you the story right. So the thing that my wife wanted me to go was a prenatal class in. She was pregnant with her first child.

They thought you're feeling unwell due to the distress and strains of it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, but actually it was just I hadn't slept. How did your wife make that? Took the full nine months, or six months? To forgive me for that one, I'd imagine.

so yeah, wow. So you were able to sustain that then for 10 years.

Yeah. So this was kind of the tail end of 10 years. Let's say that was probably year eight or nine or something around that. Yeah, yeah, I didn't play for long after we had kids, but it was kind of in my 20s. Let's say, yeah, yeah.

And I just so many ways to go with this. I mean, I'm even kind of befuddled. And then, how did it differ when you were in person? Did you enjoy the in person? Did you like travel? What way was that?

Yeah. So people think online poker is just to pay the cards, but actually a lot of it is about emotion and getting under people's skin and playing abnormally, let's say, to wind somebody up so that they think you're a bad player. And you know there's a lot of strategy to online way more than people realize. And the way I played throughout my career was always very, let's say, aggressively and active.

A bit more pissed off, which is well after 40 hours. You just wiped them out, so you understood that online was your forte. You understood the online psychology piece was your forte. That's fascinating.

I could usually tell when somebody's getting pissed off part of my French and when people are angry with you, they play very differently, because they're just trying to beat you. They're not trying to win the game.

That's fascinating because you would have thought it'd be the other way around. You'd would have thought in person it's easier, because you can just see Gary's getting pissed off or Gary's getting wound up because I've just beaten him 10 times.

So put it this way if I'm sitting here beside you and we were playing online poker and every single time you raised, I called you or raised you back, every single time without fail, you would notice that very quickly and all of a sudden it becomes very personal between me and you, even though there might be four or five other people sitting at the table, becomes a personal battle, and then all of a sudden, cards go out the window, people start playing irrationally and once you I know what you

Let's say so. You were a student of human psychology, essentially online yeah for sure, yeah, yeah. And then why would you leave that?

Industry changes. They banned online poker in the US. It became a lot more competitive, but mainly down to industry regulation. You know, banning in the US was huge for the market. The US was mainly where you would play. Yeah, yeah, that was that's who I liked playing against the most. I played on USA sites rather than European sites. Why Americans love to, but love to bet. They love to go all in and I love to call.

Simple versus psychology games again yeah. So what did you do next?

So after that, after I decided that I was no longer doing that, a friend of mine had a technology startup. So I ended up joining his team and working in digital marketing for a year or so with them and, like, because it was a friend of mine, we were working at his house and, you know, probably gave it 60 70 hours a week, really went full on into it and learned everything I could and, yeah, we had significant impact as well on that business. So that was, that was my first foray into it.

Was it hard to walk away from that, though, being your own boss, choosing your own hours, having considerable windfalls?

Yeah, it was very. It was different, right, I've never, never really worked for anyone. You know, even when I went in and joined him I was kind of doing my own thing, and I guess that's probably a challenge for me as a person. You know, I probably don't respond to rules and things like that very well.

I don't know why she's about me all the time. Yeah, that's her consistent thing. She goes yeah, you just don't deal with authority. Yeah, really, I don't know. Yeah, I'm a bit like that.

Yeah, so there was challenges, you know. And then later on in life, when I did actually have a real job once, you know, luckily I was kind of second in command. So, you know, as long as you could navigate the relationship well with the person who is in command, it doesn't feel so much as work. And I guess I've never treated a job as if it wasn't my own business through my entire career, whether I was working for somebody else or working for myself.

Yeah, but you know how to manage it yourself. You know the skills and the strengths that gives you.

Yeah, when I do something, I do it by 110%.

Yeah, so after the ads business then how long were you in the ads at the first business?

So that was the software company. It was actually a mobile app prototyping software company. I was with them for about maybe two years year and a half, something like that and then I left that company and I joined a. I met a guy and we ended up kind of he was starting it. I ended up kind of co-founding with him. It was another SaaS software as a service company. It was putting together e-commerce with Facebook advertising.

So this would have been back at the early stages of Facebook ads 2013, 2012.

Right in the sweet spot. Yeah, it's literally the dawn of e-commerce and the dawn of Facebook ads, so it was an interesting time. I wish I had started an e-commerce business.

Or bought stock and just met a hands-on Shopify.

Yeah, exactly, yeah. Yeah, I wish I had done that because that would have been very fruitful. Yeah, so we were working on that business for a few years, raised a lot of money. One of my co-founders went and lived in San Francisco. We were doing the whole startup dream. Ultimately, we were a bit too early and I didn't work out, but a fantastic experience, yeah.

Yeah, learned so much. You seem to be quite good at spotting trends. You seem to be quite good at spotting things at the right time. What do you think that comes from?

Yeah, that's a probably valid point, and something I say to myself is you need to act more when you spot them.

It's discerning between a trend and just a notion. I'm, after having it's, trying to decide between two of those things.

Yeah, I am relatively good. I wish I was a little bit better at taking action, because I wouldn't say I'm a trendsetter or an early adopter per se, but I'm definitely in crypto started. I remember laughing with a friend of mine in that SaaS business going, hey, we don't actually pay the bills here. We've got free power. We should start mining crypto and we went as far as exploring it, but we never did it.

How do?

you see, yeah. Aware of trends, but maybe not the best at taking action on them.

historically, yeah, so you did the startup dream. It was too early, so what would you do next?

So when we were forced to close that business because we ran out of cash, one of my co-founders went to work at Facebook and I joined a startup called Mukul. It was very early on. They have this device that was alerting farmers when a cow was going to give birth, so it was a wearable technology for cows.

That's a shift away from Facebook ads. Yeah, exactly what are you there?

Originally they were trying to hire me and I was like I don't know anything about cows, I'm not interested in this.

It's a hard left.

In fairness yeah, this is crazy, no way. And we had multiple meetings and all the time I was kind of like hesitant but at the same time slightly drawn to it. I'd learned about software and then this was hardware and so I thought I could maybe learn a lot here with wearables and the technology. So I ended up joining them as COO and, like I said, when I get into things, I get full into things.

You just weren't wearing brand new wellies. That's always a giveaway, right?

I knew so much about cows that he thought I must have cows. How many head do you have?

So like that's an unusual move, though, like we're not kind of apprehensive to make such a hard move, it was still a startup.

It was. You know, it was actually very exciting and it was at the very beginning of that journey. We call actually grew very well over those number of years. No, I was excited by it. It was different, it was unique. It was wearable technology Kind of don't forget, this is probably 2016 now, you know there wasn't a ton of wearables going on. You know Fitbit had probably just been invented. So you know it was interesting technology and interesting time. So I was kind of drawn to that.

And what was the next step in the journey?

So at the end of that period of time I decided to move on and do my own thing. You know I had to kind of itchings to be my own boss still and I ended up getting involved back more and more traditional e commerce. I helped a friend of mine grow an e-commerce business very successfully over a period of years and it was print on demand business.

That's a 100 grand per day of ad spend.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that was a Black Friday Gosh. I can't even remember what year it was, but like 2018, something like that. Yeah yeah, we turned over multiple millions over the weekend, so that's phenomenal.

And now that makes sense to me because, as a poker player, I can see the e-commerce, I can see the numbers, I can see the leverage, I can see all that kind of that, what you got involved in.

Yeah, so I'm good at that. I've always been good at that I'm good at first of all, I'm not afraid of spending money, clearly, yeah, and taking risk, right, so I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. If you're looking for an ad, calculated risk, right yeah.

Calculated risk. But what ads? It must have seemed so logical to you because return on investment, odds, percentages, numbers for me I can see that completely. For you, in terms of that makes total sense. You'd be a savant compared to, like, with poker. You're making educated decisions with some of the information. What ads? You're making the information. You're making decisions with all the information.

Yeah, it's so much easier.

But it's like levels right. It's like you played the game on 10 and now you're playing the game on six and you're like why is it so easy? Yeah. I spend one and I make five oh my God.

And it also helps that I had a background in Facebook software, so I knew the ins and outs of the platform and I also have an advertising master's in my back pocket, so that kind of helps as well. A little less than you'd think, I did marketing a little, very little, but yeah, it was a big game of fight as well. You know what I mean. But it was also great times in the world of Facebook ads, you know.

Facebook ads are really coming back then? Yeah, it was because there really was the height. I suppose when you get into it, 2012, 2013, it was really starting to bubble and then by 2016, 2017, it was a proven model. You know, you put in X, you get a Y. Yeah, it was very much kind of like people were scaling rapidly and it was dual platform. Yeah, there was no like, oh, it's between this, this and this and this. It was dual platform.

Yeah, and now that business was phenomenal but it wasn't my business and I never really. When I left Mucola, I intended to start my own business and I ended up getting dragged into this and then it was making so much money that, like you know, I was like, okay, let's do this for a while, if you know what I mean. So it made a great return on that over a couple of years and ended up leveraging that into starting a few other e-commerce ventures to various degrees of success.

I love that journey because I'm getting a lot of serial founders on there, because I'm interested in this learning space, because there's such a different conversation with it when entrepreneurs don't one, two, three, four and been through that, because the learnings are just monumental, like what you've distilled there and what are we in? Now we're 20 minutes in what you've distilled in 20 minutes, like a lifetime of learning bringing you to this moment.

Like when you make mistakes, you learn, for sure.

Good entrepreneurs do not everybody.

People make the same ones over and over and keep wondering what's happening and, like when I used to play poker for a living, I used to go back and actually look at the hands that I played rather than just trying to forget about them right and try to figure out what could I've done different or what should I've done different, or how did they play versus how did I play and was I actually making good decisions?

I love that because there's this thing of like oh, it has to be your passion, it has to be your. Why it has to be this. Yes, why you're doing it is important, but the product itself doesn't have to be your reason. You get up in the morning. For me, it's being my own boss. Freedom. That's why I do this, that's why I'm on boss is the freedom thing probably deeper psychological thing about authority? If you want to go real deep, therapy will just leave it at that. Yeah, and it's.

Yeah, so I guess. Well, first of all, they're handmade Natural, fully not natural soaps for men Made from all natural ingredients. We don't use things like fragrances, because that would have been easy. So For some reason it does too crazy things I've done in this business, right. So one of them was when I started, I decided to take the decision to actually make the products ourselves.

So why do you do it that way?

and I just everything in my life leading up to this moment had been about me wanting to build a proper business of my own, let's say, and I wanted to be authentic. And I didn't want. I want to be able to. I just wanted to do it in an open and transparent and authentic way and Not taking shortcuts.

I love you, want to say everything. My life has to be hard, but I love that you're like this is gonna be me. I'm gonna build this the way I want to build it everything. You was your time to do it. Then you learned all your things you, the self. It wasn't going anywhere.

There was no good reason you know there was nothing else to do and so just decided. You know it wasn't part of the plan originally. You know, when I came up with the idea To sell soap online right, so originally will backtrack a second like the original thing was purely analytical as we discussed. Right so it was. It was me making a conscious decision as to what would make a good e-commerce product right.

I was gonna say natural exfoliant.

Yeah, I would follow this path as well, nearly took a whole layer of skin off, but I didn't give up. So I, instead I changed what I was doing, I altered my recipe and you know, and like I said earlier, when I do things I do things full on.

So it's like I know it's funny, like, but it sounds bloody hard to make, like you are making something scratch when you've no experience making it.

So yeah, I mean, it was hard, like you would break a slash, had to see another. I remember when I first started, I was I wasn't great at mixing, you know. So you mix a bowl, you have to mix the oil and the lion by hand, right, and I remember, you know, making my arm was killing me and fast forward six months. I was like my right arm could like spin faster than any machine, you know. And I was, I was, I was making hundreds of soaps a day In my, in my kitchen still.

So it's good learning to be fair, yeah, you got self-awareness to know, and then what stage did you kind of go? Okay, let's start vlogging this now. We're ready.

Yeah. So my plan originally was you know, I'll sell this to the Irish American diaspora, right? If it goes wrong, it's in America. Nobody knows me, it's not gonna be too embarrassing, you know. So that was my initial plan, because Not only am I gonna make myself myself and create my own sense, I'm also gonna sell in America rather than on my doorstep. I don't know why. Well, I do know why I decided to do that because I just thought it was an angle that we could sell.

But then it would seem logical. I would imagine it's one of the biggest markets in the world, is it?

Yeah, it is, it's huge. So I was making the products myself, my kitchen, I was shipping it to a warehouse in the states. I set up a three PL before I launched and you know, I had, like I think I had a hundred of each made and six different cents when I launched, and so I decided I built everything right and we launched in the states and created some ads, you know, low spend initially, really bad ads because didn't have any feedback yet from customers, or when was this? What time is this?

Yeah, I had no idea it was going to be that much expensive.

Yeah, yeah, and that wasn't necessarily in the whole. Also, that was like I was building up a collection of essential oils which are expensive, you know what I mean, because I need to spell them all. I don't even know what they smell like. I need to buy them all. So yeah, so yeah. Kind of crazy beginnings, right. But anyway, fast forward. I just we've come up with the branding, come up the packaging, the six different sales we're launching with. Create some ads in the States.

When you say ads, where are we running the States?

No but like Facebook, facebook, instagram, facebook Instagram. So platforms, I know, yeah, yeah, so we get the first sale and within the kind of first week, there was one pivotal moment where I get a message from a customer and we like sold to 10 people at this point, like it's not going great, you know, but some people have bought right, so I'm not, I'm not stressing too much. But this guy contacts me and he's like hey, man, I'm, he's American, obviously, because I'm only targeting Americans.

This is how, like a Netflix crime special begins.

Yeah, and I actually created. So I was documenting the whole thing on Tik Tok from the get go right and one of my Tik Toks I remember like alluding that I'm going to be the serial killer right If I don't go, I can see why. You know what I mean. So I arranged to meet this guy in town and I'm bringing him in his order of soap and I meet him and he's perfectly nice and normal and I buy him a pint and we had a chat and turns out he was a natural soap enthusiast.

And each within a niche within a niche.

Yeah, and they were all sharing ideas and soaps that they were using and what that smelled like, and all this and these trade soaps to each other and send them back and forth across the states. And, yeah, so that was eye opening, so I learned a ton from from that point. And then it also turns out that he took a photo in his hotel room of what he had bought for me and posted in that group that evening. And then the next day or that evening he contacted me and said I need more.

But it's not the most bizarre story and it just shows you the power of social, the power of advertising, but the power of picking a beautiful niche that is very niche, that is clearly identifiable. But, like, within one week, he had found you online, your ads have found him online, yeah, and you found a power user, yeah, and then boom.

Yeah. So he ended up inviting me to join that group and I joined as I introduced myself and shared videos and conversations with people what I was doing, and I probably got my first hundred customers out of that group.

That's phenomenal. That learning is massive. I heard the story a number of times from a number of founders now and it's important to highlight this. So your first hundred might have come from that group. Yeah, you found that kind of like sweet spot. Yeah, the first hundred or everything, right? Yeah, first ten or everything.

Yeah, I knew them all by name. You know what I mean. It was like Jesus after buying again.

Because people think, oh, you know online ads, just throw some online ads and you're like, oh, it's not that simple or everyone would be doing it, yeah, whereas you did it. But then you find you go deeper. You go deeper into the niche.

It also human, humanified, humanizes, yeah, humanized, humanized the whole ad experience, right? So instead of just ads turning into customers, these are actual, real people who I was interacting with, you know, and they'd message me go hey, I just bought, and then you know I might have a conversation and, like I did, they say do things that are not scalable. I did a lot of unscalable stuff at the beginning.

Well, you did, but you didn't. You did online ads, which is the most scalable thing in the world. Yeah, then you dug deeper into that. Yeah, you didn't just blast on like gosh do as. You got into the weeds and figured it out.

Yeah, and had a lot of one to one conversations with these guys about my products and other products and you know a lot of them. I would consider friends now and, like, of those hundred people I'd say you know, 70 or 80 are still in touch with me relatively regularly and are still customers of the black stuff, which is incredible.

Yeah, and how did you scale then? So that's your first hundred. You know your Facebook group might have been the first hundred, along with ads. What was the next? Kind of six months, so this is May 21. So you're bringing through kind of the rest of 2021.

Yeah, so I think I turned over like 30 something grand in 2021.

Okay, so we haven't broke even, but we're nearly there, yeah.

Like still, we're still, we're not in the black yet. You know, if you're looking at that spreadsheet, the bottom line is not looking amazing, but there's starts starting to be a little bit of light at the tunnel. You know what I mean. There's something.

I mean. I know a lot of businesses don't turn over, yeah, 30k in the first month. I know a lot of funded businesses don't turn over 30K in their first couple of years.

Yeah, and I think you know it's my stubbornness and probably also my own personal financial position at the time that I was able to wait it out and learn and adapt and improve and grow slowly. You know what I mean. So I never really pushed it. You know I didn't start trying to scale ads, I didn't. You know, we spent next to nothing on ads that that whole year. You know a little bit, a little bit of dabbling.

I've made much recently, but I mean, are you still making them up at this point?

Yeah, oh, I'm making every product myself, wow, except for the soap dish. Thankfully, I'm not quite carving wood. I wouldn't put a haste to it, but go on, no, I'm making it. Yeah, so this entire year, it's just me in my kitchen, right, and I'm sending products to the states in box of hundreds soaps, and my 3PL is shipping them to customers, and I start working on a natural deodorant in that period as well, and I guess that's why I wasn't trying to scale.

I can see your advertising background coming through all the time. Yeah, relax the Cacks.

So I wanted to launch a product for Valentine's Day, but I didn't want to be for women, because I still wanted to keep us selling to men, so I didn't want to be a gift that they bought for their other half, and so the angle was well, buy for yourself to relax, right? So we figured out what essential oils had the most relaxing properties, use that to create a scent profile, and the packaging was totally different.

That's the issue with the mini-nate commerce.

So and that's one thing I hate about e-commerce, that is, people who email market. It's like what do we do? We just send another 10% discount, 20% discount, because then you start buying.

I see it myself. I just wait because I know it's coming. I know 25% is coming, I just got to wait. Even if I really need something, I'll be like, yeah, it's going to come soon. You train the customer to wait for discounts and I personally Pavlov's dog Ring the bell.

They're going to wait for discount. So that was something I want to change. With the black stuff and we very rarely discount We've never run a discount on Black Friday, yet we don't have another strategy for that.

Well, you're ziggin' on people's act.

Yeah, so the limited editions are great. So that's kind of central to the whole strategy of this business and we still relax. The tax came back in January this year again, and the two soaps that I developed back in 2022 just launched them last week. This day ever in the history of the black stuff was last Friday. Wow, we relaunched the Shamrock Saint and what's your Poison, which are the two Congrats man, that's big Saint Patty's Day ones.

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And I'll tell you what we do, then for Black Friday is we deliberately mark them out of stock right? Because even if I didn't sell out, I was not going to be the guy still selling St Patty's Day soap in.

September. It's great. It sends out all the wrong signals as well. I see, commerce Business is doing that now. I'm like, oh gosh, just.

So we deliberately always have like nope, it's gone now and we just marked it out of stock, whether it was sold or not, and that's tough, it's gone.

The good thing about you is that, and imagine there's a long shelf life on these things.

Yes, yeah, there is, which is great. But so for Black Friday, what I end up doing is saying, well, if you spend I've done the last two years, or three years actually, and it's worked really well Two years maybe If you spend a certain amount, you get a free mystery gift which could be one of our out of stock limited editions, right? So we use Black Friday to offload all our old inventory that we didn't sell and we just give it away for free. But they still buy at a full price everything else.

they don't. How often in your life do you get a genuine surprise?

Yeah, yeah, I'm going to keep doing that. I think it's a great and I would highly recommend a genuine e-commerce to try and come up with something similar, because that's brilliant. If you just run a 30% off Black Friday sale, that's actually 50% of your margin, your net profit you're giving away.

I was having a coffee with an e-commerce retailer recently and we were sitting in Dubrae's and Graffin Street and he's like, look, look down the street right now, when it was, this is Fed. So he's like, look down, look down, right now we could see Massimo Dudi, we could see not Gucci, but one of the high-end brands, sale, sale, sale. And February, middle of February, and you're like he's like it's killing retail. He's like sales are on all the time.

Somebody goes. Well, what are we doing? Well, I guess we put it on sale.

But it's all the time now. Yeah, you're just going to go under sales constantly, certain brands and certain products.

You're also teaching the consumer that your high-value product let's say that it's like I don't know our designer jumper for 200 quid is now available for 80 quid. You're teaching the consumer that actually it's not worth 200. You can still make a profit when you sell over less than half that. So obviously you're devaluing your brand.

Price anchoring. People anchor on the law as a possible price If you're like, oh well, I got it for 80 quid last year. That was weird yeah.

So products aren't cheap because we're making them by hand and out of really good ingredients. So I don't want to create a discount brand. It's a premium brand, and I think part of the key to creating a premium brand is scarcity and a premium price that doesn't often get discounted.

Know your value in a world whereby everything is getting rushed to the bottom, especially online. People can do this online all the time. Just launch sale. I started following this company called True Dark. You started following them. No Fascinating Set up by two ex-members of the SAS, really high end outdoor gear. I started getting targeted by their ads. I was like this looks cool, high end, though Premium stuff. You're talking 220 quid for a pair of trousers.

But you could swim through a marsh, that's it. I could pretend I'm in the SAS.

Yeah, if I'm walking around in Wicklow and I'm wearing that fleece. I know I'm sorted, but again, it's the emotion and the angry. Their branding is beautiful. You should definitely check it out. True Dark it's very cool, but again, premium products, yeah, excellent stuff. You can just tell, even on the website. You just look at it and you go, yeah, that's premium stuff.

Yeah, I think that's really important. The packaging that you see here is great, but we are changing that too over the next six months to be even more premium. Let's say we hired a branding and a marketing agency and kind of leaned more into the Irishness and differentiated more from our competitors and trying to make it more standalone, more premium, looking more Irish, but not Celtic cross Irish, if you know what I mean.

Not, Diddle-D-D yeah, not Iron Jumpers and Leprechauns yeah, I think that's a problem. Ireland is a bit of a branding problem. I think we have a country especially if especially a country with high-end beef and butter and really high-end products. We do tend to go for the Paddy's Day. Are we all great, let's have a pint? Yeah, not a fan of that. I think we need to look up market a bit more.

Yeah, so we're undergoing that process at the Blackstuff, so it's still obviously going to be called the Blackstuff, but just our logos changing, our packaging is changing and the whole.

We're trying to feel even more premium, but I think there's a huge learning there as well. So you launched this in 2021. It's an evolution. Yeah, and wait, and wait, and wait. Oh, when I've got the logo, perfect, I'll launch. Yeah, oh, totally. It doesn't matter if the product's absolute dog shit. Yeah, you'll spend so long.

I think I paid someone a fiver to create that logo, you know.

But that's fine. Yeah, and that's the thing. Get launched yeah, Even if you're trying to launch a premium product, but the product is excellent. I'm sure that's the difference right. Yeah, there's certain things you can go get into the product because of the sound. Yeah, don't skimp on the product. So you've spent three years perfecting the product and getting in product market fit. Yeah, so you've done 2021, you've done 30, what? 36k, 35k? Yeah something like that.

Yeah. So that moment of launching the Relax the Cacks started 2022 and then leading into very quickly into two more limited editions in March for St Patrick's Day in 2022. That kind of actually was really vital to the business in terms of my confidence in it. You know, all of a sudden it was like actually we're starting to make a little bit more money here and it started to really grow.

That right hand is just getting bigger and bigger and bigger. That right bicep is just bolding at the stage yeah.

I launched in Ireland and, yeah, we sold it. It's very quickly sold loads here. And then my why do you think that was Probably me and my ads? I leaned into Founder Story. It was just me in my kitchen making soap. It was all very real and different. It was Founder Story type ads. I'll give you a tip right, the best way to sell something is emotion, right. Number one, right it's how does the product make you feel? It's very hard to do that with something like soap and deodorant, right?

Yeah, it's a sensory thing.

It is a sensory thing and that's post-purchase right, but before you've bought the product and it's a very personal thing actually Our customers are very attached to the product because the smell of this one is all unreal. They use it when they make it right In their private place in their own shower, right. So it is a very personal item. But to connect with a future customer, you can't really lean into the emotion of it.

Kitchen is actually making food now. Weirdly enough, Our house was destroyed.

Like, not physically but emotionally, which is not worse, fairness it could have been cooking meth. There's a lot of worse things you could have been doing. The neighbor used to say, like I always know when little Johnny's been in your house, because it comes out of the smells of soap. I was like, yeah, because there's soap all over the house, curie, way worse. Yeah, so you got a workshop 2022.

So many soaps we make an end of day in 2022 or even in a week.

So when I was making it by myself in my house, I was probably making over 100 soaps per day. Wow, yeah, so it's nine, and about making 54 at a time times six I might be making like two 300 soaps a day by myself in my house, plus deodorants, so maybe like four days a week. I was making soap one day a week making deodorants, and then when I moved to having somebody helping, I was able kind of to double that up right. So it's making maybe five 600 soaps a day.

But when you know your stuff like you do, you've done it. You've made the thousands of bars, you know exactly how long it takes, exactly how much goes in, exactly how many hours, exactly the minutes, like that can't be. You can't learn that in a spreadsheet initially. No, that has to be done through.

Yeah, and I did everything you know for the first 18 months. I made every single product we sold for the first 18 months. Every customer that bought from us in Ireland, I packed it and brought it to the post office. You know, I knew most of my name. I'd recognise if somebody bought more than once, and all those things, and I think you learn a ton by doing it yourself and I think it's invaluable. So when it comes to training somebody in, I know exactly how it works.

At what point should someone hire someone? Because this is the big thing about this product I love giving tangibles. So at what point? If you're building or if you want to build something similar, at what point should you hire someone?

Earlier than you're comfortable doing it. It would be my insight. I wish I'd done it earlier. It was a big risk at the time, right? You know we didn't turn over a ton in 2021, 2022 was showing promise, but you know we're still not making much money and all of a sudden I'm signing a lease for a place I'm agreeing to take on a salary, full time paying. You know it's a large risk, but I would highly recommend somebody do it earlier than the comfortable doing it.

That's always a tricky one. That's why I like asking that question, because it's so hard making that first hire. Yeah, it's transformational almost every single time when they show the wrong person. It's so powerful that first hire because it just changes the whole game.

Yeah, big time and it changed everything. You know I still was able to work largely from home. I used to go to the workshop for a couple of hours every day. Davey was the guy I hired to sit with me, would have everything ready. I come in like, blitz out 700 soaps in the space of two hours, record a video for social media of me making it. While I do it, go home, edit the video, put it live, work on my ads, work on my all the rest of the stuff. That was great.

Within a year. Wow, yeah, how long did you think that was going to last you?

It seemed. I remember going in there it seemed big right, because I had my own house. I only had a tiny little home office that I was using and stuff was just hidden all over the house. You know you'd look behind a door and the be 100 kilos of coconut oil. You know it's literally all over the house. So it seemed huge when I, when I, when I agreed to rent it, you know, but the business just started growing so fast that space ran out.

How many people?

you got. Now we have 10 full time people. Whoa, yeah, that's wild.

Yeah, yeah, 10 full time people, yeah, and this is why I loved you in this podcast. I think to be a lot of people listening going what?

Yeah. So if we 2021, we did like 30 grand. 2022, we did like 500 grand. 2023, we did 2 million, and this year we should touch wood I would hope to hit five this year. And that's still been made 54 soaps at a time the exact same way I used to make it in my kitchen, because it's the only way I know how to make soap. I love it. Yeah, that's absolutely epic. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's and it's growing and I could see a path to 10 and beyond. It's just about.

You know a lot of unusual people listen to this podcast. You might find an email.

Yeah and so like and all that's before you can scale up your Facebook ads. You need to have all that in place. So we've already done that last year as part of our strategy for this year. So we're set up to hopefully take on four and a half to five this year in turnover.

And have you raised funding, or have you self-funded, or how have you funded this? No, it's all self-funded yeah. Yeah, amazing.

Yeah, I went lower than the 38, I think, or the 30, where I put some money, more money, in for growth over the past two years. But, yeah, thankfully it's all and I don't plan on raising money. It's not something I want to, I'd rather grow it slower, oh, slower. Yeah, something's going okay, something's going great. It's going great, yeah, but all our like, all our capital is in inventory and raw materials. You know what I mean To get ahead of growth.

I'd say a number of things, but what changed? Because those jump up in figures is astronomical, yeah.

That's just me scaling up my customer acquisition. You know, if we backtrack, I'm really good at ads right. So it took a few years to get good at making and scaling up our manufacturing so that I can grow our customer acquisition. And you know, right now we're acquiring, you know, over 100 new customers a day Plus. We've got like over 100 old customers coming back every single day.

What platforms are good now?

Still Facebook, Instagram is our core.

And when you say Facebook Instagram, do you mean the actual Facebook old platform or do you mean just Meta as a whole is in Instagram and stuff? Yeah.

Meta as a whole. Yeah, yeah, it's still by far and away the best advertising platform ever known to man.

Yeah, yeah, and what about like the likes of TikTok and stuff has that?

Yeah, I mean at the very beginning when I started the business. I started TikTok and I was recording myself doing everything, and we still do it, but it's never unlocked growth the same way for us at least, the same way as Facebook has. That's interesting.

What do you think that is?

Just two things. One I probably know Facebook better Fair, yeah, Okay, and more comfortable. But number two is the demographic as well, Because I use myself in all my ads. I tend to attract people of a similar vintage. Let's say so. We're not. Our customers aren't 20. They're more like 40. So less of them are likely to be on TikTok than on the likes of Facebook and Instagram and stuff like that. So that's probably part of it too. Now our new branding might be more appealing to younger people.

Yeah, Mine is getting a couple of new faces on there. That's an absolutely phenomenal story, yeah, so what's the plan this year then? Because you're clearly very analytical, did you intentionally use poker strategy in business?

Yeah, I. Always. Every decision is, you know, risk versus reward, always. It's just how my brain works. There's a great term in poker called EV. I mean you've never heard it, but it means expected value. Okay. So if you're 50-50 to win, your expected value is a half right. If you're 60-40 favorite, your expected value is 60% right. If you're a huge favorite, you might double your money and that's your expected value. So everything I do in business is about expected value.

to repeat purchase. Is it you? Through email, through social, or is it natural it's?

our soap that dissolves in water and they end up with an empty box.

But that's interesting, right and that is good. But then there is the friction of let's go on. My laptop must like reorder this. Like how, how's that happening?

That goes back to having a really really good product. Yeah, yeah, Our product is genuinely really good and people enjoy using it and when it runs out they want to buy more. Now we do a great job of staying in touch with them, because six or seven times throughout the year we're launching new limited editions or the limited editions coming back, because that's the thing, isn't it stay in front of mind, because you live in a world of constant distraction.

Now, we're constantly bombarded with all these things, so that's, it's staying front of mind.

So, like I know my calendar ahead of me, you know January 1st, we launched, relaunch, relax the cacks. Last week we relaunched our St Patrick's Day to different soaps and stuff like that. I know June, we've got like a surfing coming. I know September, we've got Arthur's Choice. I know December, we've got decked the balls and I know we've got Halloween stuff.

To the moon, like this is. I have to say this is episode probably 3, 3 6 or 3, 3, 7. This is one of the most interesting, clever, strategic stories I've heard on the pod.

Well, thank you. I'll tell you what I'm genuinely. I'm not trying to build something for today, tomorrow. I'm generally I have like a 10-year plan, maybe even a 100-year plan ahead of this. I'm genuinely trying to build, you know, like Nike started somewhere, huge, huge brands started somewhere, with one guy in his house coming up with a pair of shoes.

People forget that wasn't that long ago. That is the most recommended book. The hard thing about the hard things and shoe dog are two of the most recommended books in the podcast. The shoe dog is a great book, but people forget. Like that was just one dude. Yeah, that was just one guy selling shoes. So I love when you because, right, so it's not exactly a new product, right, people always search for the new, new thing. Oh, this new tech product. Oh, it's new IA product. Oh, the metaverse.

Yeah.

I've been there. It's brilliant. It's just a bakery yeah, in flippant simple terms. But it's not yeah, because they do it exceptionally well.

Yeah.

The queue is down the street for a reason, yeah, so like this. I love when people take a simple product and just make it so good, and especially here in Ireland, I think we've ample scope to do this. We have incredible products like food drink. There's definitely scope for more brilliant products like this.

And do you know what Part of how we have a great product right Right, boils down to me being inexperienced. So when I started, I didn't know the rules of soap making. Right, I was teaching myself, I was doing my own research, I was doing my own experimentation. I didn't know that Generally in a soap, you'd never really want to put in more than one or two or 3% of shea butter, because shea butter is really expensive.

I love that. I always say turn your weakness into strength. You didn't know the soap business? No, that's just. But that shouldn't stop you, Like you should be able to. Yes, there's great having deep domain knowledge, but you deep domain knowledge and ads, you layered that on top. You don't have to have it all. People are always waiting to oh when I'll do one more course or read one more book, or listen to one more blog, read, watch one more blog or whatever.

So we'd mentioned shoot dog. I love shoot dog, but I don't have a specific book, I would just say a poker book. I think it gives you a whole different insight into risk versus reward. If you're going to read one.

What one would you read?

I'd probably go, you know I would. Just I don't know that. I would recommend one book, just any poker, poker strategy, poker theory, poker for beginners. You know what I mean? Yeah, keep it simple, just learn about EV.

Yeah, I'm going to have to have a founder's poker night because we'd Michael Aduyre on from Big's back and he loves playing poker. He's on to our show and he's gone to Vegas. He's done World Series poker. He was like you need to start. He had loads of founders play poker. He needs to start a poker night. So I'm going to start a founder's poker night now. I'll organize. I'm definitely not going to play after you, two sharks. What's the biggest thing you've learned about yourself since starting?

the business. The biggest thing I've learned about myself is to just be honest and transparent, and that goes a long way. I have very strong feelings about how companies should represent themselves. We started on TikTok recording what we're doing. We still share everything publicly. I share the figures I shared here on my Twitter. I've shared every quarter. I put our financial figures out there. It's not because we're boasting or showing off, it's just transparency.

I share my stats on LinkedIn yeah, and it's bloody hard because they're not passive, but they've been growing and I share what I've learned, what I haven't learned, and it's funny. I just do it for because I like to be honest. I don't like selling, I don't like going oh look at this. But I like to be transparent and going. This is what I'm doing, this is what I'm learning. Like I was saying to you about the TikTok videos and stuff translating people into listeners, and I do that every month.

Like mental.

I'll tell you that the company off air Crazy and I was just. That was one of those moments where I'm like, oh wow, it's okay. It's good to be transparent, it's good to be authentic and I always have been, I always continue to be. But it's nice to get those moments where you're like people do watch and people do listen and people do respect it.

And the other thing is it's personal accountability.

That's for me good pressure. 2024 is the year of good pressure for me. I want to put good pressure on myself.

I put my fingers up out there, right, and then I also put my goals for next quarter and then I retweet it to force myself to be accountable. So I know it's coming right. So, like I'm there, am I going to hit that figure that I put out in December for this quarter? I think we are, you know, but there's pressure and if we don't hit it, we don't hit it, you know, but I like doing that. It's personal.

We need to get you involved. Me and James do this accountability thing every quarter, sit down every quarter, map out our goals, map out what we're going to do. It's powerful. You need that. It is powerful Because when you're on your own, you're the easiest person in the world to bullshit. To yeah, the easiest person to like yourself. Tough months because you know XYZ and blah blah blah, whereas when you're like I said I was going to do it.

Yeah, the oldest adage in gambling, you know, you only remember your wins.

Yeah, it's true, you know. So it's very, very powerful. If you were, if you start a new business in the morning, what would it be?

I would probably stay close to home now. If I was going to start another business, it would be looking at what synthetic products are in the market and how can we replace them with natural products. So most of the stuff that we use in our day to day lives we don't realize this, but it was actually. They were actually like formulated in the 70s or 80s, when it was cool to smoke at the maternity wing.

You know what I mean. I thought you mean seatbelts weren't mandatory and I guess it was given for your health.

Yeah, and they're the products that we still use in our house to clean or on our skin to clean, or even in our food. So I think there's going to be a whole shift in the next decade away from all that crap and towards more natural, healthier alternatives. So if I was going to start up now, it would probably be in the I don't know. Something like that maybe clean your home naturally, or something like that.

Well, when you see the TikTok trends of like my wife is massively into this like natural cleaning ingredients, like lemon going back to the old stuff, lemon, baking, arbol soda, all that kind of stuff you're like, yeah, makes total sense. Yeah, whereas instead of your spraying all these chemicals all around your house.

You're like, that smells really bad.

And it's all the compounding. I'm a big believer in the compounding effect, but you do all the time. Compounds Won't hurt you immediately, but over time it cannot be good. What would you do today if I give you 10 million euro Today?

yeah, I'd probably put 99% of it into the black stuff. Yeah, turn it into 100, maybe. Yeah.

I like that, I like that confidence. Yeah, what's something in your daily routine you wish it started sooner.

I go through phases in my routine. I wish I could say, oh yeah, I was getting up at 6am and exercising for an hour and reading a book and doing 10 minutes of yoga and meditation, because I've done that, but not sustainably, forever. I think, like, don't hold yourself to, it's okay not to do amazing things all the time. I go through phases where it's either it's fitness or stuff like that for your mental sanity, but I don't do it all the time and I'm comfortable with that. Okay, yeah.

Yeah, enjoyable too. If I had to give you I'm going to give you 1 million euro, can you invest in one person or one company? Who would it be, not yourself?

Yeah, I thought hard about this one, but I think I would still put the money on Shopify because Shopify, you know I bought stock in Shopify 10 years ago. Unfortunately, I sold it, you know, a year later to go on holidays.

That's one of those ones. I had Bitcoin in 2016 stories.

Oh, I did that with Bitcoin as well. But listen, you have to be comfortable with decisions you make at the time.

EV baby. Yeah, I wanted that holiday in Santa Rosa.

Yeah, I still think Shopify is going to dominate the market for the next decade when it comes to commerce. They're an unbelievable company.

It's hard to pass them, I think. What do you believe other people would strongly disagree with or find strange?

Just to be yourself. Actually, it's okay not to conform, it's okay to be quirky, it's okay to be embarrassing, you know, it's okay to make a TikTok video and look like an idiot and have your friends laugh at you and mock you, because they're your friends, they're taking the piss and having fun. Yeah, so that, just be comfortable in your own skin. Yeah, not worry too much about what other people think. Do what you think is right.

Yeah, I put out about two, three hours content every week. My tip is don't read the comments. Yeah, that's my tip.

I like reading the comments, do you? Oh?

no, yeah, I actually still… it's a strange place.

Yeah, I still reply to every single comment to go on every ad, you know, and I'll defend my brand to the get go. And, like yesterday, I was arguing with some… not arguing, but defending ourselves against some guy who had a peach for a head and his… and then it was like the third message, I know, and it's just like what am I doing?

No, it's just…. Because it never leads to any word good, I'm just like no, it's a bad place. People are not kind.

No, On the internet Behind the sanctuary of an anonymity it's always user 67 or Trek 7 or some of these losers.

You're just like because if you start, it just rinses your day. Yeah, and I'm just like I made a vow about six months ago. I made a vow like no, that's it.

Well, do you know what I do? Right, I didn't tell you earlier, but we have this Facebook community, a bit like the group, the soap group, right, but there's 7,000 Blacks of fans in it, and often I will engage with naysayers in ad comments and then screenshot it all in a humorous fashion and wind them up and then screenshot it and share it into our group for comedy. Value Nice, so yeah you're reusing this?

Yeah yeah, I was only saying it's someone. Last week I had to go in and check something and I was like what is wrong with people? I was like I think I'll hire someone part-time just to go in and be funny yeah, fun in the ad comments. I think I'll just hire, like a reverse troll, just a comedian who wants to earn a few extra quid. Let's get him or her to go in and just be funny in the comments. Back to them. What's something in your personal life you spend money on that brings happiness?

Holidays for sure. It's something, thanks to my wife and her expensive tastes, that we've always done ever and maybe it goes back to playing poker for a living and not having respect for the value of money and things like that, but we've always spent way too much money on nice holidays.

It's all relative, though, and if your kitchen is now a soap factory, I think she deserves it. Yeah, what's your favorite holiday?

Skiing Skiing in Whistler, canada. My favorite place, that is bougie yeah.

Good for you, nice yeah. What's your final piece of advice to every entrepreneur listening?

Take risk would be my advice, but calculated risk and let me backtrack, actually I'm going to change that it's be patient, take risk in a patient manner. Success takes time. That's one thing I've definitely learned and you can't force it. And if you try and force it it leads to more risk of ruin. So your expected EV goes down, and just think about growing slowly over time is not necessarily a bad thing. Good things take time.

Super John. That was one of the most enjoyable interviews we've ever done in this podcast. Thank you so much for coming in. Where can people learn more about you but, most importantly, buy some of the black stuff? Yeah, just the black stuffcom. Yeah, Great name. Great to meet you, John. Thank you so much Pleasure. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you did, please hit subscribe on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts, as it really does help the podcast grow and reach new people.