Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: Welcome to the Victory Show.
Hey victors. Welcome to this episode of the Victory show. If this is the first time you're joining us, I'm Travis Cody, best selling author of 16 books and the creator bestseller by design. And I've had the privilege to of helping hundreds of business consultants, founders, entrepreneurs write and publish their own best selling book. And along that journey we discovered a really fascinating pattern. A lot of businesses hit a revenue plateau, usually around a million dollars a year and they struggle to break through it. So on this show I sit down with some of the world's Most successful founders, CEOs, leaders, business owners, so we can uncover the strategies they use to overcome those plateaus and scale their business to new heights so that you can do the same thing. So get ready for some deep insights and actionable takeaways that you can implement in your life and business starting now.
My guest today, my goodness, true, original, a serial entrepreneur who's never had a real job. He's a former standup comic and award winning screenwriter and one of the fastest men over 60 in the country. Quite possibly the fastest 60 plus Jew in the world. And we're going to dive into that. Stephen Sashin is the co founder of Zero Shoes, the wildly successful footwear company that's launched a global movement movement helping hundreds of thousands of people live life feast first with strong, healthy, happy feet and addictively comfortable minimalist shoes. I am a user. I am wearing my zero shoes right now. Alongside his wife and co founder Lena Phoenix, Steven even appeared on Shark Tank where they famously turned down $400,000 offer from Kevin Leary and built the business their way. Instead, Steven brings a rare mix of humor, insight and unapologetic boldness to everything he does. Today we're going to get into what does it really take to build a brand. Take a stand and do it with a sprint in your step. Steven, thank you so much for being here.
[00:02:00] Speaker A: I found out that I am not the fastest Jew over 60.
[00:02:03] Speaker B: Oh.
[00:02:04] Speaker A: Now my friend Alan Tissenbaum, who is not only doesn't not only has that qualification, but I think he's like has every American and world record in the races that I'm in. So happily we are good friends but he crushes me.
[00:02:16] Speaker B: Oh, that's funny.
[00:02:17] Speaker A: But I'm cool being number two to Alan. And also for people who are watching, I forgot to. I normally take the sign behind me down, the one that says shoplifting is a crime and people wonder if it's just a public service announcement for some reason, which it may be, but it's actually something that I liberated from the Duke University bookstore when I was there 43 years ago.
[00:02:35] Speaker B: That's pretty funny. I love it.
All right, so this, so this. I, I'm always, I always love talking to people who are serially entrepreneurs. Because, Mike, the question I like to ask was, did this find you at a young age or did you find it and then got the bug?
[00:02:50] Speaker A: It never occurred to me to do, do anything. I mean, I never thought about applying for a job. I just get. I've been really, really lucky. And that's going to be a theme, by the way, that things that I found interesting were things that I could make a living at. And whether that was when I was doing stand up comedy or I was a street performer before that. I started doing kids birthday parties as a magician when I was 12. I was barely older than the kids when I got out of college. I actually graduated early because I was the house MC at a comedy club in North Carolina. And the guy who booked that club said, I can give you 10 weeks on the road. So figured if I took an extra class and took scuba diving, I could graduate early and get on the road. And then that's, you know, like one thing led to another and I've just been again, lucky that on the one hand, my interests are something that I could monetize. On the other hand, there is a theme in a way which simply that the things that I found interesting were things that were monetizable and that were, you know, that were good ideas. And that's, that's. Well, we can dive into that if you like.
[00:03:46] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, the first thing I want to say is I have friends. So I did stand up comedy when I lived in la and I have friends that did the road thing. And they. You weren't really monetizing much at all. They were scraping. So what, what was your secret?
[00:03:57] Speaker A: I was good.
[00:03:57] Speaker B: Oh, no, not that. Oh, gosh.
[00:04:00] Speaker A: You know, I mean, really, it's like you reminded me. My father once sent me an article that was in the New York Times. I was also acting at the same time, but I was most of my money, I mean, almost all my money was coming from stand up. But it was an article about how in the acting world back in the 80s 90s, the screen actors Guild, if you made enough money, you got insurance from them. The American Federation of Television Radio Artists, if you made enough money, you got insurance from them. If you got both, you got free. One cover the deductible, the other cover everything else. And my dad Sends me some article about how, like, 0.1% of actors even qualify for insurance. And I had to call him and go, how do you not know? I'm one of those. So, yeah, it was, you know, right time, right place, and I did a good job.
[00:04:36] Speaker B: That's. I learned probably one of the best showbiz lessons ever from one of my friends who's a multimillion dollar real estate investor. He wanted to do standup comedy and.
[00:04:47] Speaker A: Get a real job.
[00:04:48] Speaker B: Well, no, because, you know, when. When, When. When you get started, you're all about, I got to do open mics and you got to do the thing, and then you work your way up. And. And he had a friend here in. In that visit in Vegas. He was headlining, and. And he was so excited. He'd been doing comedy, I think, 15 years, and he was going on and going, this is the best year I've ever had. I'm gonna break $40,000 for my year this year. And we're like, how many. How many weeks were you on the road this year? And it was like 42, right? And so that my. My friend, his name is Keith, he was like, oh, man, I.
At the Laugh Factory. And his friend was like, I didn't know you do comedy. He's like, that was my second time doing it. And he's like, what do you mean? How did you do headline? How is it? And then this is what Keith and I. And I listen, Keith said this. And this is when I went, oh, my God. I went about it the whole. I'm like, and this is the difference between a marketer and an entertainer. Keith was like, I go to a Laugh Factory all the time. I love it. I know the manager. So I went in there one day and said, hey, if I give you $300, can you put me on stage for 20 minutes? And the manager said, sure. And I was like, all those years I was doing open mics, and I could have just went straight to the front of the line.
[00:05:50] Speaker A: I mean, kind of, you know, the magic question is, would that convert to something?
[00:05:53] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:05:54] Speaker A: I mean, yeah, 40 grand. I think that's what I made my first year. And again, there was a bunch of us who were doing pretty well back then. And kind of in the early 90s, things started changing a bit. And kind of, you know, the strong Ish survived, and the strong definitely survived. And some of the guys from my generation, I mean, are making tens of millions a year now. I mean, the opportunity to make money as a standup comic now is unprecedented.
It's also. Some of those things are ruining comedy. I mean, we can go down this path forever. I mean, Netflix is destroying comedy in a certain way because you get a good special and they want you to do another one a year later. And there are very few people who can really do another one a year later.
[00:06:30] Speaker B: I don't know if I've seen a good comedy special on Netflix yet.
[00:06:33] Speaker A: Yeah, well, you know, a lot of them are pretty mediocre. And it's just because if you'd had a really good set, you just did a good 40 minutes to an hour, they recorded it. Did really, really well. And I mean did well. And Netflix or some other streaming service says, we'll give you 5 million for the next one. Tell me you would turn it down.
[00:06:49] Speaker B: Right?
[00:06:49] Speaker A: And you'll do the best you can and you'll walk away with the money and cross your fingers that, you know, it still helps you on the road, which is where most of money's going to come from anyway at that point. And then there's, you know, the crazy things like Napergetzi, who just sold out a 12,000 person arena.
[00:07:04] Speaker B: Yep. All right, so how do you go from doing standup into the world of business that, like, it seems to me kind of a big leap.
[00:07:11] Speaker A: It's fundamentally the same thing. I mean, you are trying to find someone who wants something that you can do. What happened for me was doing standup is not a full time job. I mean, you know, sure, you get a lot of free time. And I got the idea to simultaneously go to Columbia Film School. And while I was there, I'm writing screenplays. And I was really annoyed by the software that it took to format screenplays in the very particular and arcane format that's required. My undergraduate degree is in cognitive psychology. And I figured out I'm not going to dive too deeply into this, but I basically, I figured out a better way to do it. And it just so happened to the common I mentioned, luck is going to be a factor. Just so happened, I was bringing my laptop to comedy clubs, sitting in the green room, working on screenplays, and one night there's a guy with a PC magazine T shirt. And I said, what are you doing with the PC magazine T shirt? He said, what are you doing with a laptop at a comedy club? And I told him about this idea I had for a better version of a word processor for screenwriting. And he said, I just was given a piece of code that can help do what you need to do. And no one else has access to it. So we started a business, and I invented a product called Scriptware, which changed the industry of screenwriting. I knew nothing about business. I knew nothing about anything, really. I mean, I would say that I think there's a thing that a small Business administration did some sort of survey about the number one thing that leads to people being entrepreneurial, and it's having entrepreneurial parents. My dad was a dentist. That doesn't sound entrepreneurial. But he started and ran his own practice. My mother, her father was an entrepreneur as well, had a jewelry store. And she had multiple jobs that were often things that she created. We never talked about it. It just seemed like a normal thing that you figure out your own deal and you find a way to make it work. So I just figured out a way to make it work. And I did learn an interesting lesson, and that is the best man doesn't always win. So that was in my mind, you know, as a lifelong individual sport athlete. Best thing wins in that world. In the screenwriting software world, One of my competitors just did a brilliantly underhanded thing, and there was one major reseller at that time and said, how much margin do I need to give you to only sell our product? Basically said, here's the 300 bucks. Can I go on stage? And that person had an answer, and it kind of shut us out. At the same time, there was someone who was looking to buy my company who had been an advisor to us, and he had two partners. And while we were negotiating, the short version is I figured out that one of their partners was embezzling, and I had kind of over committed to, you know, working with them, and things kind of fell apart a little bit. Fundamentally, though, the biggest thing that was a problem for me, if I'm totally honest, which I am and will be now, I got bored. Once we got to a million bucks, I just got bored because there was nothing new to do. I mean, we had, for example, we had an ad that was running in Writer's Digest magazine, unchanged for like five years. It just kept working, you know, because they had like 100% turnover every year. There was like, nothing really left to do.
And so it was just kind of, you know, I kind of bored. And actually, ironically, because I was bored, that's when I. And this is like 1991. 92. That's when I started getting into Internet marketing. Wow.
[00:10:16] Speaker B: So you were. You were early. Early.
[00:10:18] Speaker A: Oh, dude. In 1992, I outranked anyone who had an infomercial. I outranked them for their own name. Because I figured out how to do SEO. It was simple back then, but that was interesting to me and I kind of figured that out. So that led me down, you know, a number of paths. And anyway, bottom line is, my whole thing is I get intrigued by something where I can see there's a problem and I can think of a solution. And I'm lucky enough that often there's other people who have that same problem. And fundamentally, you know, one of the things that I see with people who get stuck is they never really prove to themselves cheaply and quickly that there was a big enough market for what they were doing or that they can compete properly in a bigger market.
[00:11:00] Speaker B: So let's talk about that because that's important because I, you know, nowadays the whole like, MVP minimal vial product, that's everywhere.
[00:11:06] Speaker A: Silicon Bros. You're already too. You're already too late. So let's back up in the. So first things first. Entrepreneurs, we tend to get. We fall in love with our babies. And to be clear, most of our babies are stupid and ugly. And I don't have an actual child. But, you know, you get the idea we get really attached to them because we think it's a good idea and it feels good. And even worse, if we had a good idea before and it went well or well enough, then we get another idea and it has the same feeling. We think, oh, it must be the same as that one that went well. It's not. I mean, there's a lot of research. The number one factor of an entrepreneurial failure is a previous success. When you find people who have had multiple successes, they are not the norm at all. So. But I have seen, like, in the footwear world in particular, I won't name name names, people who did really well in footwear and either came back with a new product or a product in a slightly different market and just crashed and burned. In fact, I definitely won't mention names, but one guy came up to me after he had spent tens of millions of dollars on a new product after he had retired many years ago with many, many, many, many millions of dollars. I mean, he created a category and the new thing got a lot of attention, but it was a stupid, horrible idea and no one had was willing to tell him. And he came up to me at a trade show and said to me, I mean, I'm trying to do version three. And it's like, oh, God, don't do that. And then he said the saddest thing any entrepreneur has ever said to me. He said, I'm just trying to get back what I used to have.
And had I known him better, I would have said, dude, that ship has sailed. You changed the world then it's never going to happen again, I promise you. Or even if it could, why bother putting yourself through all of that? Get a hobby, find a girlfriend, do something. But, you know, don't do this.
So we have a lot of stupid, stupid, ugly babies. And if we think back to what people did when you couldn't get on online, if you're trying to sell something, you put a full page ad somewhere, they have to clip out a coupon and send you a check. And what a lot of direct marketers would do is they'd write the ad first and write variations of the ad. They'd test the ad to see, you know, what the best one is. And by testing, it's like how many people are going to send me a check or call my 800 number or do whatever it is to prove that this ad actually got enough attention to justify making that mvp. And they would either cut up the checks and, you know, and not make the product if it didn't work or if it seemed like it would work. They'd sometimes cut up the checks because they knew they had 30 days to deliver a product or they'd quickly figure out how to deliver a product. 30 days. But either way, you can do that on the Internet now before you make the product, you know, get a free website, build a landing page, get on AdWords or Meta and write a couple of ads and see how many people show up and then try to figure out how big that market really is by. Someone gave me a great piece of advice, didn't. Not to me, just said it out loud in 1993, if you want to make money, it's easy. Figure out where the money is flowing and get in the way of it. And so, you know, you got to figure out where the money is flowing and can you really get in the way of it? And I know many people know this and if you say I have no competitors, stop right there because the odds are about 100% that you're right, that there's people, there's no conversation to get in the middle of.
[00:14:04] Speaker B: Yeah. So that brings, that's perfect dovetail to what I was, where I was going to earlier is that you said something. Two important things, you know, get something launched and see if it's doing it. But then you're trying to compete in a, in an area that you'd have no right competing. So I'VE never heard anybody talk about that before in the business space. So I would love to chat about how do you know if you can compete? What's the metric for that?
[00:14:26] Speaker A: There's not necessarily a metric, but what you can do. If there are enough people talking, you're going to find people complaining about the people who will soon be your competitors. Find out where the hole is and what they're doing. And it may not be obvious. It could be distribution. It could be that they're all focused on back in 19 when do we start? Zero issues 2009. Back then there weren't people selling shoes online really. Zappos. I don't even remember when Zappos started, but it just wasn't really happening. And so the big shoe companies, they were not digitally present. So I knew we had an opportunity there. Look, our first product was a do it yourself running sandal kit.
We were selling a sheet of rubber, some string and instructions how to make a sandal that people have been making for 10,000 years. There was one other guy who was kind of doing it, but he admitted on his website this is a hobby. I'm, you know, I'm just a one monkey operation. It might take me six weeks to get your profit. I went, there's an opportunity. I can do this for real and take this seriously. And. And I called him on day one and I said, I want you to know what I'm doing and you know, I'm doing something similar to you but, but a different thing but I want you to know. And he said, I don't know if I should be happy or cry. I said, you should be ecstatic because you're a shitty marketer and I'm going to bring more attention to both of us and you're going to make more money than you ever thought was possible with your little one man operation. When I bumped in him years later at a trade show, I go to say hello and like I do with most people, I go to give him a hug hello. He goes, oh, no, no, I can't do that. I said, what's the matter? He goes, I don't know, I don't trust you. I said, is it because I made you so much money? And he goes, okay, yeah, you did, but I still don't trust you. I said, yeah, you'll get over it. And a year later, you know, we became good friends.
[00:15:56] Speaker B: Oh, that's funny.
[00:15:57] Speaker A: So it could be a distribution thing, it could be a product feature, it could be a way of manufacturing. I mean, there's an infinite number of ways. Look, I did pitches early on when I was trying to raise capital. And some smart people would say to me, isn't it just a marketing play? And I would say, how many companies make refrigerators and cars and everything you own? Everything's a marketing play. Either you have a better story or you have a way of delivering the product or a feature of the product or something that's going to be unique. And that's. I'm not going to say that's critical. There are companies and people who make boatloads of money on. What's the word I'm looking for? You know, like envelopes or things that are. Everyone can do it.
There's lots of ways to make money on things that are not unique, that are just doing the same thing as everybody else. I mean, there's a way to do it. Look, I wish I could marry into the wire coat hanger family business. I think there's like three companies that do it. Eight employees or maybe something like 20 employees. I mean, some small number of people, and they work 24, 7, and 8 hour shifts. And there's no way to get into that business because there's no way to make new equipment. So the only way is marrying in. But, hey, that's a business plan. My wife would not like it. I'm not. We do not believe in polygamy, but, you know, that's one way of doing it. So, you know, there's always a way. If you just think about it.
[00:17:11] Speaker B: I love it. You know, you said something that I think is really important to highlight, which is everything is marketing. And so I find it. You know, I was. I was 15 years in Hollywood, and you see that game. And when I started helping people write and publish books, some people come to me with a book and, like, can you help me, you know, market it? And so, of course, yeah, here's all the things we're doing. Well, I don't want to buy my way onto the bestseller list.
[00:17:32] Speaker A: Well, that's how you do it.
[00:17:33] Speaker B: And I was like, well, Disney just spent 127 million last week to market their movie. And on Monday, they were going, oh, my God, we're the number one movie in America. I'm like, did they buy the number one spot or. I don't. I mean, it's, you know, a billion dollar companies doing that. So I don't understand, like, why is it so. It's funny to me how it's like, it's okay over here, but over here, no, we don't Want to do that?
[00:17:57] Speaker A: Yeah. People think it's crass. Some people think that marketing is convincing people to do something against their will. Real marketing is providing a real. Look. I was going to say providing real value. I've done a lot of talks at Internet marketing events and copywriting events, and especially for copywriters. I go, your fantasy job. And it's a fantasy for most of you because there are very few jobs that will give you these two things. Telling the truth, the ability to tell the truth and change people's lives. And frankly, if you're not doing both of those things, you should consider shooting yourself in the head, because then you are probably trying to convince people to do something that.
[00:18:30] Speaker B: How many of those copywriters like one like this in the chair?
[00:18:33] Speaker A: I mean, I met some copywriters who made lots and lots of money for themselves and their employers selling, quote, financial products, selling, you know, how to be an investor, how to be whatever. They know that 95% of the people will never even open the thing that they bought, and the 5% who do will lose money.
So they know that, you know, I go, congratulations, but I couldn't sleep at night. And again, that's just me. It doesn't work for me. I have friends from my. The early Internet marketing days. I said the only honest thing you could do is work for some company or companies and get paid based on results. If you're just selling how to, you know, I mean, you know, again, most people will never do it. And those who try, most people, it won't work for because they don't. Way back when, I put together a little marketing thing and I taught it to a whole bunch of people, and there were five people in particular who figured out how to really run with it. And each one was doing a different thing that I taught. And they would tell you that what the other four was doing didn't work because it didn't work for them. So, you know, you got to find your way. I don't know. That's a horrible thing to say. It's just if you're, if you're just copying things, you can make money doing it. But at some point, there's a high probability that you've basically built your house on someone else's land and there's going to be an earthquake.
[00:19:42] Speaker B: So let's talk a little bit about obviously your, your big, big baby right now, the zero shoes. Take me back to the very inception of the thought for this. I mean, obviously you started with this.
[00:19:52] Speaker A: This, this, but you're giving Me? You're giving me way too much credit. So what happened was the 2007, 18 years ago. Ish. Um, I'm 45 years old. I got back into sprinting after a 30 year break. I was getting injured nonstop for the next two years, and a friend of mine suggested I try running barefoot to see if I learned anything. What I learned is that when you're running barefoot, good form feels good and bad form hurts. And when I was running barefoot, it hurt. It was also, though, really interesting to me because that first barefoot on, I'm a sprinter, like we mentioned. I don't need to take turns on the track. I run 100 meters outdoor, 60 meters indoor. I don't have a GPS watch. I don't like getting lost. But I was so enthralled with the experience of running barefoot. Like, what if I change my cadence, number of steps per minute, but I run the same speed? What if I change my speed but have the same cadence? What if I land on this part of my foot or that part of my foot? I mean, I was just so interesting. But again, I ended up with like, you know, an injury. I had a big blister on the ball of my left foot. My second barefoot run a week later, I thought, if I can find a way to run that isn't hurting the gaping hole, then I'm probably not doing what caused said gaping hole. And 9 minutes and 30 seconds of agony later, it changed in one stride. My running got faster, easier, lighter, more fun and enjoyable. And over the next few weeks, my injuries went away and I became faster. So I've been Masters All American for the last 15 years. I just wanted that barefoot experience as much as I could have it. And I got tired of arguing with restaurants about whether it was legal to go in there barefoot. It is. My wife got tired of me walking into my white carpeted house with my bare feet. Not good.
So I knew about the Tarahumara Indians in Mexico and other indigenous tribes that made very simple sandals. The book Born to Run had just come out and it talked about them as well. So I found some rubber from a shoe repair place and some cord at Home Depot and whipped something up. And other runners asked me to make some of those sandals for them. And I made like 50 pairs. I charged them just enough so that I could buy more the next time. If I charged you $20, that's because I needed $20 to buy twice as much stuff the next time. And once I made about 50 pairs. A guy who was a barefoot running coach said I've got a contractor at a book. And if you had a website for this little sandal making hobby, I could put you in a book. Well, again, I started Internet marketing in 91, 92. I built hundreds of websites at that point. So I rush home, I pitch this brilliant opportunity to my wife who tells me it's a really dumb idea that won't make any money, isn't a distraction, and it's just part of my little attention deficit whatever thing. And so she insisted that I not build a website and I told her that I wouldn't. And she went to bed and I did. And at that time we were actually, we just started a search engine marketing business a few months earlier. So when she growled at me the next morning, I said, look, it'll be a good case study. I can own all the keywords I care about in about three months. And I was wrong. It took me six weeks. What was. We thought it would be a nice little lifestyle business, but what we started hearing from people right away is, oh my God, these things changed my life. And it's not because we were doing anything special. It was something to protect your foot, something to hold it on your foot. That's fundamentally what a shoe is. But when you add things like arch support and motion control and you elevate your heel and squeeze your toes together, that's bad for you, proven to be bad for you. 50 years of propaganda has convinced you that's the way it is. Those companies know it is bad for you. I'm going to jump way ahead. Many of those companies have said directly to our faces or to the faces of people we know, yeah, that natural movement thing that you guys are doing is for real. But if we did that, we'd be admitting we've been lying for 50 years. So anyway, we thought, welcome to capitalism. Yeah, well, it's lying to people to make money.
[00:23:15] Speaker B: I so what I like when I came across zero shoes because that started my wife having foot problems and she, you know, we moved to Vegas, she started lifting competitively and had no idea that athletic shoes jacks up your gait. And so she started having back and hip issues, couldn't figure it out. And then she's the one that figured out the percentage of lift in the shoe. And that's, you know, obviously the zero drop is where you got, I'm assuming where you guys came up with that phrase and that we had never heard of that before. Yeah, and it was from my wife. Like she does, she won't wear anything else now that's all she.
[00:23:47] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, you know, look, when I try to get people out of the trance that footwear companies have put them in, it's not very complicated. I say things like, if you elevate your heel, that's changing your posture very slightly, but it puts pressure on your knees, your hips, and your back. So that's problematic. Or simply even better, you have 200,000 nerve endings in the sole of each foot. Why? And people will go, well, I guess, you know, so you can feel things like, yeah, so your brain can get that feedback to know how to move your body effectively and efficiently, can adjust to the terrain. How much can you feel through the amount of foam that you have in your shoe? And what problems might that cause when you can't feel anything? Or I go, which is better, weaker or stronger? It's not a trick question. And they go, stronger. I said, okay, let's talk about weaker for a second. If you put your arm in a cast, does it come out weaker or stronger eight weeks later and they go weaker? I go, yeah, because you immobilized one joint, and then all the muscles, ligaments, and tendons around it got weaker. See if you can bend your shoe because you have 33 joints and 110 muscles, ligaments, and tendons in each foot. People go, oh. I go, yeah, supporting. It makes things weaker. Tell me what kind of problems you could have when your feet get weaker at the end of a day, a week, a month, or, you know, when you're over 70, when trip and fall accidents are one of the number one causes of death because you can't feel, you can't move, you have no strength.
People go, so. And weightlifters, I mean, I'm. I'm surprised it took her a while. Powerlifters know that if you're going to deadlift, you want to be in bare feet or socks or something flat. What happened in the lifting world is someone who had long femurs had to make lifting shoes or was doing Olympic lifting, where you've got a heavy bar over your head, and if you don't elevate your heel a little bit, you're going to fall over forward. And then everyone. And then whoever those people were, set records. And everyone goes, oh, you. You have to wear their shoes to set a record. But 90% of people don't. You don't need those. If you're Olympic lifting, you're not lifting enough where it's necessary. If you're powerlifting, there's no value in them, typically, unless you have the anthropomorphic qualities that require them, but most people don't. So anyway, I could go on all that.
[00:25:41] Speaker B: So what? So walk me through like the first year of running the shoes. Like how, what did that look like? This started off as like a little side hobby lifestyle thing.
[00:25:51] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:25:51] Speaker B: And how long did it take before you and your wife went.
[00:25:55] Speaker A: Wait a minute, about two months.
[00:25:57] Speaker B: That was it.
[00:25:57] Speaker A: Because so what I did for marketing back then is I made and syndicated a bunch of videos. Some of them were literally just how to make the sandals.
And at the time, YouTube was not what it is now. There's like 25 different video platforms. Most people don't remember things like Dailymotion. And so I just had videos all over the place. And then there weren't even, I mean, Facebook was not really a thing. There were Google groups, conversations in Google groups that I was getting involved in. And we were just offering something for people to play with that was less expensive to get it from us than to do it on your own. So a lot of what, what our life was, was going to every Home Depot within 100 miles of here to find the cord that we were using, trying to, you know, sitting there cutting up giant sheets of rubber into smaller sheets of rubber and packaging up. I mean, we, I don't remember how quickly we had someone in our, in our living room doing shipping for us because we got tired of it and couldn't handle it, and then had someone at our dining room table doing customer service. But, you know, it took over the house pretty quickly.
It was just that there was a lot of interest at that time that was growing very quickly and we were the only game, well, one of the only games in town and the only game in town that was actually marketing effectively. So I don't remember what we made that first year, but I can tell you that we were in Shark Tank at about the two and a half year mark. And when we were on the show, right before we were on the show, I said to my wife, wouldn't it be nice to have a little Internet based business that made a couple hundred grand a year, took a couple hours a day? And she goes, that's what we have. Yep. But it can't stay that way because it was really obvious what we were doing was not rocket science or as they said when they invented those sandals, not rock science. And we knew it was just easy to copy. And people were already telling us, I don't want to make my own. Can you make do it for me? So we started doing custom made Sandals and then I don't even want to wear those. What am I going to wear in the winter or at the office? We had, we were getting so much feedback that this was a much bigger thing than we thought. And people that we met at like the seven month mark, who had 35 years of footwear experience said to us when we had made like 50 grand, they said we could sell this company for a million dollars right now. And we're like, what? They said, no, this is really important.
There's ways that we could market this. This is a big deal. And just, you know, back to the luck thing. The biggest lucky thing is I'm married to my wife. She's a brilliant finance operations person. I'm a really good product marketing person. We never knew each other as working people. And she brilliantly, you know, like a couple months in, went, all right, I'm all in. You're going to do what you do. I'm going to do what I do. So that was an.
[00:28:19] Speaker B: So what took you to, to Shark Tank and what was the product you pitched when you were there?
[00:28:23] Speaker A: The DIY kit. That's all we had. Then we were working on a ready to wear product, but it wasn't out yet. And what happened was we, we'd been at like parties and people would say, you guys should be on Shark Tank. And we're going, what the hell are you talking about? And so then we watched an episode and we got hooked and we watched every episode that we could find on YouTube. We watched the Dragon's Den from Canada, the Dragon's Den from the uk. I tried watching the original in Japanese, but it wasn't translated. And we're going, oh yeah, this would be great for us. And you know, we were doing what everyone does, following along, pretending that we' sharks pretending we're the entrepreneurs, imagining what it would be like if we were on there. And I didn't know how applying worked, so I just, I don't know what I did at first. But the application process that happened during a particular window, like in March. And at the time you could submit an application by email or you could submit a video, or you could go to a live audition. And I submitted an email. I made a video a little while later and I was just about to book a flight to Chicago to do a live audition, thinking that we could sell it better in person, when we got a call. They had 36,000 applications that year. And someone who is one of the people vetting her boyfriend had read the book Born to Run. So she was hip to what we were doing, called us up, interviewed us and said, hey, that's great. We're going to need a video of you that answers like these 50 questions in five minutes and we need it by next Monday. And I said, no problem. It was on a Thursday and I didn't know that my wife was planning a surprise 50th birthday party for me that weekend. So we got it done and submitted the video along with an application, very long application that had to be handwritten. And our handwriting makes doctor's handwriting look like calligraphy. So we typed out our answers, hired someone from Craigslist to write them out, submitted all of that, they came back and sent us a contract saying, not that you want to, you know, we want you on the show, but this is the next step. We filled out the contract, very one sided, no way to negotiate it. And then the day, the day after they got the contract, they said, yeah, we want you on the show. And, and the biggest thing we did is a lot of prep. We read every autobiography or biography of all the sharks we did. We had every business person that we know who knew the show pretend to be the sharks and grill the crap out of us. And when they want you on the show, they work with you. They give you two producers and they work with you on that initial pitch. And we did that, of course. And we, we got a lot of advice from bankers who invested in companies, who sold companies, from footwear companies that were acquired, people who bought companies, people, I mean, like everyone we could think of to justify how we wanted to craft the story. And then we somehow ended up on the show and they, they tape more segments than they use. So then we crossed our fingers waiting to see if they would use ours. And we heard that after they do your little segment, if they call you within a few weeks to come out and film you where you are, there's a higher probability, but not guaranteed they'll be on the show. And five months went by and then they called us and said, we're going to come out and tape you guys. And we're like, crush your fingers.
[00:31:08] Speaker B: So what were you going on the show? Were you going just as a marketing play or were you really hoping to get an investment and.
[00:31:14] Speaker A: No, we were hoping to get an investment.
And specifically we were hoping we were going to get Barbara to invest because reading her autobiography, Barbara is a brilliant marketer and we had heard she was the only shark at that time who's really working with the companies she invested in.
So we had a Story for everybody. Robert was a runner, so I knew, I hoped that he was hip to the barefoot running idea. Damon, you know, Damon. And he's hip to footwear and apparel. Cuban was interesting because he had been representing a shoe made by another company that was a barefoot shoe. So we knew he was kind of hip to the idea. And the only person who we thought knew nothing about it was Kevin. And then Kevin, you know, did this Hail Mary offer to us where we were offering 8% for 500 grand for 400 grand. And he said, I'll give you the 400 grand for 50%. And it was such a non starter, we forgot he even made the offer until Robert reminded us. And we're like, oh, yeah. The prep for the show is what really convinced us to go all in because we were. I mean, we already knew we were getting this feedback and we knew that if we were on the show, it would get us a bunch of attention. And frankly, we were on the entrepreneurial retirement plan. So if this didn't work, you know, I was going to maybe have to get. What's the word? Job.
I don't know, whatever the hell those people do from nine to five where they have to have a resume and get interviewed and crap. I don't know. I don't know how that works.
So that got us really committed. And when the show aired, the feedback that we got from people like, oh my God, I can't believe you're doing this. This is awesome. And then changed my life. That just really nailed it. I mean, that's when we realized that this was going to be our life. But frankly, we didn't think it would be 16 years of our life. We thought once we got to about, I don't know, a couple million, somebody would offer us two or three times that and tell us to go enjoy our vacation. But that ain't the way it plays out. Wow.
[00:33:01] Speaker B: So what's the next three to five years look like for you guys in your company? Where do you want to take it? What's the vision?
[00:33:06] Speaker A: Well, I can hyperbolically say we're just trying to change the world. And when I say that, it's not really hyperbolic because again, the metrics that we have, I mean, the percentage of our orders that are coming from existing customers is higher than almost any other than any other footwear brand I've ever heard of. The applications for what we're doing are getting broader and broader. I mean, we make shoes for almost everything you do. We're in the NBA and WNBA now. We made basketball shoes that are being worn on the court by professional players.
[00:33:34] Speaker B: That's amazing.
[00:33:35] Speaker A: For other sports.
There was no research early on about the health benefits that people were claiming they got from wearing our products. Now that research is starting to come out. So we're really a health and wellness company disguised as a performance and lifestyle footwear brand. And what that means is it gives us legs, pun intended, the likes of which is kind of unprecedented in the footwear world. So the biggest thing we're trying to do is position the company to take advantage of all that opportunity. And that's a very tricky thing, especially if we're trying to maintain a certain amount of the personality of the company that we started that we're part of. Because, you know, when you get to a certain size, you need people with a bunch of talent, and most of the times they come from a different corporate mindset than ours. And finding a way to integrate all of that is challenging. And fundamentally, when people say, who's your market? I go, people with feet. Preferably to, but not required. There's just so much opportunity.
This is not, you know, where we're making it up. This is because we're literally hearing it every day. I got a call, literally this morning from a woman who found my phone number. And I pick up the phone. I go, hi, this is Stephen. She goes, oh, my God. And she just spent an hour telling me how much we changed her life. And that's, you know, that's a powerful thing, and I feel quite responsible for maximizing the opportunity for people to have that experience.
[00:34:55] Speaker B: For you, as a leader and a business owner, what have been, you know, some of the challenges that you've personally faced is that the company is scaled like those areas where the company grew faster than your skills.
[00:35:06] Speaker A: It never did that. What it grew faster than is our ability to raise enough capital to bring in enough people to maximize what we already knew how to do. So what people have said to me recently, you know, we were growing like, 30, 40 year over year, and people kept saying, well, you can't keep doing that. You know, once you get to the size we're at, I mean, like, I can say this number publicly. We did an equity crowdfunding raise in 2017, so I can only say things that are publicly available. In 2023, we did about $65 million in sales. And people can say, well, once you're at that size, you can't keep growing at that rate. And I would say, I know it should be much faster. And they think, I'm kidding. But we never had enough people to implement all the things that we knew we could do.
So that's been my biggest personal thing, is that, you know, we just never.
We haven't maximized the opportunities that are right in front of our face. And for me personally, not being able to take advantage of an opportunity is extremely painful. So the gap between where we are and where I know we could be, if I pay attention to that gap, which is what I do most days, that's not fun. And not having the resources to do things that we know we could do is not fun. Beyond that, as the company has grown, just more people and bigger things unpleasant that we just don't have the same kind of tactile relationship with every part of it now. That said, my favorite thing is when good people can take things over and I don't need to think about it at all. I can just go, you can work two thumbs up. Let's have some fun. And we have a lot of people doing that.
It's.
There's a shift that happens for both Lena and I about what our roles are. And frankly, we're still negotiating that right now.
[00:36:39] Speaker B: Wow. Well, this has been amazing conversation.
Final couple, I guess questions is, what is a business owner who's been in the process of scaling. Somebody comes to you, maybe they're around the seven figure mark and, you know, they're in that awesome phase where they don't have enough help and they're overwhelmed and they're working a lot. What advice do you give people at that point?
[00:36:59] Speaker A: I can't think of any other way of saying this other than good fucking luck, because there. There is no answer. If there was an answer, everybody would do it. And it's just, you know, and every situation is different. If I had to start over again today, it wouldn't look like this. There's no way it could. The number of lucky, unexpected things that allowed us to get here is almost infinite. You know, like I like to say, when I was in film school, one of our. One of my teachers was the director, the late director Milos Forman. And someone asked him one day at a public event, you know, how do you make a good movie? And Milo says 90% of making movies is casting. And the other 10%, it's.
He's also casting. And it's kind of true. And when you see the people he cast in his movies, like, oh, my God, that is that person. But what I say is business is very much like that. It's 90% luck. And the other 10% is also luck. But then there's another 100%, this 90% working your ass off, and 10%, hopefully being smart enough to know how to put out the fire that started overnight or find someone who does, even though nothing changed since yesterday, so there shouldn't be a fire. So really, you know, you just got to find a way to hold on because there's no blueprint for it. The only thing I can suggest, actually, is that since marketing is going to be the number one thing that's going to drive most of what most of us do is I'll give you the thing that I say to people multiple times a day when they're pitching me on something that they think is going to make me a bunch of money. I go, cool. How quickly and cheaply can I find out if either one of us have our heads up our butts? Because the only thing I can mitigate is risk. The upside unknowable. And even then, you need to know what the upside needs to be for you to stay alive. Because you can grow really quickly but not end up with enough cash to sustain yourself by the end of the year. So when people say, oh, I spent a dollar on this ad and I made a dollar back. Cool. You just lost about $3, probably. Yeah.
[00:38:44] Speaker B: I'm working with a woman right now. She's writing a book, and it's like, how to scale your way out of business.
[00:38:48] Speaker A: Yeah, look, people. People have always, you know, said that they were really impressed by what we've done. And I go, no, no. Growing this fast is fraught with peril, and we have been both lucky and unlucky. I mean, we've had some things happen within the company that we never imagined would happen. People making some very bad decisions that, you know, could have put us under and happily didn't because we have enough momentum that it's kind of hard to stop the train. But rapid growth is very tricky. I'll say this in a weird way. I get approached by marketing agencies all the time, and I go, yeah, we're not going to do that. They go, what? I go, well, first of all, for any of the nine things that you're doing, there's only five people in the world who are experts at those. Those things, and none of those people work for you. Secondly, you know, they go, well, we're the fastest growing agency. Ooh, ooh, stop right there. Definitely not going to work with you. You. Because again, there's only so much talent. And if you as an agency are growing that quickly, you don't have the right people in the right places for me to work with, guaranteed.
And so that paying attention to what's it going to cost if you're wrong and can you sustain that is. It's what I live by. I don't care when people promise me that I can. You know, people send me a spreadsheet, look how much money you'll make if you do this. I went, cool. I don't care about your spreadsheet. I don't care when people say, let me send you a case study. I go, don't bother. What? Well, that company is nothing like ours. And even if they are, they're not us. And that was in the past. I don't care if you've been batting a thousand. We could be your first strikeout. All I care about is what's it going to cost me to find out if one of us is full of it, and if one of us is and it's you, then what do you do to make up for it? Because I don't want you saying, sorry it didn't work out. Thanks for putting my kids through college. If people don't have an answer for both those questions, I don't work with them.
So I guess my answer to the. That question that you asked that I said, I don't know is you got to know your numbers inside out and backwards. You got to know how much money you need to make with everything you do. And you got to optimize for that. And you've got to pay attention to the risk, pay attention to your competitors, pay attention to shit that could go wrong. I don't know if anybody heard about what was formerly 145% tariff from China or that we have to pay that's now only. Only 30%. If it started at only 30%, we would have still exploded like everyone's head would have popped. You've got to. And you've got to sit down and think of everything that could go wrong and see if you're prepared to handle that, both as a business and as a human being. As. Look, failing is not really a personal problem. Happens to a lot of people, the problems that we've had. Sometimes my salvation has been when I talk to a handful of other entrepreneurs, they go, yeah, tell me something I haven't lived through. You know, we all go through it. I guess the bottom line is this. Looking at people who've gotten to wherever we are or beyond at an extra zero or two and trying to come up with some story about how you can Replicate that. This is the natural human process. We imagine what we think it's going to take for us to be happy and we think there's a path to get there and we can reverse engineer it. If anyone's really honest about where they are from, where we are beyond, they'll tell you how much. It's a function of luck. And then. And people go, oh, you make your own luck. You take advantage. Yeah, true. But the luck part is what started that. We met our product developer who really helped us really build the business because his dog knew another dog that was owned by a friend of ours and they started chatting and it just so happened that he was the head of global product design at Crocs and we were retiring. It was the dogs. Sure. When I. Eventually he had already bought one of our kits and it changed his life. It was the dogs.
[00:42:12] Speaker B: That's funny.
[00:42:13] Speaker A: So that is. That's my rant. You could see that gets me.
[00:42:16] Speaker B: Yeah. You're be again, you said at the beginning, right. We're telling. Being honest, like was it. There's the book by Darren Hardy and it was called the Entrepreneurial Roller Coaster. Yeah. You're getting like, you're free falling. You're like, oh my God, this is amazing. You know, we're growing, we're growing, we're growing. And they hit the top and you're like, oh my God, we're going. And he's like. And it is you.
[00:42:33] Speaker A: You know the other, you know, the other myth, other than, you know, slow and steady growth without craziness is work life balance. Yeah, no such thing. Yeah, there was a guy in the 90s, wrote a couple of books about work life balance and they sold millions of copies. In the early 2000s he wrote a book. I don't remember what it's called, but it may have. Well as be. May as well. Well have been called. I was full of. And that book sold nothing. Because people love this story that, you know, you can just make it happen. There's a process for doing it. It's all going to work and then you're going to be happy. Just not one part of that sentence is true.
[00:43:00] Speaker B: When I was in Hollywood, I was working for a huge producer name this guy that used to manage Travolta. And one of my friends was at the time, she was an A list actress. She's getting, you know, a lot of money and she'd known me before I got into the producing side of things. And I swear that I met her one day and. And she was like, how's the producing going? And I just sat there for a second. I said, you know, it's like I'm a gladiator. And I get up in the morning and I put my breastplate on and I got the shield and the helmet and my sword. And I go into this arena having no idea what's going to be thrown at me. And then I spend the entire day getting the crack kicked out of me. And I go home and I pound out the dents and I fix my bent sword and I sharp it back up and I get ready to do it all the other day. And she goes, I. It's the exact same thing for me. And my brain exploded because I'm like, oh, my God, it never ends. Making $10 million a movie, and that's what her existence was. I was like. And that's when I was like, you never actually arrive.
[00:43:58] Speaker A: 1. One day I'm in LA and one of my. One of the comics from my era was having a birthday party. This is, you know, maybe. Oh, gosh, maybe 92. Yeah, like, let's call it 1990. I don't know, somewhere around there, here. And having a big birthday party. Basically, everyone was still the same kind of person. They were just making 10 times more money than we were making before. They had shows, they were writers, they were producers, they were stars. And at one point, a guy jumps into the swimming pool fully clothed, and he gets out and someone hands him a 20 bill. And everyone went, dude, why did you do that? He goes, well, my show just got canceled and I don't know if I'm ever going to work again. I mean, you know what? I. What I. What? And I just. Oh, I just remember this. And at some point, everyone at that party walked up to me and said, so you're like, out of the business now. You're got this software company. I went, yeah. And they all said, my God, we are so proud of you. You escaped, you escaped. And, you know, and then I realized nothing had changed except some people were making more money. But it was the same, you know, look, the business of writing for television, which I got a number of offers to do, it was every 13 weeks. Someone who can't do what you do is telling you whether you can keep doing it or not. Holy crap. Who wants to live like that if you don't have to, you know?
[00:45:00] Speaker B: Yep. All right, so someone's listening to this interview and. And they're like, my feet are killing me and I need help.
How do they get involved in zero shoes and the and the things you.
[00:45:10] Speaker A: Have going going on could not be simpler. Go to zeroshoes.com xeroshoes.com unless you're in the EU, then it's xeroshoes EU or the UK, then it's zeroshoes.co.uk and we've got sites all over and, you know, find something that makes you go ooh and ah. And you can also follow us on social. We're at Zero Shoes or slash. Zero Shoes. Wherever you at. Or slash.
[00:45:29] Speaker B: So what's your number one bestselling shoe?
[00:45:32] Speaker A: Ooh, it's a kind of a toss up right now. I'll give you two.
One is the Prio P R I O. It's the first kind of go everywhere, do everything shoe that we made. Works in the gym, works for everything else. And there's one that's kind of similar, that's a little more of a upscale style called the Nexus N E X U S. That is. We have people who wear it in the gym, people who wear it just casually. There's a bunch of others, but those two are the winners right now.
[00:45:55] Speaker B: So what's the shoe you wear when you're sprinting?
[00:45:57] Speaker A: The Speed Force.
[00:45:58] Speaker B: All right.
[00:45:59] Speaker A: The shoe I helped develop and it's what I train and race in.
[00:46:02] Speaker B: Love it. Stephen, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for taking time out of your day. I've really enjoyed our conversation.
[00:46:07] Speaker A: My pleasure. If it was useful, that's great. If anyone got anything good out of it, they clearly misunderstood me.
