Latest / eCommerce Podcast / From $13K Crowdfunding to an 8-Figure eCom Business | Adam Callinan

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From $13K Crowdfunding to an 8-Figure eCom Business | Adam Callinan · eCommerce Podcast

• 0:04
  Matt Edmundson: So welcome.
• 0:05
  My name is Matt Edmundson and you are listening to
• 0:08
  the eCommerce Podcast.
• 0:10
  Now I've been, uh, an e-commerce, uh, it's my
• 0:13
  phrase For those of us who are in eCommerce, I've been
• 0:15
  an e-commerce since 2002, and these days I partner with
• 0:19
  e-commerce brands to help them grow, scale and exit.
• 0:22
  And if you'd like to know more about how that works,
• 0:23
  simply head over to the website ecommerce-podcast.net.
• 0:29
  Now today.
• 0:30
  I am joined from, well, fellow eCommerce-er from
• 0:33
  the other side of the pond.
• 0:35
  Adam, how are we doing?
• 0:36
  So you're doing well.
• 0:37
  I'm doing
• 0:37
  Adam Callinan: great, and I deeply appreciate you converting
• 0:40
  eCommerce into a verb.
• 0:42
  That's fantastic.
• 0:44
  We, we may borrow that on the other side of the pond.
• 0:46
  That's great.
• 0:46
  Matt Edmundson: I totally feel the freedom to steal it.
• 0:48
  Uh, okay.
• 0:48
  It's um, when I wrote the word down EI thought eCommerce.
• 0:53
  So this is a great, I'm an eCommerce.
• 0:55
  Yes.
• 0:55
  I'm just gonna use this phrase.
• 0:57
  When I wrote it down, it looked great on paper.
• 0:59
  In fact, it's the name of our newsletter.
• 1:00
  Um.
• 1:02
  But to say it's not actually that straightforward, it
• 1:06
  just feels slightly awkward.
• 1:07
  So that's my, it's,
• 1:08
  Adam Callinan: it's like a sorcerer or e-commerce.
• 1:10
  It's great.
• 1:11
  Matt Edmundson: Makes perfect sense.
• 1:12
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:13
  That's exactly what it is.
• 1:14
  Exactly what it is Now, uh, Adam, before we get, uh,
• 1:18
  get into the show, just tell folks a little bit about
• 1:20
  who you are and, uh, and why we're chatting Steve.
• 1:24
  Adam Callinan: I mean, first and foremost, I'm
• 1:25
  a dad and a husband and all that really important
• 1:27
  family stuff that is, yeah.
• 1:28
  Yeah.
• 1:28
  You, you may see in my story and the way that I look at things,
• 1:33
  priorities are important.
• 1:34
  Um, professionally speaking, I'm an entrepreneur.
• 1:36
  I've built and sold a couple of things.
• 1:38
  My, although I am the, the founder of a, a software,
• 1:42
  SaaS platform right now that we'll certainly talk
• 1:44
  to, that comes from my last experience in eCommerce, right?
• 1:47
  As a, as a fellow eCommerce, or that company was called
• 1:49
  Bottle Keeper, and there's.
• 1:52
  I'm sure a handful of highlights that we'll get into things
• 1:55
  that we did really, really well in a boat, lot of times
• 1:57
  that we tried to burn it to the ground and, uh, all the
• 1:59
  fun hard stuff that, that come with operating businesses.
• 2:02
  But we, uh, yeah we did, we did some really fun things there.
• 2:05
  We were super lean.
• 2:06
  We got to 8 million in sales with no employees
• 2:08
  or investors, then into.
• 2:10
  Tens of millions with, I mean, we got acquired
• 2:12
  by private equity.
• 2:13
  Uh, we only had four team members, so we were really
• 2:15
  lean, we were profitable.
• 2:16
  We had no investors or anything, so it was really, really
• 2:19
  fun and really, really hard.
• 2:22
  It's
• 2:22
  Matt Edmundson: amazing how those two things
• 2:23
  come together, isn't
• 2:24
  Adam Callinan: it?
• 2:24
  They do.
• 2:25
  You have to have them.
• 2:25
  You have to have them both in order for it to really work.
• 2:28
  Matt Edmundson: You do, uh, hard work without
• 2:30
  fun is just a nightmare.
• 2:31
  But fun without hard work is just frivolity, uh, I
• 2:33
  suppose in so many ways.
• 2:35
  Yeah.
• 2:35
  Um, but I, it's, I'm fascinated actually by the, the story,
• 2:40
  um, of bottle Keeper.
• 2:41
  We have similar stories in the sense we built up big brands.
• 2:44
  I had way more than four staff.
• 2:46
  Those companies got acquired and sold and we,
• 2:48
  you know, we've both done this a few times now, so.
• 2:51
  I am curious with bottle Keeper, 'cause you, you had this, this
• 2:55
  product, uh, which as best as I can tell Adam, and forgive
• 2:58
  me if I'm butchering, uh, what you did actually create,
• 3:02
  um, you created the ability to keep a, a bottle of beer,
• 3:05
  ice cold, uh, for a long, a sustained period of time.
• 3:09
  Um, have, have I understood that correctly?
• 3:11
  Adam Callinan: Yes.
• 3:13
  So we literally took a stainless steel water bottle.
• 3:15
  Hacks, saw it in half.
• 3:16
  Stucked it with neoprene, like wet jacuzzi material, so you
• 3:19
  could put your beer bottle inside of it and it would keep
• 3:21
  it cold for way longer than is necessary and protected where
• 3:24
  glass doesn't make sense and
• 3:25
  Matt Edmundson: yeah.
• 3:26
  Yeah, yeah.
• 3:26
  No, fair play.
• 3:27
  Fair play, and, and you, you got this business up.
• 3:30
  Well, let me ask you a question first and foremost.
• 3:32
  What.
• 3:34
  Was this a particular problem you were having?
• 3:36
  Did you just thought, my beer's not staying cold enough, long
• 3:38
  enough, therefore I'm gonna hack this, this Yeti over
• 3:41
  here and see what happens?
• 3:43
  Adam Callinan: No, it was not my problem.
• 3:45
  My cousin, who was my co-founder in that business,
• 3:47
  it was his problem.
• 3:49
  He, uh, whom I love deeply and I'm very close with, and
• 3:53
  was the best man at my wedding far before bottle keeper.
• 3:56
  He is a lunatic and he will only, I like him already
• 4:00
  in the best possible way.
• 4:02
  Yeah,
• 4:02
  Matt Edmundson: yeah.
• 4:02
  Adam Callinan: He will only drink a.
• 4:05
  Or has a significant pre preference, let's say,
• 4:07
  to drink a beer out of a corona, out of a bottle
• 4:12
  at a specific temperature.
• 4:13
  Yeah.
• 4:13
  So the day he found himself on the beach in southern
• 4:16
  California trying to drink a beer out of a red party cup,
• 4:20
  you know, at 85 degrees, uh, he, he had to have a better,
• 4:24
  a better way of doing that.
• 4:25
  So he quite literally took a stainless still
• 4:28
  water bottle hacks on it and half stuffed it with.
• 4:31
  Insulation, like CZI material.
• 4:32
  Mm-hmm.
• 4:32
  And if it is corona and solved this problem, so I was
• 4:35
  actually not in the country.
• 4:36
  I was across the pond in your neck of the woods
• 4:38
  when this all happened.
• 4:39
  Um, I thought it was interesting, but I I, I'm
• 4:42
  the first to say I was not sold that that was gonna
• 4:44
  be an actual company.
• 4:46
  Matt Edmundson: So what, what was the journey
• 4:48
  then, because you, you.
• 4:50
  You go from this sort of, I need my beer cold, and I, I'm, I I'm
• 4:54
  more in the camp of your cousin.
• 4:56
  To be fair, I think beer has to be cold to drink it,
• 4:58
  which sounds odd coming from a Brit because for the, yeah.
• 5:00
  Longest time we never did that.
• 5:01
  But, um,
• 5:05
  so go.
• 5:06
  Going from that, this is not an idea that I think is viable.
• 5:08
  You obviously had some Damascus road experience
• 5:12
  to go, let's start an e-commerce business here.
• 5:14
  What was that?
• 5:15
  Adam Callinan: We did, uh, and it was very, it
• 5:17
  was a very defined road.
• 5:19
  We went, so this would've been in the fall of 2012
• 5:23
  is when Matt, uh, my cousin's name is Matt.
• 5:26
  He did this, I sold out of a medical company in May of 2013.
• 5:33
  So the timing was right.
• 5:34
  Matt is, yeah.
• 5:35
  Is the.
• 5:39
  I hesitate to use the word wacky 'cause it makes him sound wacky.
• 5:41
  And he is not a wacky guy, but he's like the inventor
• 5:43
  that he, he generally comes up with something that's really
• 5:46
  cool and really interesting.
• 5:48
  Yeah.
• 5:48
  And he prototypes it and he patents it.
• 5:50
  And, um, you know, this, that's what he did with bottle Keeper.
• 5:55
  And he went down that path and, and my time had opened up.
• 5:59
  I went down and.
• 6:00
  The road of trying to start a venture capital fund, which is
• 6:02
  awful and terrible and I was bad at it 'cause I don't like
• 6:04
  raising money, which doesn't go very well with venture capital.
• 6:08
  Mm-hmm.
• 6:08
  Fundraising.
• 6:09
  Yep.
• 6:09
  Matt Edmundson: Yep.
• 6:10
  Adam Callinan: And we, uh, you know, I sort of over
• 6:13
  some time agreed that I would go and test this with Matt.
• 6:16
  And again, we were really close.
• 6:17
  So what I didn't want to do, so we're both
• 6:21
  scientifically minded.
• 6:22
  We both have science degrees, uh, specifically in molecular
• 6:25
  and cellular biology, which has a lot of math and physics and
• 6:28
  chemistry and, and all of those.
• 6:29
  Mm-hmm.
• 6:30
  Studies are revolve around the scientific method and
• 6:34
  where you, you sort of have to start at a, and you know
• 6:36
  that you need to get to Z and it's your job to figure
• 6:38
  the things out in between.
• 6:39
  Matt Edmundson: Yeah, yeah.
• 6:40
  Yeah.
• 6:40
  Adam Callinan: And so I wanted to approach it, and this
• 6:42
  is also to be fair, about the time of Eric Reese, the
• 6:44
  Lean Startup, you know, Tim Ferriss's for our work week.
• 6:47
  Like all these sort of iconic books that put people, you
• 6:50
  know, down really lean, much smarter business paths.
• 6:53
  Matt Edmundson: Yeah.
• 6:54
  Adam Callinan: I wanted to prove that we could get, that people
• 6:56
  were interested in this product.
• 6:57
  'cause I honestly did not think they would be
• 7:00
  at a real price point.
• 7:01
  Mm-hmm.
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  So we, I put up a website, I shot a video.
• 7:05
  I literally duct taped a GoPro to the outside of our like,
• 7:08
  prototype bottle keeper, which is actually sitting over my
• 7:10
  shoulder if you're watching video here on the shelf.
• 7:12
  Okay.
• 7:12
  Um, and shot a video on the beach, uh, near our house in
• 7:16
  Manhattan Beach, California.
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  And put it online and spent $500 on Google AdWords,
• 7:21
  sending people to the site to collect emails, and
• 7:22
  enough people submitted their email that was like, okay,
• 7:24
  maybe this is a thing, but they're not giving us money.
• 7:26
  So it's helpful, but not, yeah.
• 7:28
  Super relevant.
• 7:29
  Matt Edmundson: Yeah.
• 7:30
  Adam Callinan: From there we, the only way that I could figure
• 7:33
  out at the time, and I still think this is quite relevant,
• 7:36
  maybe there's a lot more noise in the system now, so it's
• 7:39
  more challenging, but the only way I could figure out how
• 7:42
  to get and test to see if we could get strangers to input.
• 7:46
  Payment, like to actually give us money for it
• 7:48
  was with crowdfunding.
• 7:48
  Matt Edmundson: Mm-hmm.
• 7:49
  Adam Callinan: So we launched a crowdfunding campaign,
• 7:51
  um, that we all did our, you know, we did internally.
• 7:53
  We didn't go and spend a bunch of money and get
• 7:55
  fancy and hire video teams and do all that nonsense.
• 7:58
  We, you know, I shot a video in my kitchen with a cheap camera
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  and that was the extent, I mean, you could still find it now.
• 8:04
  It was on fundable fundable do com.
• 8:06
  Right.
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  So the, we did that to prove that we could get people that
• 8:10
  weren't our moms and dads and aunts and uncles to actually
• 8:12
  put payment information at a real price point.
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  And it worked.
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  I was like, huh, okay.
• 8:19
  That became a thing.
• 8:20
  So we, we, I mean we sold about 300% of what our goal was,
• 8:23
  which was not a lofty goal.
• 8:24
  It was mm-hmm.
• 8:24
  We figured if we could sell $5,000 at $17 a piece or
• 8:28
  whatever our price was, um, if we could sell $5,000 of
• 8:31
  that, that would be enough to prove that people were
• 8:34
  interested in the product at a real price point.
• 8:35
  Matt Edmundson: Yeah.
• 8:36
  Yeah.
• 8:37
  And that worked.
• 8:37
  So at that point, you've got your proof
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  of concept, haven't you?
• 8:39
  Adam Callinan: Exactly.
• 8:40
  So we went, the important part there is we went and did all of
• 8:43
  that before we spent any money.
• 8:45
  Matt Edmundson: Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it?
• 8:46
  Because I, I, I remember reading, um, the four hour work
• 8:49
  week when it came out, and, um, I remembered this idea and, and
• 8:56
  again, we, we, uh, we took his idea, Tim, the Tim Ferris idea.
• 9:00
  If you've not read the book, I, I do recommend.
• 9:03
  You know, reading it.
• 9:03
  Uh, but we took that idea where Tim basically said, you create
• 9:07
  a landing page, sell in the product, and you in essence
• 9:11
  monitor how many people go to the page, how many people click
• 9:14
  the button, and that's gonna give you some idea of whether
• 9:16
  or not this product's gonna fly.
• 9:18
  Right.
• 9:18
  That was his whole thing.
• 9:20
  And so it is, you didn't even need the product.
• 9:22
  You were just, you were just sending people to the page to
• 9:24
  see if actually anybody would.
• 9:26
  And I remember reading that and thinking that is genius.
• 9:30
  Like, why have I, why have I not thought about this before?
• 9:34
  Um, and, and we ran that for several different
• 9:39
  businesses that never really, we never really took any
• 9:41
  further because of the data we were getting back from.
• 9:44
  Yeah.
• 9:44
  Actually we just didn't think people were gonna hit
• 9:46
  the, hit the Bible and, um.
• 9:48
  So it's interesting that I'm listening to you tell that
• 9:50
  same story, that actually that's what you did, and
• 9:52
  that's, that was the start.
• 9:53
  The start of in effect of, of bottle keeper.
• 9:57
  Adam Callinan: It was a great way to start the company and
• 9:59
  again, prove it out as the skeptic in the Crowd going.
• 10:03
  Honestly, didn't believe, I thought it was a cool product,
• 10:05
  but I thought it was a $7 at Spencer's gift product,
• 10:08
  which is not a company.
• 10:10
  That's a nice, maybe hobby, but that's not a business.
• 10:12
  Matt Edmundson: Yeah, yeah.
• 10:13
  So it
• 10:13
  Adam Callinan: was a really good way to prove to, to use
• 10:15
  data to prove myself wrong.
• 10:17
  Or let the data prove myself wrong.
• 10:20
  Matt Edmundson: It's an interesting, do you see
• 10:20
  people doing that these days?
• 10:22
  I mean, back then it was kind of like, you know, after, after
• 10:25
  the, the four hour work week came out, I, I, you talked
• 10:28
  to a lot of people and they were doing similar things.
• 10:30
  I don't know if I've spoken to many people doing it recently.
• 10:33
  I know I've spoken to a chap called Tanner Holt.
• 10:36
  He's been on the show.
• 10:37
  He has a similar methodology using Facebook ads to, uh, to
• 10:41
  build these funnels, to test concepts, to prove ideas.
• 10:44
  But, um.
• 10:44
  Uh, do you see people doing that now or do you think it's
• 10:48
  a, it's sort of something that we don't do anymore?
• 10:50
  It seems slightly distasteful, maybe.
• 10:53
  Adam Callinan: Well, I mean, the crowdfunding sites are certainly
• 10:56
  still highly functional.
• 10:58
  I mean, you know, that's Kickstarter and Indiegogo
• 11:01
  and surely fundable and, and these things, you don't
• 11:03
  hear about them as much.
• 11:04
  And I think that's probably Aurion Media issue.
• 11:06
  Matt Edmundson: Mm-hmm.
• 11:07
  Adam Callinan: Aurion Media outcome.
• 11:08
  I do know, I mean, I have.
• 11:10
  A, a friend and and company we work with that's called
• 11:13
  Packed Bags, PAKT bags.
• 11:15
  And they launched their brand on crowdfunding, I mean,
• 11:18
  kind of the exact same way.
• 11:19
  Like they hacked together the products and used
• 11:21
  some, some video editing to, to create a thing.
• 11:25
  And I mean, they did $2 million worth of, sold $2 million
• 11:27
  worth of product online.
• 11:28
  And that was.
• 11:29
  Five years ago.
• 11:30
  Matt Edmundson: Wow.
• 11:31
  Adam Callinan: I mean, that wasn't, I mean, we
• 11:31
  did this in 2013, so yeah, that was over a decade ago.
• 11:34
  But that, you know, this is, this was right before Covid.
• 11:37
  Um, so I'm, I'm sure there are more success
• 11:39
  stories of out there of people doing that Again.
• 11:43
  The, with the caveat that it, to me, success is not
• 11:47
  raise a bazillion dollars.
• 11:48
  I mean, Malcolm impact what they did, $2 million is outrageous.
• 11:50
  Like that's an insane amount of money to raise grant funding.
• 11:52
  Yeah.
• 11:53
  Yeah.
• 11:53
  We were, we raised $13,000.
• 11:55
  Like it wasn't a big amount of money.
• 11:57
  We didn't need a lot of money to start the company.
• 11:58
  Matt Edmundson: Mm-hmm.
• 11:59
  I
• 11:59
  Adam Callinan: mean, even in the, the whole course
• 12:00
  of the company, Matt and I each put in $10,000.
• 12:02
  That was the extent of our entire investment
• 12:04
  into the business.
• 12:06
  So that $13,000 it paid for the first manufacturing run, plus a
• 12:10
  little bit of product, you know, maybe double the, the amount
• 12:13
  of product that we needed.
• 12:14
  And then, you know, we marked it at a price point that was
• 12:17
  real and continued to sell it.
• 12:19
  And you know, we had some important inflection points
• 12:21
  and some lucky things that happened over the course of
• 12:23
  the first year that turned it from, you know, a. Funny
• 12:27
  side project to like a holy hell, this is happening.
• 12:29
  Kind of a business.
• 12:30
  Yeah.
• 12:31
  Yeah.
• 12:31
  But it was really, if you, if you boil it down just to
• 12:34
  the simple test of can we get strangers to put in their
• 12:38
  credit card and click buy?
• 12:40
  Mm-hmm.
• 12:40
  Just that.
• 12:41
  Just let that be the test.
• 12:43
  If you need to raise a zillion dollars, like go and do that.
• 12:45
  And then maybe you raise a zillion dollars
• 12:47
  and that's great.
• 12:47
  And maybe you take that data and the, you know, the modicum of
• 12:51
  success that you get from that.
• 12:52
  Mm-hmm.
• 12:53
  And use that to go raise around or raise family and
• 12:55
  friends around or whatever.
• 12:56
  Yeah.
• 12:56
  At least then you have, like you said, you at least have a
• 12:58
  proof of concept at that point.
• 13:00
  Matt Edmundson: You do.
• 13:00
  And that proof of con, and this is really important, I
• 13:02
  think if you're starting out in e-comm, which I know many people
• 13:04
  listening to the show are.
• 13:06
  Someone and I, and I like how you phrased it.
• 13:09
  Um, uh, I, I often say to people, someone other
• 13:12
  than your mum has to buy this product willingly.
• 13:15
  Right?
• 13:15
  Yeah.
• 13:16
  And, and if you can do that, then maybe, maybe
• 13:19
  there's, there's something of interest in there.
• 13:21
  If I fast forward, um, Adam a few years, then your, your
• 13:25
  bottleneck's doing well.
• 13:27
  Um, and you then appear on Shark Tank.
• 13:31
  Right.
• 13:31
  And this, this interests me because we don't have
• 13:34
  Shark Tank in the uk.
• 13:35
  We have something called Dragon's Den, which I
• 13:37
  feel is the same thing.
• 13:39
  Yep.
• 13:39
  Um, and the reason why this interests me is
• 13:43
  coming on the show soon.
• 13:44
  I, I spoke to her earlier this week actually, is a, a beautiful
• 13:48
  young lady called Millie.
• 13:49
  She started a makeup business.
• 13:51
  She's got, um, she has, uh, this chromosome issue
• 13:57
  going on, which, um, so she wanted to do, uh, a makeup
• 14:00
  company for disabled people.
• 14:02
  And her story is just magical and inspiring.
• 14:06
  So make make sure folks she stay connected.
• 14:08
  'cause that's coming up.
• 14:09
  The thing that interests me was this Thursday
• 14:12
  she was on Dragon's Den.
• 14:13
  Right.
• 14:14
  So the equivalent of, of Shark Tank, she took
• 14:16
  her business on that.
• 14:17
  Um, I'm still to catch up with the episode.
• 14:19
  I'm still to find out what actually happened.
• 14:21
  Um, and I, and I'm getting to do the interview with
• 14:24
  her in two weeks time.
• 14:25
  So she's coming back on the show, which will be interesting.
• 14:28
  So this has piqued my interest that in the space of a week
• 14:31
  I've spoken two people, uh, that are going on Dragons down or
• 14:34
  have been on, uh, shark Tank.
• 14:35
  How did you find that whole experience?
• 14:38
  Adam Callinan: They found us in 2015.
• 14:42
  Mm-hmm.
• 14:42
  Because we were, you know, this is like the heyday of paid media
• 14:46
  that, you know, we were spending it as fast as we could spend it
• 14:50
  on Facebook and it was returning 20 x and we literally couldn't
• 14:53
  reinvest it fast enough.
• 14:55
  Matt Edmundson: Yeah.
• 14:56
  Adam Callinan: So we had a miss those
• 14:58
  Matt Edmundson: days.
• 14:58
  Miss those.
• 14:58
  Yeah,
• 14:59
  Adam Callinan: I know the good old days.
• 15:00
  That's, that's quite literally why I won't ever have a
• 15:02
  consumer product brand again.
• 15:04
  I, I can't go back.
• 15:05
  Um, time travel were a thing.
• 15:07
  Matt Edmundson: Yeah.
• 15:09
  Adam Callinan: And so we were, you know, we had one
• 15:10
  video that I shot on the beach in front of my house.
• 15:12
  We're like, hands come in and you see the bottle
• 15:14
  keeper in action and.
• 15:15
  And that video got, I mean, it got a 2 billion views
• 15:18
  or something 'cause we put so much money behind it.
• 15:20
  Mm-hmm.
• 15:21
  Um, and it just returned unbelievably well.
• 15:22
  And so a producer at Shark Tank saw that video and they're,
• 15:26
  I mean, they have a team of people whose jobs it is to go
• 15:28
  out and find interesting things.
• 15:29
  You can also get into the show, you know, by going
• 15:31
  to a casting call or submit
• 15:32
  Matt Edmundson: mm-hmm.
• 15:33
  Adam Callinan: Mm-hmm.
• 15:33
  Stuff.
• 15:34
  So they reached out, we went through the process.
• 15:36
  Um, I was actually in Iceland when they gave
• 15:39
  us our, the film dates.
• 15:41
  And granted in 2015, we were, I. We did about a million
• 15:45
  and a half in revenue, and they found out that
• 15:49
  I was not in the country.
• 15:51
  The whole point of this business, to be clear, was that
• 15:53
  I wanted to build a scalable business that had no employees.
• 15:56
  Yeah.
• 15:56
  That I could operate from anywhere in the
• 15:58
  world with internet.
• 15:59
  Mm-hmm.
• 15:59
  So my wife and I could travel, and we did.
• 16:01
  We spent four to six months of the year outta the
• 16:03
  country, much of the time.
• 16:04
  Again, across the pond, in your neck of the woods,
• 16:05
  and in Asia and Africa, and all these fun places.
• 16:07
  Mm-hmm.
• 16:08
  So they, they ended up not being okay with me not
• 16:10
  being in the country when I had to come back and film.
• 16:13
  So they pushed us, obviously I didn't know that or I
• 16:14
  would've been in the country.
• 16:16
  They pushed us to the next year.
• 16:17
  Then they had too many beer companies on that year, so they
• 16:20
  pushed us to the next year.
• 16:21
  And so, but we didn't film until June of 2018.
• 16:26
  Right.
• 16:26
  And I mean, our trailing 12 months in June of 2018
• 16:29
  was over $10 million.
• 16:30
  So like, we were a dramatically different
• 16:33
  company by the time we filmed.
• 16:35
  Matt Edmundson: Yeah.
• 16:36
  Yeah.
• 16:36
  Sort of eight, seven or eight times the
• 16:38
  size, wasn't it really?
• 16:39
  Adam Callinan: Yeah.
• 16:40
  Yeah.
• 16:40
  So I mean, as expected, you know, the, the episode
• 16:44
  took about 55 minutes to film, and it is pure chaos.
• 16:47
  I mean, there were no breaks, there were no redos,
• 16:49
  and they cut that into seven or eight minutes.
• 16:51
  But of the 55 minutes, I think 52 of them were of them
• 16:54
  just messing with us about not needing to be there.
• 16:56
  I mean, mark Cuban's actual quote was either
• 16:58
  you're the worst business people in the world, or
• 16:59
  you don't need to be here.
• 17:02
  Which is, yeah, we knew that was gonna happen.
• 17:04
  Made for a gray headline.
• 17:06
  Matt Edmundson: Yeah.
• 17:06
  Yeah, that definitely, you put that on a poster
• 17:08
  on your office, right?
• 17:08
  Yeah.
• 17:08
  It's, uh, there's, there's the motivation.
• 17:11
  Now, you didn't get the Shark Tank, well, you got the
• 17:14
  Shark Tank deal on the tv.
• 17:16
  They got, you got the agreement, but for whatever reason,
• 17:18
  it, it didn't come to pass, um, post recording, but.
• 17:23
  I'm assuming, well, I don't know the answer 'cause I've
• 17:26
  read the data, but it, it sort of gives you a tremendous
• 17:29
  amount of exposure, doesn't it?
• 17:30
  The, it does the whole Shark Tank thing and so the business
• 17:33
  then goes to another level.
• 17:34
  Again,
• 17:35
  Adam Callinan: it's, you know, and yes, short answer, when you
• 17:39
  have the opportunity to get in front of millions of eyeballs
• 17:43
  for free, like it doesn't cost you anything to do it.
• 17:46
  Yeah.
• 17:46
  You're not giving up, you know, take that in the us.
• 17:49
  There's this never ending rumor that if you go on
• 17:51
  the show, you have to give them 5% of your company,
• 17:53
  which is completely false.
• 17:55
  Mm-hmm.
• 17:55
  They did that the first year and Mark Cuban said, if you
• 17:57
  keep doing it and you don't give it back, I'm gone.
• 17:59
  So they changed it and they never did that again.
• 18:01
  Right.
• 18:01
  So it doesn't cost you anything from a customer
• 18:03
  acquisition standpoint.
• 18:05
  It is exceptional.
• 18:07
  Matt Edmundson: Yeah,
• 18:07
  Adam Callinan: I mean we aired, we were lucky that
• 18:10
  we aired, you know, the December 3rd or something
• 18:13
  right before Christmas.
• 18:14
  And we were, we would do half our revenue in the month of
• 18:16
  December for the entire year.
• 18:18
  Mm-hmm.
• 18:18
  So we were a very much a gift product company.
• 18:21
  Right.
• 18:22
  So we got really lucky with that.
• 18:23
  We had over a million dollars of revenue in the first week that
• 18:26
  we could directly attribute to Shark Tank, and surely we had
• 18:29
  more that we could not directly attribute to Shark Tank.
• 18:31
  Matt Edmundson: Yeah.
• 18:31
  Adam Callinan: But that episode re airs today.
• 18:34
  I mean, that was.
• 18:35
  Seriously, I would.
• 18:36
  Oh yeah, absolutely.
• 18:37
  Okay.
• 18:37
  It's on A, B, C for it.
• 18:39
  It reared in the January after, and then they move it
• 18:40
  to CNBC and it rears probably every other month still.
• 18:44
  I mean, it is, it is like the gift that keeps on giving,
• 18:47
  Matt Edmundson: that's the most extraordinary thing, isn't it?
• 18:49
  Yeah.
• 18:49
  And so,
• 18:50
  Adam Callinan: uh, no
• 18:50
  Matt Edmundson: regrets then doing that.
• 18:51
  Adam Callinan: Oh, goodness.
• 18:52
  No.
• 18:52
  It was an exceptional experience.
• 18:55
  Yeah.
• 18:55
  I mean, in the, you know, from an investment standpoint,
• 18:57
  we were open to taking it.
• 18:58
  We didn't really want it, but we were absolutely
• 19:00
  open to taking it.
• 19:01
  The deal that we did on tv, we were.
• 19:03
  Open to do.
• 19:04
  I mean, we got what we asked for.
• 19:05
  We asked for a million dollars for 5%, and
• 19:07
  we got Mark and Lori.
• 19:08
  Despite, despite Mark's, you're either the worst business
• 19:11
  people in the world or you don't need to be here commentary.
• 19:14
  Um, and then the reason there's a, you know, if you've ever.
• 19:17
  Ben around any investment ever, whether someone
• 19:20
  investing in your company or you investing in another.
• 19:22
  We literally read an an investing article ever.
• 19:25
  Due diligence is a real thing and it takes a really long
• 19:27
  time, and that goes both ways.
• 19:28
  Mm-hmm.
• 19:29
  Lori wanted to put us on QVC, which wasn't part of our brand.
• 19:32
  We were more luxury high-end brand, so
• 19:33
  that didn't make sense.
• 19:34
  Yeah.
• 19:34
  So she, we, and she was awesome to work with.
• 19:37
  She just called me directly and we talked and that was great.
• 19:39
  Mm-hmm.
• 19:39
  But it didn't make sense.
• 19:40
  And Mark.
• 19:41
  We did try to do a different deal with where we were
• 19:44
  gonna, he was gonna move more into a consultant.
• 19:46
  We really didn't wanna take money from him.
• 19:47
  Mm-hmm.
• 19:48
  You take money from people, you have this, you know, fiduciary.
• 19:51
  At least again, in the US you have this big
• 19:53
  fiduciary responsibility.
• 19:54
  Yeah.
• 19:54
  I didn't really want to have that to Mark Cuban
• 19:56
  unless we really needed to have it and we didn't.
• 19:58
  We were fortunate at the time to not so.
• 20:00
  We tried to do a consulting deal.
• 20:01
  It didn't work out for legal reasons.
• 20:03
  We had to, we were gonna have to change our accounting structure
• 20:05
  and it was gonna cost like a half a million dollars in taxes.
• 20:07
  Oh, wow.
• 20:08
  So it wasn't because, you know, there wasn't any
• 20:11
  like malicious intent or, uh, or, uh, disagreements.
• 20:15
  It just, mm-hmm.
• 20:16
  Things happen.
• 20:17
  Most of the deals you see on TV don't actually get done.
• 20:20
  Yeah, yeah.
• 20:21
  Yeah.
• 20:21
  That's just the reality.
• 20:22
  It's good television.
• 20:23
  It's a TV show.
• 20:23
  Let's see.
• 20:24
  Yeah, yeah.
• 20:24
  Let's be really clear.
• 20:25
  It's first a TV show and then, uh, and you know, some of 'em do
• 20:27
  Matt Edmundson: obviously.
• 20:28
  Yeah, yeah.
• 20:28
  No, absolutely.
• 20:29
  There's a couple of things, Adam, that you've
• 20:31
  said along the way 'cause I'm, I'm really intrigued
• 20:34
  to, into this if I can.
• 20:35
  So a lot of people like say start in e-com businesses
• 20:37
  or they're small e-com businesses and you, and
• 20:39
  you have sort of achieved.
• 20:41
  Um, what we, bris would like to call the American
• 20:43
  Dream in many ways.
• 20:44
  It's kind of like you've set up a business, it's
• 20:46
  scaled, you are on tv.
• 20:48
  Uh, it scaled even more.
• 20:50
  You exit the business.
• 20:51
  You made a few quid and everyone's happy, right?
• 20:53
  And you've, and you've sort of gone from beginning to end
• 20:56
  and now you're, you're running your, your SaaS service.
• 20:59
  I'm intrigued by this notion going back to
• 21:03
  the four hour work week.
• 21:04
  Um.
• 21:06
  Which was very much part of Tim Ferriss's thinking,
• 21:09
  which seems to have been, uh, part of your thinking.
• 21:12
  I wanted to build a business that I could run from anywhere
• 21:15
  in the world, and I didn't want really to have staff.
• 21:18
  And yet you are turning over 10, $15 million a year
• 21:22
  with very little staff.
• 21:24
  There's a lot of, I can hear them now screaming.
• 21:27
  They're all shouting at their car, radios or wherever they're
• 21:29
  listening to us going, how in the world did you do that?
• 21:34
  Adam Callinan: It's much easier to do when you build
• 21:38
  from the very beginning, the guardrail, that you'll never
• 21:41
  have a team member, right?
• 21:43
  You have to solve problem if you're gonna make that decision.
• 21:46
  Mm-hmm.
• 21:46
  You have to solve problems in a way that doesn't require
• 21:50
  human bodies to solve them.
• 21:53
  So on the one hand, I had to learn how to play and run every
• 21:59
  single position in the business.
• 22:01
  Because I had to do every single position in the business.
• 22:04
  Like Matt's responsibility was our manufacturing and
• 22:06
  our inventory and, uh, some of our financial stuff,
• 22:10
  shipping and fulfillment.
• 22:11
  The things that would happen that a customer
• 22:12
  didn't see my responsibility was everything else.
• 22:15
  The website, the images, the videos, the brand, the voice,
• 22:19
  the email, all of the content and copy all of the paid social
• 22:22
  media, all of the organic social media, like I literally.
• 22:26
  Every single thing that a customer would touch, I,
• 22:28
  I had to physically do.
• 22:30
  Matt Edmundson: Yeah.
• 22:31
  Adam Callinan: So when you learn how to do those things, when
• 22:33
  you have to learn how to do those things, you know how to
• 22:35
  fix them when they're broken.
• 22:35
  And you also get to see.
• 22:39
  I got to see and find interesting ways to
• 22:42
  automate a lot of that.
• 22:44
  And you know, and that would've been really difficult
• 22:46
  in 2005, but in 2015, you know, we're not at a place
• 22:50
  where most tech platforms will talk to each other.
• 22:53
  And if they won't, we had Zapier or one of these
• 22:56
  platforms that you could get them to talk to each other.
• 22:57
  You could move the stuff into a Google sheet and zap
• 23:00
  it from here to there and you know, create scalable.
• 23:04
  Systems, cloud-based systems and, and we did that
• 23:07
  really, really, really well.
• 23:09
  But, but we only got to do that at scale, I think because it
• 23:13
  was, the company was built like that and we said, no, this is
• 23:16
  another really important piece.
• 23:17
  Because of that guardrail, I was really, really strict
• 23:20
  and I mean, Matt and I were really strict that we did not.
• 23:24
  Do anything that would require us to hire
• 23:26
  people, even if they were opportunities to make money.
• 23:29
  Okay.
• 23:29
  I mean, we had companies coming to us, retail companies and
• 23:31
  stores and wholesale almost from the very beginning,
• 23:35
  asking to buy the product.
• 23:36
  And I knew that if we were going to do that, we were gonna
• 23:40
  need to have somebody whose whole job was just to do that.
• 23:42
  Mm-hmm.
• 23:42
  So we said no to it, like people trying to give us money
• 23:45
  for product, we told them no because it violated this
• 23:48
  core tenant in the business.
• 23:50
  Matt Edmundson: Mm-hmm.
• 23:52
  Adam Callinan: In hindsight, that worked really, really well.
• 23:54
  One, because it forced us to focus just on the consumer
• 23:57
  in a D two C business.
• 24:00
  And then by the time we went, we did decide to go
• 24:03
  to wholesale and retail.
• 24:05
  We had such incredible demand because we had the
• 24:08
  consumers, not because we were asking them to, they
• 24:11
  were going into the stores and asking for this product.
• 24:14
  They, you know, they didn't wanna wait the two days it
• 24:15
  was gonna take to ship 'em.
• 24:17
  Matt Edmundson: Yeah.
• 24:17
  Adam Callinan: And we, we had a wait list.
• 24:19
  I mean, you know, we had the companies that were coming
• 24:21
  to us, we weren't just telling 'em to pound sand.
• 24:22
  We were like, yeah, we'll at some point we
• 24:24
  will be open to this.
• 24:24
  Give us your email and we'll let you know.
• 24:26
  So by the time we did that, we had thousands of
• 24:28
  companies on a wait list.
• 24:30
  So we launched into wholesale in 2018.
• 24:33
  We went into 5,000 stores in the first year,
• 24:36
  and we got to control.
• 24:37
  It was crazy and we got to control how.
• 24:40
  I mean, we weren't jerks about it, but like you
• 24:42
  couldn't sell it online.
• 24:43
  I, the whole point of wholesale was I didn't wanna
• 24:45
  compete with the company selling our own stuff online.
• 24:47
  So, so because we, we kind of held the cards, we got to
• 24:51
  control how it was distributed and where it went in the store,
• 24:54
  and how they talked about it and what their pricing was.
• 24:57
  Um, so it worked that, and that was completely unintended.
• 25:00
  I, we didn't do that on purpose.
• 25:01
  That was just a, a nice benefit from, from waiting
• 25:04
  until we had enough demand to go in and do it.
• 25:07
  Do you think, looking back,
• 25:09
  Matt Edmundson: um, then that this idea of, um, having this
• 25:16
  non-negotiable, which says, you know, I'm gonna, we're gonna
• 25:19
  build this business where we don't employ people at least for
• 25:21
  a little while until, you know, you, you know, you are doing all
• 25:24
  the wholesale accounts, but it, do you think looking back that
• 25:29
  was a right decision to make?
• 25:30
  Would you still make the same decision?
• 25:34
  Adam Callinan: No.
• 25:35
  I wouldn't, because the time is different.
• 25:38
  It's significantly more difficult today to build a
• 25:47
  online only e-comm to scale.
• 25:51
  Uh, namely because paid media is kind of off the table.
• 25:54
  Yeah.
• 25:54
  Like building a business on paid media today as your
• 25:56
  foundational revenue model is phenomenally treacherous.
• 25:59
  Matt Edmundson: Mm-hmm.
• 26:00
  Adam Callinan: If it's even possible, frankly, and I don't.
• 26:04
  I don't have the expertise to go and build massive audience
• 26:09
  and engagement organically.
• 26:11
  People do and they do that and you see it and
• 26:13
  I think it is absolutely.
• 26:16
  It's like sorcery to me.
• 26:18
  It's unbelievable how people can do that.
• 26:19
  Yeah.
• 26:20
  Um.
• 26:21
  And it's funny, I was having a conversation with Travis
• 26:23
  Lowry at Vinyl VC the other day, who's a friend and
• 26:25
  he invests in commerce.
• 26:26
  He won't call it e-commerce because he actually doesn't
• 26:29
  believe that a successful business can be exclusively
• 26:33
  in e-commerce today.
• 26:34
  And I agree with that.
• 26:35
  Hmm.
• 26:35
  I think it's too difficult to, um, when you know, when
• 26:39
  you're small and, and little and nimble and you're trying
• 26:41
  to prove the concepts out.
• 26:42
  Absolutely.
• 26:43
  Like get as far as you can with that as possible.
• 26:45
  Matt Edmundson: Yeah.
• 26:46
  Adam Callinan: Um, but.
• 26:48
  But I think you, you have to diversify that revenue
• 26:51
  stream a lot earlier than we had to in Yeah.
• 26:53
  You know, 16, 17, 18.
• 26:55
  Matt Edmundson: Yeah.
• 26:56
  Yeah.
• 26:56
  It's a very different landscape, isn't it now?
• 26:58
  I suppose in, in many ways it is.
• 27:00
  Um, I, I look back and I, our first e-com
• 27:03
  business was in 2002.
• 27:06
  That's epic.
• 27:07
  Yeah.
• 27:08
  And you, you kind of go, well, it's only 20, 23 years.
• 27:13
  But so much has changed in the last 23 months.
• 27:15
  Do you know what I mean?
• 27:16
  It's that kind of, it's such a fast, dynamic, uh, moving space.
• 27:22
  I'm intrigued by your statement.
• 27:23
  If you were starting, uh, you wouldn't get into a consumer
• 27:26
  goods eCommerce business now.
• 27:28
  I mean, I know you've got into the SAS business.
• 27:29
  You've got into, and that's, and we'll talk about
• 27:32
  that in in just a second.
• 27:33
  I'm curious as to, is that the, what you've just talked
• 27:36
  about, is that the reason why you wouldn't get into this.
• 27:39
  Adam Callinan: I would say what I wouldn't do, I
• 27:43
  wouldn't go and try to start something from nothing.
• 27:46
  Right.
• 27:47
  In, in the consumer product world.
• 27:50
  And, and honestly, part of it's just emotional.
• 27:52
  Like I've done it already.
• 27:53
  I mean, I wanna go and find new challenges and new things.
• 27:56
  Like I know the pain that's gonna come with that,
• 27:58
  and I don't particularly wanna relive it.
• 28:00
  Matt Edmundson: Mm-hmm.
• 28:00
  Adam Callinan: I'll relive it starting SaaS companies
• 28:02
  and I'll relive it, doing all, all these other things.
• 28:04
  But those are learning experiences.
• 28:05
  Those are new problems that I could solve in a different way.
• 28:08
  Um, I do think because of seeing that.
• 28:13
  Seeing an eCommerce business go through the
• 28:15
  full American dream cycle.
• 28:18
  Mm-hmm.
• 28:18
  And I, I do agree with you.
• 28:19
  Like we lived the American dream, no question.
• 28:21
  Matt Edmundson: Mm.
• 28:22
  Adam Callinan: But because I've gotten to see it through
• 28:24
  that all the way from startup through, you know, early scale,
• 28:28
  through midscale, through acquisition and all, you know,
• 28:31
  all of the goods and bads that come with every single one of
• 28:32
  those pieces, I can be really helpful to those companies.
• 28:35
  And I, I could see a circumstance, you know,
• 28:38
  of getting involved with.
• 28:40
  eCom businesses that we're, we're struggling.
• 28:42
  'cause it's really easy for me to look under the
• 28:44
  hood and see what's wrong.
• 28:45
  Yeah.
• 28:46
  And frankly, that's what this SaaS product,
• 28:47
  that's penting Yeah.
• 28:48
  Yeah.
• 28:48
  That's what it does.
• 28:49
  And we can talk about that if you want.
• 28:50
  But, um, that part is, is interesting to me
• 28:53
  because I can be really helpful really quickly.
• 28:55
  Matt Edmundson: Yeah.
• 28:56
  Adam Callinan: And, and most of the, the challenges are
• 28:59
  inside of that, although they're emotional in nature
• 29:03
  because we're humans and that's what comes, that's
• 29:06
  the beauty of being human.
• 29:08
  They're generally math problems.
• 29:10
  Matt Edmundson: Yeah.
• 29:10
  Adam Callinan: Like, yeah.
• 29:10
  Yeah.
• 29:11
  They, they're data issues and math problems and algorithms.
• 29:13
  They need to be tweaked and thought of differently.
• 29:15
  And, and that's easy for me to, to go in and help with
• 29:19
  Matt Edmundson: my, uh, my son, my eldest son has, has,
• 29:22
  uh, this year he graduated.
• 29:25
  Um, not this year.
• 29:26
  Last year he graduated from.
• 29:28
  University with his master's in theoretical physics.
• 29:32
  Adam, great.
• 29:32
  Epic.
• 29:33
  Oh, I wanna talk to him.
• 29:34
  Smart chap.
• 29:35
  I love this.
• 29:35
  But he's like, he's like, everything is
• 29:37
  a math problem, dad.
• 29:38
  That's, that's, it's just a math problem.
• 29:40
  I just need to solve the math.
• 29:41
  Okay.
• 29:43
  Adam Callinan: I spend, I spend an unreasonable amount
• 29:45
  of my spare time in the world of quantum mechanics,
• 29:47
  and, uh, that's where he, that's where he functions.
• 29:50
  Matt Edmundson: It's awesome.
• 29:50
  Oh, the stuff he comes up with is just on another planet.
• 29:54
  That's me.
• 29:54
  That's cool.
• 29:56
  Adam Callinan: Good for,
• 29:56
  Matt Edmundson: good for you.
• 29:57
  And good for him.
• 29:58
  That's awesome.
• 29:58
  Well, definitely.
• 29:59
  Yeah.
• 29:59
  Yeah, yeah.
• 29:59
  But, uh, I, I is your comment about, uh, but mess, one of
• 30:03
  the things, um, that I also wanted to ask you about,
• 30:07
  and I can't remember where, about in the conversation,
• 30:09
  whether, whether this was prerecord or post record,
• 30:12
  the value of your business.
• 30:14
  Right.
• 30:14
  So a lot of people are, are, are, um, thinking about
• 30:17
  exiting their e-com businesses or they're wanting to think
• 30:20
  about the possibility of that in a few years time.
• 30:22
  And so the default has always been go build sales and.
• 30:26
  Um, you know, hopefully sell at a time when you've
• 30:29
  got a good multiple.
• 30:31
  One of the comments that you made was about building
• 30:33
  value from your ip.
• 30:36
  So you, you, you did a lot of, um, patents, um, or
• 30:41
  patents, uh, I suppose you, which I'm not quite sure the
• 30:45
  right way to pronounce it now.
• 30:48
  What, tell me a little bit about that, because this obviously,
• 30:51
  um, is unconventional, I suppose in some ways to the standard
• 30:55
  rhetoric that maybe eCommerce entrepreneurs are told.
• 31:00
  Adam Callinan: When we got started in bottle keeper, uh,
• 31:07
  I never believed, and my cousin didn't really believe either
• 31:10
  we were on the same page.
• 31:12
  That going and raising a bunch of money and then chasing
• 31:15
  that to the next valuation round and then chasing it
• 31:17
  to the next valuation round sounded like a fun thing to do.
• 31:21
  And my company before that was bootstrapped.
• 31:22
  Yeah.
• 31:22
  I mean, I'd never raised money.
• 31:23
  It just wasn't part of who I was and wanted to be.
• 31:26
  Yeah.
• 31:26
  And that would've gone very much against the, I want
• 31:28
  to build a scalable thing on the internet that I can
• 31:30
  travel the world to do.
• 31:31
  Yeah.
• 31:31
  Yeah.
• 31:31
  Yeah.
• 31:31
  That doesn't generally fit with playing the, the
• 31:34
  VC run and gun game, so.
• 31:38
  At the same time, we also knew that it wasn't a business that
• 31:42
  we wanted to hand our kids.
• 31:44
  It wasn't, this wasn't the thing that was gonna
• 31:47
  be the generational.
• 31:48
  Yeah.
• 31:48
  Like I, you know, to be clear, from the age of six until
• 31:52
  halfway through college, I wanted to be a doctor.
• 31:54
  My whole life revolved around being a doctor.
• 31:56
  That's why I got a crazy science degree.
• 31:58
  Mm-hmm.
• 31:59
  Now I'm selling beer products.
• 32:01
  This is like the, you know, epic give nothing back dichotomy.
• 32:05
  Yeah.
• 32:05
  So this was, this was a thing that, that we did not see
• 32:08
  as, as the do for everything.
• 32:10
  That being said, we believed that if you could
• 32:14
  build a business that was.
• 32:16
  That had two things.
• 32:17
  One, it was profitable, meaning it could survive ups and downs,
• 32:21
  and if you're not gonna raise money, it has to be profitable.
• 32:23
  Yeah.
• 32:23
  So that's not really an option.
• 32:25
  But the other is if you can build value in as many
• 32:28
  places as possible throughout the business mm-hmm.
• 32:31
  Someone will always want to buy it.
• 32:34
  So where we saw building value, were in three places.
• 32:39
  One which you just talked about is sales.
• 32:41
  There's value in revenue, no question.
• 32:43
  Even if it's not profitable revenue, as much as I hate
• 32:45
  saying that, but it's true.
• 32:47
  Matt Edmundson: Mm-hmm.
• 32:48
  Adam Callinan: The second is in the brand.
• 32:50
  So we were really, really, really diligent.
• 32:52
  That's why our products were expensive.
• 32:53
  Like we looked at Yeti and it was unfathomable to me
• 32:58
  how they took a product that everybody like it was
• 33:01
  not a super unique product.
• 33:02
  Granted they had some IP and whatnot, but like
• 33:04
  it was a fancy cooler.
• 33:05
  There were 10 companies that had the same quality of cooler.
• 33:07
  Yeah.
• 33:07
  But they would get $300 for their cooler.
• 33:10
  Mm-hmm.
• 33:11
  And people were going gaga over it.
• 33:13
  Yeah.
• 33:13
  Yeah.
• 33:13
  I don't, I never understood how they do that, and
• 33:15
  I absolutely loved it.
• 33:17
  So I just said I want to go and do whatever that is.
• 33:19
  I wanna do that.
• 33:20
  Yeah.
• 33:20
  You want to be, I would rather sell less product
• 33:22
  for more money than more product for less money.
• 33:24
  Mm-hmm.
• 33:24
  That just, that goes in line with my efficiency brain.
• 33:29
  Yeah.
• 33:30
  So brand, there's value in brand.
• 33:32
  The other is an intellectual property
• 33:33
  Matt Edmundson: in patents.
• 33:34
  Adam Callinan: Mm-hmm.
• 33:35
  And with Matt's, you know, when he filed.
• 33:39
  And it's called a provisional patent.
• 33:40
  Like you file this placeholder patent that's inexpensive at the
• 33:43
  very beginning of the company.
• 33:44
  So you can go basically like hold your spot in the
• 33:46
  line, because in patent law, they're first to file
• 33:50
  instead of first to use.
• 33:52
  Mm-hmm.
• 33:52
  So you can come up with the idea all you want, but if someone
• 33:54
  files it first, it's theirs.
• 33:55
  Matt Edmundson: Right?
• 33:56
  Adam Callinan: So you file a provisional patent, which
• 33:58
  holds your place in line.
• 34:00
  Then you have 12 months to prove that concept out.
• 34:02
  And if you prove the concept out and it actually turns
• 34:04
  out to be a thing, then you convert that into a utility
• 34:07
  patent or a patent, you know, that lasts a much longer time,
• 34:09
  way more expensive, but at least at that point, you've
• 34:11
  de-risked spending that money.
• 34:13
  Matt Edmundson: Mm-hmm.
• 34:14
  Adam Callinan: So we did that.
• 34:16
  It obviously worked, so we converted it.
• 34:18
  That's actually what we used a lot of, that $13,000 that
• 34:21
  we got from crowdfunding was to convert a provisional
• 34:23
  patent to a utility patent.
• 34:24
  Yeah.
• 34:25
  And then in that process, you.
• 34:29
  I'll caveat everything that I'm about to say
• 34:30
  with, I'm not an attorney.
• 34:32
  I have a lot of deep domain expertise in
• 34:35
  intellectual property, but I'm not an attorney.
• 34:36
  So talk to your IP specific attorney.
• 34:38
  Don't talk to your contracts.
• 34:40
  Mm-hmm.
• 34:40
  Law neighbor attorney, your intellectual property attorney.
• 34:43
  It's very nuanced, it's very specific.
• 34:45
  You have to talk to an IP attorney, but when you get
• 34:48
  your first patent, you, you do what's called a continuation
• 34:51
  and process, and it's CIP and you leave the patent open.
• 34:56
  So you don't allow the patent to close.
• 34:57
  And what that allows you to do is evolve that
• 34:59
  patent into another patent.
• 35:01
  Mm-hmm.
• 35:01
  And broaden its scope.
• 35:02
  And then you take, you leave that one open, and then
• 35:04
  you evolve that patent into another pro patent and you
• 35:06
  broaden it scope, and by the end of it you have 42 patents
• 35:09
  in this incredible scope that's insanely valuable.
• 35:12
  Matt Edmundson: Mm-hmm.
• 35:13
  Adam Callinan: That when you go to sell the company, the private
• 35:15
  equity group, who cares a lot about revenue and profitability,
• 35:18
  they didn't ask us in the first.
• 35:21
  Probably four conversations, hours long conversations
• 35:25
  with the board of directors and like all these people.
• 35:26
  Mm-hmm.
• 35:27
  Not one time did they ask us what our revenue was.
• 35:30
  Matt Edmundson: Wow.
• 35:31
  Adam Callinan: Or if we were profitable.
• 35:32
  Mm-hmm.
• 35:32
  They cared what was on our balance sheet because
• 35:34
  they wanted to know if we had raised money.
• 35:37
  All they wanted to talk about was our brand and
• 35:39
  intellectual property.
• 35:41
  So there are, and that those are not the only
• 35:43
  ways to, to create value.
• 35:44
  Like in your business listener who, whatever that is, think
• 35:48
  about the, the different things that you, you know, who you
• 35:51
  could possibly sell the company to at in a year or in 10.
• 35:55
  And what would be valuable to that company?
• 35:57
  Is it just sales?
• 36:00
  Probably not.
• 36:01
  It might also be sales.
• 36:03
  In most cases it is.
• 36:04
  Yeah.
• 36:04
  Yeah.
• 36:04
  But there will be things that are valuable to that.
• 36:08
  Type of company and go build for that.
• 36:10
  Yeah, like spend your time, spend some time, not all
• 36:12
  of your time, but some of your time, trying to build
• 36:14
  value around those things.
• 36:17
  Matt Edmundson: Yeah.
• 36:18
  No, that's, that's fascinating.
• 36:20
  That's really good.
• 36:20
  I, I it's Did you, so when you set out, uh, with the
• 36:25
  business, were you very intentional with the patents
• 36:27
  or was that something you kind of stumbled into as,
• 36:29
  as you went along, stumble?
• 36:33
  That's funny how often that, right.
• 36:34
  Yeah.
• 36:35
  Yeah.
• 36:35
  Yeah.
• 36:35
  Adam Callinan: I mean, Matt, Matt had invented
• 36:37
  a couple of things that he had filed provisional
• 36:38
  patents on that didn't go.
• 36:40
  You know, for one reason or another.
• 36:42
  So he knew a little bit of the process to, you know,
• 36:47
  that it was a smart thing to file a provisional patent
• 36:49
  at the very beginning.
• 36:50
  'cause they're inexpensive.
• 36:51
  I mean, it's thousands of dollars, not tens of
• 36:53
  thousands of dollars.
• 36:54
  Um, you know, you have to do a, your IP, specific IP attorney,
• 36:58
  we'll do a patentability search to make sure you're
• 37:00
  not violating anyone else's patent with what you're doing.
• 37:02
  Mm-hmm.
• 37:02
  And in some cases, if you are, you can modify your product to
• 37:05
  not be, and yeah, yeah, there's some strategy stuff there, but
• 37:08
  make sure what you're doing.
• 37:09
  Is patentable.
• 37:11
  And if they're really good, they might say that it's not.
• 37:15
  But if we tweak it this way, it becomes patentable.
• 37:17
  I mean, there, there's a lot of, there's an incredible
• 37:20
  amount of strategy.
• 37:21
  Matt Edmundson: Mm-hmm.
• 37:21
  Adam Callinan: Around,
• 37:22
  Matt Edmundson: yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 37:23
  Adam Callinan: That's definitely worth.
• 37:24
  And then you have to be prepared to defend them,
• 37:25
  which is a whole nother thing.
• 37:26
  That was actually like the worst part of the business.
• 37:28
  Matt Edmundson: I was gonna ask you about that because,
• 37:30
  um, I wrote a comment somewhere that you, you seem
• 37:33
  to get dragged into having to defend your patents.
• 37:38
  Uh, yeah.
• 37:39
  A fair bit.
• 37:39
  How, how was that?
• 37:40
  That was brutal.
• 37:41
  You tell us a story while I drink from my Yeti, by the way.
• 37:44
  Adam Callinan: Yeah.
• 37:44
  Awesome.
• 37:46
  Yeah.
• 37:46
  They, they were just an exceptional brand.
• 37:47
  Mm-hmm.
• 37:48
  I mean, they're, they're like the pinnacle of, of brand value.
• 37:52
  Yeah.
• 37:52
  They really, what has done,
• 37:53
  Matt Edmundson: yeah.
• 37:54
  Adam Callinan: We.
• 37:55
  In 2000 and probably 15, started seeing fake versions
• 38:00
  of our product on Amazon.
• 38:01
  It's like, you know, that's gonna happen, but it is
• 38:03
  just like gut wrenching.
• 38:05
  Mm-hmm.
• 38:05
  When you see this thing that you've, like at that point, you
• 38:08
  know, had all your blood and sweat and tears and all that
• 38:10
  good stuff inside of, and now you're, you see your product
• 38:13
  with another name on it being produced by whatever company
• 38:15
  outta China on now, on Amazon.
• 38:17
  Matt Edmundson: Yeah.
• 38:18
  Adam Callinan: And at that time we did not have our, our utility
• 38:21
  patent had not issued yet.
• 38:22
  It takes a while.
• 38:23
  I mean, sometimes it takes a year.
• 38:25
  For us, it took almost three years for you, right?
• 38:27
  First like defensible patent to issue.
• 38:30
  Um, the problem is when you start having that success,
• 38:35
  those things pop up and you have to deal with them.
• 38:38
  Matt Edmundson: Mm-hmm.
• 38:38
  Adam Callinan: And in the case, using Amazon
• 38:40
  as a perfect example.
• 38:41
  You, you, the platform doesn't want to be the one making
• 38:44
  the determination that that company is violating your
• 38:47
  patent because they're, that's what case law is for.
• 38:50
  Yeah.
• 38:50
  That's what the courts are for.
• 38:53
  So Amazon, if you have a patent, you can't just go to
• 38:55
  Amazon and say, look, I have a patent on this product.
• 38:57
  Take that thing down.
• 38:58
  They'll say, we don't know if your patent is valid or if
• 38:59
  it's actually violating or not.
• 39:00
  Yeah.
• 39:01
  Like, get a court order and we'll take it down and,
• 39:03
  you know, naturally your mental explodes like court
• 39:06
  order, how the hell am I gonna get a court order?
• 39:08
  Yeah.
• 39:08
  It'll just like go to the courthouse and say,
• 39:10
  can I have a court order?
• 39:11
  Yeah.
• 39:11
  I, I'll tell you exactly how to do that.
• 39:14
  You have to, this is where it gets painful.
• 39:16
  So if you're in this, if you're facing this as an operator,
• 39:19
  like dig deep and buckle your seatbelt and you know, pick up
• 39:24
  meditation and the things that you have to calm yourself down.
• 39:26
  Yeah.
• 39:26
  Ex exercise a lot.
• 39:28
  Take care of yourself.
• 39:29
  You have to go and sue a bunch of companies.
• 39:31
  Mm-hmm.
• 39:32
  So go and pick 10.
• 39:33
  This is exact, literally this is our playbook.
• 39:35
  And it worked perfectly.
• 39:36
  It was brutal, but it worked perfectly.
• 39:38
  Sue, find 10 companies that are selling your product on Amazon.
• 39:42
  That are small companies.
• 39:43
  They're teen, like literally, it's people selling 'em
• 39:45
  outta their basements.
• 39:46
  Mm-hmm.
• 39:46
  You have to sue those companies.
• 39:48
  You're not trying to, gonna try to get money from them
• 39:50
  'cause they don't have money and that's not the point.
• 39:52
  Matt Edmundson: Yeah.
• 39:52
  Adam Callinan: The point is you want them to stop selling it.
• 39:55
  Matt Edmundson: Mm-hmm.
• 39:55
  Adam Callinan: And you need them to sign a document with
• 39:57
  the court, within the court case that says they agree
• 40:00
  they violated your patent.
• 40:01
  And then some number of those, you only probably only need one.
• 40:04
  Hopefully you get a couple.
• 40:06
  You need the court, the judge in that case to agree that
• 40:09
  that company was violating your patent and you want that judge
• 40:13
  to sign a consent judgment.
• 40:15
  That consent judgment has a number associated to it,
• 40:18
  which is a court order.
• 40:20
  You can use that court order number.
• 40:22
  Yeah.
• 40:22
  And Amazon and Amazon will now very, very effectively
• 40:25
  pull those things down.
• 40:27
  Matt Edmundson: Wow.
• 40:28
  Adam Callinan: But that took, let's be clear,
• 40:30
  that took a year.
• 40:31
  It cost half a million dollars and it was unbelievably brutal.
• 40:37
  Like dealing with lawsuits, 10 of them at a time
• 40:40
  like that is hands down the worst part of Yeah.
• 40:44
  The bottle keeper business now.
• 40:45
  It was clearly important and it, it is what led to that
• 40:48
  transaction outcome where we had 'em, you know, on
• 40:51
  four phone calls and never asked about our revenue.
• 40:52
  'cause the patent portfolio was so impressive.
• 40:54
  Yeah.
• 40:55
  But it was very, very difficult.
• 40:57
  And then from there you just play whack-a-mole forever.
• 40:59
  Yeah.
• 40:59
  You have to, you set up processes and there are some
• 41:02
  technologies you can use to help, um, automate that, but.
• 41:07
  You know, you, you're just gonna be defending that stuff
• 41:08
  for the life of the business.
• 41:10
  It's just part of deal.
• 41:12
  Matt Edmundson: It is.
• 41:13
  No, it's, it's so easy now, isn't it?
• 41:15
  For, and I think it's even easier than it was 10 years
• 41:18
  ago for people to just copy.
• 41:21
  You know, they, it's easy to see the sales data,
• 41:23
  to see the analytics and go, I'm gonna make that.
• 41:25
  And it's like, well, okay, come sue me, it's gonna
• 41:27
  take you at least a year.
• 41:28
  And in which case I'll stop saying I won't care 'cause
• 41:30
  I'll have moved on something else and you can't ask.
• 41:32
  Yeah.
• 41:32
  Okay.
• 41:32
  It kind of takes the, the shine off it a little bit,
• 41:36
  uh, when you are dealing with those kind of things.
• 41:39
  Um, so tell us about the SaaS platform you've got going on.
• 41:43
  So now you, you sort of, you've done the whole e-commerce thing
• 41:46
  and so you woke up one day and thought, yeah, I'm gonna
• 41:49
  start, I'm gonna sell software.
• 41:50
  That's what I'm gonna do.
• 41:51
  'cause that makes an awful lot of sense.
• 41:53
  Adam Callinan: Yeah.
• 41:54
  I can tell you that is not how it happened.
• 41:58
  Yeah, I mean, we had a.
• 42:04
  I had a wise sage in my life.
• 42:08
  I literally had a performance coach.
• 42:09
  Mm-hmm.
• 42:09
  Because I was trying to figure out like what I'm gonna do
• 42:11
  with myself after this thing.
• 42:13
  And he said, don't go and start another company immediately.
• 42:17
  Mm-hmm.
• 42:17
  Like, I know you're gonna want to.
• 42:18
  Of course.
• 42:18
  Mm-hmm.
• 42:19
  I went and tried and it was a disaster.
• 42:20
  'cause I, you, you gotta learn some stuff the hard way.
• 42:24
  Yep.
• 42:24
  And he's like, yep, his name's Dr. Jeff.
• 42:26
  He said, yep, I told you so.
• 42:27
  He's like, okay, fine, Dr. Jeff, I'll do nothing.
• 42:29
  And I got, like, into carpentry.
• 42:30
  I started building things in my house.
• 42:32
  I remodeled the kitchen doing all these things to, to not,
• 42:37
  to try to like break out of that business execution cycle.
• 42:42
  And after about six months, I woke up one day and
• 42:44
  realized that my hardest decision the entire day was
• 42:46
  what to have for breakfast.
• 42:47
  And that was a problem.
• 42:49
  Yeah.
• 42:49
  And Dr. Jeff said, all right, we're ready.
• 42:51
  Like, let's go.
• 42:53
  We need to do what he would call practice soft offense.
• 42:56
  Like let's go find something to do.
• 42:58
  What are, and I, I had invested in a, a number of companies
• 43:01
  over the life of Bottle Keeper.
• 43:02
  So we decided that I was gonna go and talk to those
• 43:06
  companies and see if there's literally just how can I help?
• 43:09
  And they're, I mean, I was, they were all friends, people
• 43:11
  that I knew and whatnot.
• 43:12
  So like, yeah, absolutely.
• 43:13
  Come look under the hood, let's figure it out.
• 43:15
  And I realized very, very quickly.
• 43:17
  There was something that we did at Bottle Keeper Real, you
• 43:19
  know, there was a lot that we did wrong and we, again, like I
• 43:21
  said earlier, we tried to burn it to the ground 20 times, but
• 43:25
  there were some things that we did really well that led
• 43:28
  to being able to build really scalable revenue efficiently.
• 43:32
  Matt Edmundson: Mm.
• 43:34
  Adam Callinan: And that had to do with systems
• 43:35
  that we created using math.
• 43:36
  Mm-hmm.
• 43:37
  So like it goes all back to math and science.
• 43:38
  Right.
• 43:40
  As the CEO of the business trying to run paid media,
• 43:43
  running the website.
• 43:43
  All of its optimization.
• 43:46
  Trying to be profitable, all that stuff.
• 43:49
  I realized that there was no, there were no systems,
• 43:54
  there was no software.
• 43:55
  There were, honestly, there wasn't anything that gave me
• 43:57
  the clarity that I needed to make smarter decisions around
• 44:00
  how we spent AD dollars.
• 44:01
  Mm-hmm.
• 44:02
  How I optimize the website, what we could afford to
• 44:04
  do or not afford to do.
• 44:06
  And so we built them.
• 44:07
  We wrote math and crazy spreadsheets, and we ran
• 44:09
  the company on it for the entirety of the business.
• 44:12
  We tried to go.
• 44:13
  Find it in other platforms.
• 44:15
  It was always a disaster.
• 44:15
  We tried to build it on like NetSuite and Salesforce.
• 44:18
  Aama totally didn't work, and we always went back
• 44:21
  to these spreadsheets.
• 44:22
  So I saw in these first two companies that I went in
• 44:24
  and helped that they had, they were good businesses.
• 44:27
  One of 'em was a $20 million year business.
• 44:28
  They were profitable.
• 44:30
  They had no idea how to make money.
• 44:32
  They just knew that like they spent.
• 44:37
  You know, $18 million a year and they made $19 million a
• 44:41
  year, and 19 minus 18 equals $1 million in net profit, which
• 44:44
  is a hundred percent true.
• 44:45
  Mm-hmm.
• 44:45
  But they didn't understand like the nuance of how
• 44:49
  they spent money versus how they acquired customers.
• 44:52
  Yeah.
• 44:52
  And how it was all made.
• 44:53
  Like there's a lot of really, that's like
• 44:54
  where all the good stuff.
• 44:55
  Yeah.
• 44:55
  Yeah.
• 44:56
  Yeah.
• 44:56
  Matt Edmundson: Yeah,
• 44:57
  Adam Callinan: so I rebuilt systems that we ran a bottle
• 44:59
  keeper inside these businesses and it totally changed them.
• 45:01
  Mm. It just gave them clarity around how to, you know,
• 45:04
  better operate the business.
• 45:06
  And it, you know, one of the, that company had increased
• 45:08
  their net profit the following year by 50% because they,
• 45:11
  it was like, it's going bad.
• 45:12
  Huh.
• 45:12
  That's interesting.
• 45:13
  So we, we decided, Dr. Jeff said, okay, let's go see if you
• 45:16
  can get paid to do that, because I just did that for free.
• 45:18
  Obviously.
• 45:18
  They were, I was just, mm-hmm.
• 45:19
  I had an incentive, like I was just trying to help.
• 45:21
  Yeah.
• 45:21
  So I fe went and found a, a consumer product company
• 45:24
  that was, that needed, I mean, they were in bad shape.
• 45:27
  They were losing a hundred thousand dollars a month.
• 45:28
  It was a $2 million a year business, which means
• 45:30
  they were losing a lot.
• 45:31
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 45:31
  It's huge, huge loss.
• 45:33
  They only had a couple of months life left and they,
• 45:35
  and I got paid as an advisor to help them turn it around.
• 45:38
  And I did the same thing, like I built this, these
• 45:40
  much sexier, leaner, smarter versions of the stuff.
• 45:44
  We used a bottle keeper and it, this company three
• 45:47
  months later was profitable.
• 45:48
  And now they're, you know, two years later, they're up 300%.
• 45:51
  They're crushing, they're profitable.
• 45:53
  Matt Edmundson: Mm-hmm.
• 45:54
  Adam Callinan: Um, and so that, that was the, like, clearly
• 45:56
  there's something here that is helpful to other businesses
• 45:59
  and it can't just be a bunch of super intimidating spreadsheets.
• 46:03
  Yeah, yeah.
• 46:03
  So Pentane is born from that.
• 46:05
  It is built on foundationally built on.
• 46:08
  It is a SaaS platform, but it is foundationally
• 46:10
  built on systems that we operated bottle keeper on.
• 46:13
  So, so they're built from the standpoint of the operator.
• 46:15
  It's not a finance product that Yeah.
• 46:18
  You know, an accounting team put together.
• 46:20
  Looking at it from the standpoint of finance it,
• 46:22
  it does have financial components to it because you
• 46:24
  have to, but it also has a lot of customer acquisition.
• 46:27
  You know, you can't.
• 46:29
  Whether you are or not, you can't make really smart
• 46:32
  decisions about how you acquire customers if you
• 46:34
  don't understand the financial component in the business.
• 46:36
  Like how the business makes money.
• 46:38
  Yeah.
• 46:38
  How the business spends money.
• 46:40
  You know, what, how your payroll and adding to it or subtracting
• 46:43
  to it impacts your ability to be profitable and what you
• 46:45
  should be spending on ad dollars and how it needs to perform.
• 46:48
  And all of that is, you know, is math.
• 46:50
  Matt Edmundson: Yeah, yeah.
• 46:51
  No, that's brilliant.
• 46:52
  Brilliant.
• 46:54
  Where can find, where can people find out more
• 46:55
  information about that, Adam?
• 46:57
  Adam Callinan: Pentane pentane.com.
• 46:59
  Matt Edmundson: P-E-N-T-A-N-E.com.
• 47:01
  Does pentane mean anything other than it just seems, at
• 47:04
  first I thought it was pen 10, but it's, no, it's not.
• 47:08
  I've gotta spell it right away.
• 47:08
  It does.
• 47:09
  Adam Callinan: This goes back to my ultimate nerdom, pentane
• 47:11
  is a, is a five carbon molecule.
• 47:15
  It's, it's a member of the alkane family.
• 47:17
  It's like a, it's like octane propane methane.
• 47:21
  Ethan Hexane.
• 47:23
  Matt Edmundson: Okay.
• 47:23
  And fine.
• 47:25
  Adam Callinan: Yeah, I know, I know.
• 47:27
  I mean, literally, I went and tried to do Octane.
• 47:29
  I was like, okay, there's a thousand
• 47:30
  companies called Octane.
• 47:31
  I can't do that.
• 47:31
  Yeah.
• 47:31
  And I just, there this family called the Alkanes.
• 47:33
  I went through the list of Alkanes and found one that I
• 47:36
  could buy the domain for $2,000.
• 47:38
  And there was, and there's like no business sound around it.
• 47:41
  So that's how we got to pentane.
• 47:44
  Matt Edmundson: It is funny now how when it comes to
• 47:46
  naming your business, you're like, right, the first thing I
• 47:48
  need to do is, is the, what's the domain that I, you know,
• 47:51
  it's the driver, isn't it?
• 47:53
  Behind all your business.
• 47:54
  Yeah.
• 47:54
  I set up a business recently and I'm just like, I'm not
• 47:57
  going through that process.
• 47:58
  'cause all it is is legal entity in the background, right?
• 48:00
  Mm-hmm.
• 48:00
  It's, um.
• 48:02
  It's an SPV that helps with our acquisitions.
• 48:04
  I just took the name of our company, spelt it
• 48:05
  backwards, and lo and behold, it was all available.
• 48:07
  So I'm like, let's just do that.
• 48:08
  Perfect.
• 48:09
  Yeah, that's perfect.
• 48:11
  Adam Callinan: I mean, look, some of the most successful
• 48:13
  companies, like they, their names don't remotely make sense.
• 48:15
  That's not the point.
• 48:16
  It's basically like, is it memorable and could
• 48:18
  you buy the domain?
• 48:20
  That's about it.
• 48:21
  Matt Edmundson: Well, can I buy the domain and
• 48:23
  then is it memorable?
• 48:24
  Maybe I don't.
• 48:24
  Yeah.
• 48:25
  Yeah.
• 48:25
  Uh, so is that how people reach you?
• 48:28
  Uh, is it through that website or LinkedIn?
• 48:30
  What's your preference?
• 48:31
  Adam Callinan: Yeah, I mean, if for me, LinkedIn, I'm, I don't
• 48:34
  do the socials outside of that.
• 48:36
  I haven't for a long time, but I am spending time
• 48:37
  on LinkedIn because it's the place I need to be.
• 48:39
  Yeah, it's big.
• 48:40
  I am, I am really focused on being helpful, so even if
• 48:43
  it's outside of, of Pen 10, if I can be helpful literally
• 48:46
  in, in any way with respect to consumer brand, like, you
• 48:48
  know, DM me on, on LinkedIn, um, otherwise, yeah, you can
• 48:52
  find information and demos and sign up for free trials and
• 48:55
  all that stuff at pentane.com.
• 48:56
  Matt Edmundson: Fantastic.
• 48:57
  We'll, of course link to all of those in the show notes as well.
• 49:01
  Uh, Adam, in the last few seconds that we have talking
• 49:04
  of LinkedIn, uh, and I've remembered, um, I told you
• 49:06
  it'd be 50 50 at the start, uh, this is where I ask for a
• 49:09
  question for me, which I answer on LinkedIn fully enough.
• 49:12
  Um, so what is your question for me?
• 49:15
  Adam Callinan: Given your exposure to companies moving
• 49:19
  through the lifecycle up into acquisition, how do you look at.
• 49:25
  A company building just a D2C or, or needing
• 49:29
  to be more omnichannel.
• 49:31
  Matt Edmundson: Okay, we will get into that.
• 49:34
  Come follow me on LinkedIn if you wanna know how I'm
• 49:36
  gonna answer that question.
• 49:38
  Uh uh.
• 49:38
  But Adam, listen, it's been an absolute treatment.
• 49:40
  I've genuinely enjoyed the conversation.
• 49:43
  Uh, if I had more time, I'd talk to you about your experience
• 49:45
  with joiner in carpentry, because I too, it's funny how.
• 49:49
  Digital guys like to go and make stuff out of wood
• 49:51
  is the sort of pest time.
• 49:53
  Uh, when I sold my business a few years ago, the first thing
• 49:56
  I did was build a wood shop.
• 49:58
  Perfect.
• 49:58
  Yeah, I love it.
• 50:01
  It's the way it works, isn't it?
• 50:02
  Yeah.
• 50:03
  But thank you for coming on.
• 50:07
  I'm gonna get through this.
• 50:08
  It's no problem.
• 50:09
  Uh, thank you.
• 50:10
  Oh no.
• 50:10
  Tell us about your podcast as well.
• 50:12
  'cause you, you, your episode four, uh, into
• 50:15
  your brand new podcast.
• 50:16
  Maybe tell us about that so we can go check that out.
• 50:19
  Adam Callinan: Yeah, the podcast is called Growth Mavericks.
• 50:21
  It's all about disrupting our defaults.
• 50:23
  It's part, it's, it's really two parts.
• 50:25
  It's part tactical.
• 50:26
  So I'm talking with, you know, e-commerce founders and what,
• 50:28
  what is working more, what is not working, and where are
• 50:30
  they, uh, spending their time.
• 50:33
  Trying to problem solve with the other half of the discussion
• 50:36
  being around what they do to remain resilient and durable
• 50:40
  and sort of anti-fragile in these, in the world of these
• 50:43
  massive up and ups and downs.
• 50:44
  And also interviewing some people that just do that, like
• 50:47
  special operations guys mm-hmm.
• 50:48
  That have gone and, you know, had to do really hard things
• 50:50
  under real duress where there are real consequences, not
• 50:52
  like, lose some money mm-hmm.
• 50:53
  But lose, lose lives and things like that.
• 50:55
  Yeah.
• 50:55
  So, um, it's, it's a, it's been really, really fun.
• 50:58
  I'm only a handful in, but it's been.
• 51:00
  It's been a really, really a productive handful of
• 51:03
  episodes, uh, helping operators.
• 51:05
  Matt Edmundson: Fantastic growth Mavericks.
• 51:07
  Check that out.
• 51:07
  Of course, we'll linked to that in the show notes as well.
• 51:09
  But Adam, listen, appreciate you, man, appreciate you coming
• 51:12
  on and sharing the story.
• 51:13
  Uh, it's been, it's been a lot of fun listening to it.
• 51:16
  And, um, I all the best my friend with the, with the
• 51:19
  SAS platform and, and what's going on in the future.
• 51:21
  And next time you're on this side of the pond,
• 51:23
  let's go grab a pint.
• 51:25
  Adam Callinan: I would love that.
• 51:26
  Matt Edmundson: That'll be fun.
• 51:27
  Sounds like fun.
• 51:27
  That would be fun.
• 51:28
  Uh, but yeah, no, absolutely.
• 51:29
  Adam, thank you so much.
• 51:31
  Adam Callinan: Thanks for having me.
• 51:31
  Appreciate it.