Business Lessons From The Sex-Toy King (#75)
The news story was, look at this, like, cringey video, and people are actually clearly wanting this device because there's thousands of preorders.
Speaker 2:I'm Jim Hoffman, and this is If I Was Starting Today, A collection of conversations about half baked startup ideas, growth tactics, and stories from founders, including my own journey as a business owner. All of the content is centered around one question. What would you do if you were starting today?
Speaker 3:Today, we're talking about a taboo subject. The actual conversation really isn't that taboo, but the content could be considered that because of the industry we discuss. So if you're easily offended, then I apologize because that is not at all my intention with this podcast. But if you're open minded and wanna learn from an industry that really people don't talk about, then stay on. Today, have Brian Sloan.
Speaker 3:He's our guest, and he's the founder of Auto Blow, which is a sex toy company that does well. It's pretty self explanatory. But here's why I wanted to talk to him. He's grown a global direct to consumer product that is doing well into 8 figures. And here's the impressive part.
Speaker 3:He's done it with just two employees, and he's been able to do it without doing traditional things like Facebook ads and Instagram ads. Instead, he had to get really creative with how he's done growth by using nontraditional channels like porn sites, and he's had to do epic press stunts. And it's worked so well. It's gotten him on Howard Stern show, HBO, GQ, Playboy, and more. So if you're open to learning about innovative weights ways to grow your business, then this is definitely the episode for you.
Speaker 3:So, again, really hope you get some of those content, and the goal is not at all to be offensive. So I apologize if so, but I really hope you enjoy today's episode. I have Brian Sloan on today, and I'm I'm very excited for this one. I think this will be a fun one. I'll learn a lot from.
Speaker 3:And so Brian is the CEO of, an 8 figure business that is growing like crazy. Very intelligent ecommerce that has one very, very popular flagship product that I'll let him get into. But, Brian, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Of course. So I'm I'm lucky to know Brian through we're both in Seattle. There's a group called EO, and I met Brian through that. And it it's been pretty fun to kind of meet Brian and, like, learn about his experience.
Speaker 3:And you've been in EO for for how long now?
Speaker 1:I joined in the Beijing chapter in maybe 2012 or something, and then I was in the Berlin chapter later and then now Seattle. So I don't know. On and off, I had a period out maybe eight or nine years, I think.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And, you just joined a very, select group or forum based on your p and l that I'm envious of, but we can talk about that another time. But first, Brian, I wanna talk about you you have this product, Auto Blow. The one could say is, like, in a category that people are not familiar with, which is kind of adult toys, sex toys, whatever that is. Before we even get into that, I'm very interested to see, like, how did all of this get started to kind of get into that industry?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Long story short, I graduated from law school in 02/2005. And while I was in law school, I mainly saw up close the life of lawyers, and it was it was not what I had hoped it would be. It was pretty brutal. There was a cap to how much money you could earn because you were basically working for time, and there was no way to scale.
Speaker 1:You know, those lawyers didn't have a way to scale their efforts. And at the same time, I mean, if I if I didn't find something else, I'd probably still be doing it. But while I was in law school, I discovered local auctions. And to pay for part of my living expenses because I was taking loans at the time, I just started going to auctions, buying mostly antiques there and selling them on eBay. And that really exposed me to another possibility for my life, which was a life of buying and selling things.
Speaker 1:So that that really started just sort of seeing that I could scale my efforts. You know, I can make a good buy, and I could make, you know, a thousand bucks. Whereas if I was were working as a lawyer, I would need to work for hours and hours and hours running my brain at full capacity to make that same thousand dollars. So I just figured out there was something else.
Speaker 3:So you kinda got the edge you saw, like, hey. I can make money outside of traditional ways of becoming a lawyer, but actually selling something online. And so you're doing it through auctions. And then does it get into, I can buy products and resell them or I can start to manufacture? When did you start going down that path?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So after I graduated, I was doing I I moved instead of antique auctions, I moved to doing bankruptcy auctions. They just had it just sort of broadened what I could buy and sell. It came to me that it wasn't gonna be my future when I had rented a, I don't know, 20 foot long U Haul truck and I was towing, my car behind it and the the U Haul was filled with furniture I purchased at a factory auction in Indiana. And I realized this is also not as scalable as I thought it would be because I'm driving around the country buying trucks full of stuff, selling it.
Speaker 1:So I searched eBay. I was really an expert at time about what kind of stuff you could find on eBay and what you couldn't find. And I found a category there of latex fetish wear, and, it had high prices and very few sellers. So I used at the time, Alibaba. I located a company in China, a factory that would that made latex fetish wear, and I started ordering the, sort of clothing and bondage items and at first just selling those on eBay.
Speaker 1:And really, was from that first experience buying from a factory and and listing and selling that I saw, okay. Now I'm able to move. I sort of started to understand the path to move from auctions where the supply of goods wasn't constant to ordering something that was more constant in in selling that.
Speaker 3:So that kinda starts to get into this category. So you see this persona where, wow, there's, like, high demand. Maybe they're price insensitive. This is something that you're interested in. And then how does that lead to kind of this flagship product?
Speaker 1:So, at the time, was I was going back and forth to Beijing actually to an antique market, buying antiques to sell on eBay. And I met a lot of, entrepreneurs and interesting foreigners living in Beijing. And so in 02/2007, I decided to move to Beijing. And what I started doing at first was just developing that that latex business. I had a website made, I moved off of eBay, and I started selling the latex fetish word direct to consumer on a website.
Speaker 1:And I started to sort of, learn how to market that. I was just working at home basically in my apartment, there in China. And, long story short, the more I got into selling the latex, like specializing making special kinds of of the material, getting into some niche communities online to try to sell it to people, I also came upon the same problem I came to with auctions, which was this is certainly more scalable than driving around a truck, buying things from auctions. But now I'm limited to a very specialized product that's less scalable than I I had hoped. So it really was only because I sort of reached what I consider sort of the end of my interest in in latex about the scalability that I started thinking, well, what other kind of things can I make, or sell that don't have very many sellers interested and specifically have some kind of moral sort of a part that block people from participating in the industry?
Speaker 1:And so since I already had discovered latex, you know, and the only reason that there weren't more sellers of of high margin retail, latex finish wear but because it's weird to sell it because the people have unusual interest, and so it didn't attract that many sellers. So I thought, okay. What's more scalable than this, but still has a moral component where people don't wanna get involved and and with a larger market. And that's when I had the idea, maybe around, yeah, late two thousand eight for for the auto blow.
Speaker 3:That's crazy. And can you give people context just like today, like, what that is and, like, the scale your business is at?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So, we we sell AutoBlow on we have one main ecommerce website that's autoblow.com, where we sell direct to people in The US and Canada and a few people from outside. But then the AutoBlow, are two devices, auto blow AI and auto blow two plus XT, they sit on most shelves of adult stores in The US, Canada, most countries in Europe, and Australia. So, yeah, it has pretty wide distribution. People in the adult toys business know about it because they resell it, and a lot of people many tens of thousands of people search for it on Google every month.
Speaker 1:And we we start we we moved up into the 8 digit sales, like, two or three years ago.
Speaker 3:That's insane. And so you have this 8 figure business that's really backed essentially by a core product, which I think retails around, like, $300 is what it's showing on your website, $2.50 to 300. So as you're coming with this idea and putting it out there, like, when did you realize you had something special? Like, oh, wow. This is this is starting to work.
Speaker 1:When we first started selling kind of a very basic version in 02/2008, it was easy at the time to rank highly in Google. And so the business wasn't based so much, I think, on the product at the time in 02/2008. It was mainly based on our ability to put it in front of people when they search for this kind of product. So after we started building some scale, I would say in the first couple of years of doing that, I I realized, like, wow. The the product I was selling was not amazing.
Speaker 1:It was an okay product for 2,008 times, 2,008, 2,009, 2,010. But around maybe 02/2011, I started thinking, if I could make this product awesome, then I I could, you know, really, really scale the business. Because people are quite interested buying this okay product that they're they're finding easily. But if I had a great product that they would find easily, then, you know, everything's possible, you know, retail stores, like bigger online distribution. So I really set sort of a a path forward from 2011 or '12 to 02/2014.
Speaker 1:That was development time of turning this sort of novelty item into something that was more like a kitchen appliance.
Speaker 3:So I have some questions because, you know, I'm kinda working on, like, manufacturing, like, a men's grooming product, and making a product is freaking hard. And it takes so much longer than I realized. And my thing is it should be quite simple. You're working on a device that's going on to a a very sensitive part of the body. Like, talk to me about, like, how do you build something that like that that I mean, if if it goes wrong, you're gonna have some very, very bad reviews.
Speaker 3:Like, what advice would you give to people as you're like or, like, lessons learned from going through the manufacturing of that?
Speaker 1:I wasted a year of time with a factory in Taiwan. It was good and bad because the the main, even I was living in China, it was hard for me to know who to trust. That's, I think, a main issue. People are like, well, how do I know who to trust? Because the the factory will just make it on their own.
Speaker 1:Maybe. But, anyway, a factory contacted me from Taiwan, and they actually had done research. And they said, hey. We've seen your product online, and we think that you're selling an okay amount, but we can make the product better for you. So I thought, this is amazing.
Speaker 1:These people contacted me, and they seem okay. They actually specialized in digital whiteboards, kind of like Wi Fi connected whiteboards. And that was a big mistake because they had no understanding of our industry, the materials, the they weren't mechanically inclined people at that factory. And after a year, the sort of prototype they delivered to me was no better than the original product that I gave to them for improvement. So I happened to be at a an adult industry conference in Las Vegas just walking the show, and I met a guy, who also I found out lived in China, an American Taiwanese guy.
Speaker 1:And we started talking, and I told him I was looking for a factory, and he happened to run a factory that is also working for other famous adult toy brands. And really that relationship, just meeting that guy at a show, is and that's the same main factory that I work today. That really started the process. I basically gave them a list. Here's my list of things that the old product is not good at doing, and that's what here's what the new product needs to do.
Speaker 1:Like, I think it should have beads that go around that look like this. Like, I just sort of gave them a list, and they actually have a development studio. And and the first version, they were able to develop for me at their development studio at the factory based on all of my requirements. That said, the first version to the version the 2,000 sort of 14 version to the today version, now we have to do that development process on our own because it's become a lot more high-tech and and the development work is more specialized. But at the time, the factory was able to take my laundry list and incorporate them, 80% of them into a a device.
Speaker 3:So you you're finally starting to nail a product. You're like, this thing is is is is good and it's working. Now let's go into that next phase. How do you, like, scale this? Like, it's doing well, but how do you go that next level of growth?
Speaker 3:And you, like, I put this on lens. Like, we work with a lot of d to c commerce startups where, oh, you wanna grow, spend on Facebook and Instagram and all these other channels. You have some limitations which could be seen as a disadvantage. However, you have grown at an insane rate and you've done something extremely well and that is grow through nontraditional ways and and grow through press. Like, can you talk about, like, what were some of those key, like, events or moments that that helped you, like, get to an excellent growth with press or or other channels?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So as people may or may not know, adult toys may not advertise on Facebook, all of the none of the content networks, Taboola, RevContent, blah blah blah. None none of them. We can't even now they're actually even starting to take down YouTube videos of people just reviewing our product or making jokes about it. I mean, comedians making jokes.
Speaker 1:They can make jokes about anything, but if they make a joke about Auto Blow, they can get their video taken down. So we're quite restrained in one way, but in another way, we're not. So the key first thing that we did that got us, on on the radar was crowdfunding. So this was in 02/2014. We crowdfunded the Autoblow two on on Indiegogo.
Speaker 1:And it became I think we raised, like, 250 or $275,000 of, you know, presales on Indiegogo. But the media picked up this story because it was me in the pitch video. Normally, you know, traditionally and even still, mostly it's adult brands hire fake people to front their brand, porn people, porn stars, or whatever. But it was me, and I made this video about the product, and it's kind of cringey for me. It's hard for me to watch it now, but it was ridiculous.
Speaker 1:And the news story was, look at this, like, cringey video, and people are actually clearly wanting this device because there's thousands of people who are pre pre there's thousands of preorders. So that became a new story, and that new story went viral around the world back in 02/2014. And so I think the foundation of their of our, the rest of our sort of strategy involves, some press coverage, and it all starts with the proof that people are interested in news about my inventions and that that kind of news is gonna be good for their audience and it's gonna be good for their visitors.
Speaker 3:Gotcha. And so it's like it also it just starts with, like, the category in it and your product that that in itself is press worthy, and and you're behind it. And so people pick that up and amplify it. What what else? Because, I mean, I'm looking at your sizzle reel we were just talking about.
Speaker 3:Like, it's insane the press you've gotten. You've been on, like, GQ, Playboy, HBO, Forbes, Vice, recently just on Howard Stern. As you look back, what are some of the the the key moments and any advice you could give to people that wanna be good at press? Because that's something everybody wants, but it's so hard to be like, alright. Let me go out and get press.
Speaker 3:It's like, well, you gotta do something press worthy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think people also ask me that. They'll say, you know, like, oh, could you introduce me to your, like, PR person or whatever? And it's like, you're not gonna get press on, like like, a bookshelf or whatever. You know?
Speaker 1:So I actually you know, I learned from from that experience in 2014 that I will to only invent things that are press worthy, to only invent things that are truly interesting things for the public to learn about. Right? And I learned how to do, you know, my basically, I've created a bunch of stunts over the years, and and media have picked up on them because they're actually good stories. For example, we held a vaginal beauty contest that went viral across the world in, I don't know what what that was, 02/2015. And the the news was this guy put up this page for a vaginal beauty contest.
Speaker 1:And the crazy thing is people are actually visiting it and submitting pictures, and people are coming. I mean, we had millions and millions of people visiting and many, people submitting pictures. And that event blew up to such an extent that at the time, it was Elite Daily. Elite Daily flew a crew out to Germany to witness this kind of we were three d. We used technology that was sort of press worthy.
Speaker 1:We three d scanned the winners to put them on the tops of our products. That was, like, the story. And so and this was an interesting use of a new technology at the time of three d scanning technology because most of that kind of replication of women's body parts for products was done with clay molds by hand or with casting. So that was a kind of it would there was a tech story there, and it was interesting for us to be able to use the latest technology. And at the time then, you know, the scale of what had happened on Indiegogo plus this contest, you know, a journalist from wrote an article for Playboy, like a profile for Playboy, followed me around, went to the factory, went with me to Germany, another journalist came.
Speaker 1:So we just sort of under learned to understand how to create events that I had a lot of fun with, but also were interesting, you know, culturally and technologically interesting for media to write about. And there were more. Like, I made a the thing that comes to mind is the the auto blow. I made an attachment for a Tesla that allows people who drive the Tesla to attach an auto blow so that they could enjoy a blow job while their car drives itself. That's like a culturally and technologically interesting thing to be able to have a blow job while your car drives itself.
Speaker 1:So, car websites and other websites like Vice, they wrote about that because that is a a new thing that's happened in the world. So yeah. And there's been more, you know, a a masturbator specifically made for men in the military, etcetera. So it's sort of a combination of, like, understanding what culturally is interesting for people at a given time and at the same time understanding the limitations of what mainstream media outlets can work with and sort of positioning the story right on the towards the end of the thing. It's not too saucy, but it's just saucy enough that they're willing to explain the story to their listeners and their listeners or watchers share and enjoy the content.
Speaker 3:There's some good takeaways there or one, you ride a trend. Like, Tesla's coming out. Everybody's gonna be talking about how can you be a part of the conversation and doing it in kind of an insane creative way. Another one is you're leveraging new technology combined with the fact that you're doing something that I have never heard of with the beauty pageant like that and then three d rendering. I mean, there's a lot of things to take away where you you have this unfair advantage just with the category you're in that when you put these things on top of it, you you're literally creating these insane events.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and it it reminds me also, like, with AutoBlow AI. You know, we actually conducted a machine learning study of the actions that occurred during blowjobs. I hired, like, real AI scientists to do this, and we discovered the movements and then replicated the movements in the machine. So this is interesting.
Speaker 1:Other companies just like, oh, we released a product today, and it has 10 modes. It's like, no. No. No. We went really deep.
Speaker 1:Like, what are the 10 modes gonna do? What have other people never done? And then on top of it, to make sure that people understand that it was interesting, I produced a short film, like a ten minute documentary about how we, that that basically goes with it. We went to to Serbia, and we filmed the guys who had to watch a thousand hours of blowjob videos to input the data. We flew the film crew to Canada to meet the AI scientists.
Speaker 1:We met the we went to the place where the guys in Canada helped me to, co helped me to invent the product as well. And we really told the story, And then we released the film online, and we got some press around this short film explaining a thing that so it's basically a combined entertainment with the technology. And I think that's sort of, at least for us, the key. But I do think it's a difficult strategy to follow for people who don't have particularly interesting, products, like culturally interesting products.
Speaker 3:That's insane. I didn't even know about that documentation of it. That that's really smart. And one thing that kind of really astounds me is you're running this like fast growing well into 8 figure company. You have a core flagship product.
Speaker 3:Talk about your team. Because when I see these DTC startups, they just raised $20,000,000. They get a a nice office in Soho. All of a sudden, they have headcount of 60 people. Like, what does your operation look like?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Every time I see companies, especially in my space, boasting about how many people they have, I think, like, you are boasting about the wrong thing. You know, part of my goal since the beginning, it was, number one, I made the decision never to take, money from investors, and two, to keep my head count relatively low because I don't think that for me, it would be fun. I don't wanna work in I don't wanna run a big company people wise. And I saw a lot of friends of mine get really bogged down in the kind of ugly, uninteresting day to day details of running companies that have rooms full of people.
Speaker 1:So our structure is quite unusual for our size. It's basically, it's me. I have a a guy, like a partner, and I've worked with many, many years in Romania in Alex. He controls all the technical side of the business. Him and kind of one guy sometimes he has one or two guys that that, help him in Romania.
Speaker 1:And everyone else, we have some customer service, few customer service people. But other than that sort of core team of, like, several customer service and the technical person or two, everyone else is hired on demand only for things that we need. So for example, we use Upwork. I've used Upwork when it was Get A Freelancer since 02/2008, then it was oDesk. Now it's Upwork.
Speaker 1:And now I have a pretty good list of people I I go to when I need specific things. But for example, many companies of our size certainly would have a few designers on staff, but I don't believe in, I don't believe that many people are multitalented. Okay? So we have designers, that I I hire as needed. But for example, some of them only do graphics for, one of them only does three d renderings.
Speaker 1:A guy a great guy from, Ukraine. Another guy in Argentina, I go to him only for some design needs, we needed a new autoblow picture with some words written in a specific way or, oh, I need a poster for retail stores. He makes me that kind of stuff. There's another guy in Brazil. There's one guy and his team in Brazil have made all of my product packaging since, you know, I don't know, 2015 or something.
Speaker 1:And then there are specialists for banners. If I need banners, is it if they're video banners, go to one guy. If they're other kind of banners, they go to another guy. So I I hire only those kind of people on demand. And the same with if we have a when we did our AI, study, we looked at what we could do ourselves with it, but I thought, okay.
Speaker 1:I need to hire out a company. So there are a lot of companies, like, five or 10 people companies specialized in all kinds of stuff around the world that I've hired for, you know, niche work. Like, you'll notice on our website, we have animations. We explain things to our customers through animation. So there's a studio that I've used for many years, and, you know, that guy and his team have always done our animation work, but I don't need to keep some kind of animator on staff.
Speaker 1:And it goes like that for everything. There are probably dozens of people who I know who I can contact at any time. I might not be able to get them today. For example, like, the three d designer, he's excellent. And if I have a new project, like, I just got a bunch of graphics done.
Speaker 1:I said, hey, Dennis, I need this stuff. He's like, okay. In, you know, fifteen days, I'll be free. So I say, okay. I'll wait fifteen days.
Speaker 1:So I miss, you know, in a way being able to get that kind of thing done immediately, but I gain not having someone sitting around doing nothing. So, yeah, there's very few people I need to have actually, interactions with on a daily basis.
Speaker 3:Gotcha. So every d two c founder that's listening to this about to jump out the window, you're you're like, well, need figures, and you have basically less than five people, running. And the other, I think, lesson learned there is, like, you because I think a lot of startups starting out, you have issues of, like, do you go for the generalist or the specialist? And a lot of times, I see they start with the generalist who can help. And then as you grow, you go to the specialist.
Speaker 3:But what you're doing is you have this almost like Rolodex of specialists on an as needed basis that you're able to leverage. So you can be really good and efficient, but you're also not, yeah, wasting time or, like, spending money on high overhead and also just, man, the issues that come with managing people and whatnot is is is definitely, you know, time consuming as well. Dude, that's super impressive.
Speaker 1:I I mean, I've noticed, you know, especially in in EO, a lot of people often a topic is about, like, company culture. You know? And I don't know that anyone would say that my company has a a culture. There's a the people who I interact with, we kinda we know each other. We chat about stuff once in a while, but I don't know that I don't get into so many details with so many people because our interactions are really mostly by email or by some kind of chat, and it's mainly about the work.
Speaker 1:And I think if you would add up the time savings, over the last, you know, thirteen years I've been doing this, I think it's quite a lot to be able just to email a guy and say, hey. Here's my renderings project. And he says, okay. I'll have you your draft in fifteen days, and that's the only interactions we needed. That is actually a huge time savings multiplied times all the people I've needed to hire to get to where we are.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's just a matter of, like, you project managing it is is the only issue, but you'd still be doing that if people were in house. No, man. That's that's super impressive. So here's what I'm interested in because we work with a lot of companies where they're like, you know, Hey, how do we get to our like a million or 2,000,000?
Speaker 3:And then we work with companies like, Hey, I want to get to 10,000,000 and then comes in, I want to get to 20,000,000. You've done all of that. What has changed as far as, you know, different channels that have worked for you online, offline, or the the different, you know, ways you've gone to those different milestones? Because the way we see it is you can easily get to 1,000,000 on back of one channel doing, like, Facebook ads or whatever. As you you go up, we're seeing people need to get more organic traffic, more referral traffic.
Speaker 3:We then see companies getting better doing offline and online. One thing that you've done, like, so well is you've had offline working and not just in one market, but you're literally global. So I don't know if you could speak to, like, the path of, like, as you grew, like, that was because of these channels that opened up or these different things you were doing.
Speaker 1:You know, there was a time that we sold on we never sold auto blow on Amazon. We sold other kind of white label products on Amazon, and that provided some revenue. But in the end for us, Amazon just became a timed a very a high risk time suck. And the one of the best moves I ever made was to liquidate all of our inventory for Amazon and pledge to never sell on Amazon again. I think people are and like like us, so we were we were sort of odd by the size of what was possible in Amazon.
Speaker 1:But once we got into the nitty gritty of the details of actually selling there, it is a dystopian nightmare of a company to put it politely. So I think that, you know, there's also we we tried a bit with eBay and some other marketplaces, but, you know, actually, the main thing that we that we have the biggest return on our investment of time was just making people find out about our brand name from some kind of channel online so that when they shop in stores I mean, that was another phase was starting to sell to stores. But the reason people often buy it in stores is because they know about the brand from the Internet, and store store staff tell us that. So really, we've put all of our resources into almost all of our resources looking back at making people know know and search for the auto blow brand name when they go to Google and do a search. That's pretty much it.
Speaker 3:So when you say all of your resources, does that mean the the efforts you're doing for these PR stunts and press and putting it out there, it's really to do this halo effect of they need to know this brand. So when they're in the buyer's mindset, it's top of mind. Is is that what you're getting at?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, we advertise you know, we we sell a a relatively more expensive, adult product so we can afford, and we've become technically excellent in advertising on large porn platforms. So we can relatively profitably advertise on the largest porn websites in the world. And so when we're getting eyeballs of people who are watching porn, those people aren't exactly buyers. It's not, like, great traffic, but they are people who may eventually get the idea to buy a sex toy, especially for the first time.
Speaker 1:And, so just having that in so many millions of people's minds is helpful. The media is helpful for that as well, especially the media that people talk about. So we sometimes we sponsor YouTubers, videos, and so, you know, that have, like, a very active fan bases. So once, you know, Autoblow appears in a video, then we find out on their Reddit that their community is talking about it. That kind of stuff just spreads.
Speaker 1:And so over many, many years, yeah, our basically, a single goal is just to get brand name recognition for the brand so that people know, oh, Audible, that's the best, like, you know, automatic sex toy for men.
Speaker 3:So I've I've heard of some other startups that were advertising, like, porn in adult websites. I heard it was really good from, impressions share and, like, brand awareness. Was it was tough for conversion, but are you seeing, like, efficiencies by doing that or is it is it pretty competitive over there?
Speaker 1:It's very competitive, especially because as, weed has become legal in different places, the weed companies have started competing for the, ads on, on the porn networks. So that's not that good because before there were already there were porn subscription websites and there were cams websites and there were some toys. But now there are more and more industries, especially cannabis, is okay advertising on porn sites. So it costs it it's mainly it's not such a driver of direct sales, but it is good for our branding. But it is expensive, and we have had to learn how to be technically excellent at doing that, including, working with APIs and spending enough money to get API access to such resources.
Speaker 3:Gotcha. Super interesting. So you probably don't like giving advice just with like the the the the way EO goes, but like for anybody that's getting started in ecommerce, like what what advice or what would you tell to them if they're trying to like go all in on their own thing?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I hate it, guys. But I think one of the kind of the most valuable thing that I ever did for my business is to focus on this single brand. You know, at one time, we thought we would have Auto Blow would be like one brand, and then I thought, oh, I'm gonna have, like, all these adult brands. And I made a a a I made all kinds of stuff.
Speaker 1:I used to make artificial vaginas and anal toys, and I made a women's brand called Ladygasm, and I had different kinds of Ladygasm products. So I thought I was gonna be multi brand, and that was my sort of way I was gonna start selling more and more and more. And what I found later was that all I had done is just split my time from the thing I was best at, which is selling automatic sex toys to men, and things I was not so good at selling, things that are commonly sold by other people. You know? So I think I I learned I should specialize in one that it was after expanding and wasting a lot of time.
Speaker 1:I think the best thing that we ever did as a business is focus only on developing and improving, basically, like, two devices. And now we're gonna make a few more devices in the next couple of years, but let's say we have only four products. There are not that many companies that specialize in so few products. And, all of the efforts that we put in continue to differentiate ourselves from competing products. Whereas if we try to focus on other things at the same time, we would lose our edge, the thing that we're good at, which are making these mechanical, devices.
Speaker 3:Man, I'm a little envious. Focus is so hard because I well, it sounds like you've kinda gone through the the shiny object syndrome that I think everybody does, but you've been disciplined to come back to just focus and, like, the the numbers and results kinda speak for itself. When did you go all in on kind of the core product and, like, discard everything else?
Speaker 1:I think it was by now, maybe something like five years ago. Mhmm. And to do that was was painful. We had, we had inventory that you know, when we left Amazon, we had, half a million dollars of inventory of cost. I sold that to a chain for a $125,000.
Speaker 1:It was two or three. I think it was three three fifty three foot trucks full of stuff and just saying goodbye to it. Taking that was a $375,000 loss. And then once we we had other websites that were selling that stuff as well. That was our Amazon inventory, but closing down these additional websites selling that stuff, throwing stuff in the garbage.
Speaker 1:I mean, you know, throwing $10,000 of of vibrators where the batteries had expired, you know, into the garbage was not easy to do, but we were paying storage on it. So making that transition actually cost, money, but but it it provided a huge, I think, profitability boost in in the long run.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, it looks really smart looking back, but I'm sure at the time, you're like, is this the right move? I hope it is, but it clearly paid off. One question I like to ask ask everybody as we kinda end this is, what's the nicest thing anyone's ever done for you in your career?
Speaker 1:I don't think anyone's ever done anything nice for me in my career, actually. But, you know, when I go back to I I can think about a few positive moments. Really, it it's around getting the Audible into retailers in The US and in Europe. You know, after the product was for sale on the Internet and people were really buying, this was after it was crowdfunded, after we were selling Audible too. People were searching for it.
Speaker 1:It had good Google search. We went to some event to try to meet the retailers and a lot of the, you know, the retailers came from a different universe. Even though we had so many Google searches, a lot of retailers were like, oh, I never heard of this thing. It's like, yeah, because you don't really use the Internet, I guess, that much. And so most of them tried to, like, critique the the product.
Speaker 1:They say, oh, if you did this, maybe you'd better. And it's like, no. No. No. The product is already how it's gonna be.
Speaker 1:Okay? So you're either buying it or not. So there were a few people at this event who believed me because they literally didn't believe me when I said, people know this brand. When they walk in your store, they're gonna know the brand because they know it on the Internet. And they were like, I don't believe.
Speaker 1:They basically did. They didn't tell me I don't believe, but they didn't believe me. So I I have very positive feelings towards a few of the adult shop chain owners who trusted me that I was telling them the truth. And they were rewarded with being early sellers of the item as well. But I yeah.
Speaker 1:I have a kind of like fond memories of those people who I mean, it's not so it sounds like a normal thing to do just to believe someone, but most people, they didn't believe us that the product was popular on the Internet. So I appreciated that those people, yeah, believed me and took a chance to take some inventory and let me prove it to them.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, it's hard enough to get into retail with traditional products. I don't know with with this category, but it's like getting that break. I mean, that's a huge unlock. I mean, can you speak to, like, your overall revenue?
Speaker 3:Like, how much is online versus offline?
Speaker 1:We actually sell most I mean, I I don't know the the breakdown. We we sell we have more revenue generated from our online sales
Speaker 3:That's awesome.
Speaker 1:Than we do from offline sales. But we sell a lot of pieces offline because they're not as profitable to sell. So I don't know what the piece breakdown, but definitely we sell more revenue wise d to c than we do b to b.
Speaker 3:That's awesome. Then you can actually own the relationship with the customer. Well, Brian, this was awesome, man. This is it's insane what you've built. But what, if people wanna learn more about you or what you're working on, what where should, where can we point them?
Speaker 1:I guess they could just go to, they can go to autoblow.com. They wanna see, our devices. And if they wanna look at our company page, they can go to vlikevictor,ieci.com, v I e c I, to just check out sort of our web page and our media, and they could get in in touch with us through the contact page there.
Speaker 3:No. That's awesome. And, like I said, yeah, I mean, your press is insane. You're just on Howard Stern like Joe Rogan's talked about it. And there there's a really cool sizzle reel there if people wanna see what what what all you've accomplished.
Speaker 3:But, Brian, thank you so much for the time, man.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Thanks for having me, and I hope that people found an interesting or useful piece of information.
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