I Went From Broke To $1B+ In just 3 years

- April 24, 2026 (about 1 hour ago) • 01:02:46

Transcript

Start Time	Speaker	Text
00:00	Sam Parr	Zero to over $1,000,000,000 in 32 months. It's maniacal.
00:03	Chad Janis	"We're quite literally just getting started."
00:05	Shaan Puri	"Where do you think the gap is to really jump from average or good to great?"
00:09	Chad Janis	If you want to have the greatest odds of success, it's by creating a new format. New formats win.
00:14	Shaan Puri	"You obviously spotted one really great opportunity. I'm curious, what other opportunities do you spot?"
00:18	Chad Janis	I think there's an idea that no one else is going to be able to run it. There's a $10 billion business idea.
00:23	Sam Parr	"You should just say it now and we'll bleep it out."
00:25	Chad Janis	"We'll talk about that. I think that's the biggest opportunity for founders."
00:28	Sam Parr	"What are the inputs necessary to reach $100,000,000 in revenue for an e-commerce brand in three years?"
00:32	Chad Janis	Here. Here's what I'll say.
00:43	Shaan Puri	So, here's three things I'd love for you to deliver: 1. Origin story. I want to know the origin story — like, how the hell did you have the idea, and why did you have the confidence in the idea? We're gonna go there. 2. Marketing funnel. You sent us a thing about your marketing funnel, which is: what does world-class marketing look like in this scenario? 3. Brainstorm / next steps. The last part: I want to riff with you and brainstorm on "where to from here." You obviously spotted one really great opportunity — I'm curious what other opportunities you spot.
01:07	Chad Janis	Yeah, let's do it.
01:08	Shaan Puri	Okay, sweet, dude. I've been... I've been taking grooms [unclear] for, I don't know, six—six to twelve months now. It's basically like eating candy. It's like you open up a pack of gummy bears, you eat them, and then you're like, "I just had vegetables." Totally. I ate gummy bears, but I think I just had vegetables. Maybe. Totally. So, I want to know: where were you sitting when you were like, "You know what? What if we did this?"
01:32	Chad Janis	Yeah, so I like to describe myself as an entrepreneur who had short stints in private equity and investment banking. I've started three companies—this is my third—and I actually didn't want to start a company. I was leaving a private equity firm in Boston called Summit Partners to go get my MBA at Stanford. I told myself, "Look, I just want to have a normal MBA experience for two years. I'm not going to start anything. Maybe I'll do an internship in the summer." Two weeks before leaving for Stanford, I was at my parents' place in Utah, doing some work and drinking a greens powder in my dad's office. I remember looking up, super vividly, and thinking, "There's no way I'm keeping this habit past 30 days." I'll do it because I always finish what I started, but I'm not going to stick to this habit after 30 days. It wasn't just the taste for me; it was the weird frothy sediment at the bottom of the drink. The biggest thing—this is probably unique to me—is that I remember staring at the bottle sitting on the countertop, on the drying rack. I'm sort of an OCD person, and I thought, "If I commit to this habit, I've got to stare at that bottle on the countertop for the rest of my life." There's just no way that's going to happen. That got me thinking: how do I take comprehensive supplement nutrition and put it in some format—at the time I didn't know it would be a gummy—that gets people looking forward to it? So they go to bed thinking, "I can't wait to have that tomorrow." That's a complete pivot, I think, from how people usually think about supplementation.
03:14	Sam Parr	"Can we, like, roll it into a blunt now?"
03:16	Shaan Puri	"Yeah, yeah — exactly. Look, hey: we'll smoke your greens."
03:20	Chad Janis	We'll talk about that. I honestly think that's the biggest opportunity for founders. People just want to rip on the formats that work, but I think if you want the greatest odds of success, it's by creating a new format. So if it's a blunt — awesome. If it's these little "zen" pouches that people are doing now, and they're making those focused so they're non-nicotine — great. New formats win.
03:43	Sam Parr	Did you think that— I mean, it's maniacal. Thirty-two months to a $1 billion exit is maniacal. Did you call your shot? Were you like, "That's where we're gonna go," or were you like, "Who knows"? I mean, what—where was your mindset when you started it?
03:59	Chad Janis	This is a bit shocking to hear, but we've basically met the forecast that we put in place since the very beginning. You have to appreciate—I talked with thousands of entrepreneurs when I was at Summit Partners. I looked at the proprietary datasets; I don't have them anymore, obviously, but I have a very visual memory. So I know the LTVs and CACs of hundreds of brands. For me, it's weird. I could tell you—I won't—but I could tell you what every big brand's LTV, CAC, and margin looks like, all the brands that we know of today. Now, I didn't really forecast beyond $100 million of revenue because that would be pretty pointless, like I'm not...
04:38	Shaan Puri	A sociopath—yeah, there's a fine line between ambition and being just absolutely batshit. You're saying that now. I want to ask you something about the in-between: when you're like, "Oh, I don't really enjoy this form factor—what if there was another?" You said you didn't have gummies right away; it wasn't like you immediately had the fully baked idea. I'm curious: what were the companies or products you admired? I sort of have this thing where what you admire becomes a little bit of your destiny—your admiration becomes your destination. If you think about a great entrepreneur—Steve Jobs, famously—who did he admire? What products did he admire? You steal little elements of them and they sort of bleed out into your final products years later. Same thing with comedians and moviemakers. What were the products and companies you thought were kick-ass that you feel inspired some of the result of "grooens"? [term unclear—transcribed as "grooens"]
05:32	Chad Janis	Yeah, look — I sat on the board or observed the boards of great brands like Ruggable, Doctor Squatch, Brooklinen, Chubbies, Solo Stove, Thuma — twelve different businesses. I learned a lot from the unique problems and, frankly, the recipes that worked for each of them. I would say that the brand I think we most closely resemble in terms of execution is Doctor Squatch.
05:55	Sam Parr	"Is that deodorant?"
05:56	Chad Janis	It's the cold-process soaps—the bar soaps that are for men.
06:02	Shaan Puri	"I've seen the marketing, but I think I have the deodorant. I don't know what's so special about it. Is there something cool about it?"
06:08	Chad Janis	So what's cool about it is they just sold to Unilever last year for 1,500,000,000 [dollars]. In that business, what's cool is that cold-process soap is more natural. You're not getting all the chemicals and it's a very clean product. But because of the branding, the approach, and the partnerships they've done — like Harry Potter, Star Wars, SpongeBob — they've taken an approach where you, as a consumer, relate to the brand. Prior to Doctor Squatch, I don't even know what I was using. I was probably using whatever my wife was buying and stocking in the shower. They were the inspiration for us. What they've done within the personal care space — making it a joy for the consumer — is what we aspire to do within supplementation. I mean, we all spend time on social media. You get one ad and it's like: "Oh my goodness, Sean-san, I don't know how old you guys are, but you're blank years old and you've never heard of creatine? What the hell are you doing with your life? You're gonna die tomorrow." And then you get a colostrum ad: "What are you doing with your life? You need to be taking colostrum right now. It does a blank% increase in blank body metric." I just think the way we've approached this — taking inspiration from Doctor Squatch — is to make our supplementation a lifestyle: something that people look forward to, that resonates with who they are and how they live their lives.
07:32	Shaan Puri	Alright, let's take a quick break. This podcast is called My First Million, and it's probably the question we get asked the most: How do I go from zero to making my first million? I did an episode a little while back where I broke down exactly the philosophy and frameworks I would use. Topics included finding your white belt business, identifying your "bear on the unicycle" advantage, the core way that your two skills could overlap, and why maybe starting a service business is better than starting a software business for your initial business to make that first million. The team at HubSpot has created a guide that took the stuff I said in that episode and laid it all out for you. You can get it for free in the description below — just click that link and it's all yours. Alright, back to the steps.
08:11	Sam Parr	"How much money did you raise to get to your first million in revenue, and how fast did it come?"
08:15	Chad Janis	Yeah. Month one we did about $30,000 in revenue, and month two was already about $230,000. So I guess, in month two — a month into the business — we had already crossed the $1,000,000 run rate, maybe $2.5–$3 million at that. I've never really looked at the business that way. Maybe you've heard me talk about LTV to CAC.
08:35	Sam Parr	Yeah.</FormattedResponse>
08:36	Chad Janis	I would say we probably burned through about $8,000,000,000 of capital until we reached profitability. That could have been less if we had slowed down growth a little bit. But, just the way it worked out is that we — I think we've earned through $8,000,000 of primary capital before we hit profitability. </FormattedResponse>
08:54	Shaan Puri	"You mentioned focusing on LTV to CAC. For you, what's good and what's great?"
09:00	Chad Janis	Yeah. I think table stakes for businesses that need to be acquired is that you need to be at least three. The best I saw—one obviously goes where we're at—but during the COVID era I would see brands in the four-to-five range. Those brands are probably two-and-a-half to three times right now.
09:17	Sam Parr	But when you say LTV, are you referring to—so LTV (lifetime value), for an e‑commerce brand: does "value" mean your contribution margin?
09:27	Chad Janis	Yeah, let me describe that. The way that I always look at it, I use a three-year period — so 36 months. LTV (lifetime value) is fully burdened gross profit, meaning: Sam orders our product. What are the total costs stripped out of that value to get it to Sam's door? So you've got product COGS, you've got discounts, returns, you've got fulfillment, shipping, merchant processing fees... you've got all of that that gets it to the door. That's your lifetime value over a three-year period. How much contribution (gross profit) are you getting from the consumer over three years? </FormattedResponse>
10:03	Sam Parr	"And you use three years not because that's how long someone subscribes to Groon's [unclear]. You just said three years — everyone should use three years."
10:08	Shaan Puri	Because you can't do a lifetime.</FormattedResponse>
10:10	Chad Janis	Yeah, I think it's a productive way of looking at it to optimize against. I mean, we obviously look at three months, six months, and twelve months, and try to make adjustments based on that. But yeah—we've got consumers who are... we're 32 months old, so we haven't hit that 36-month mark. There's very clearly going to be consumers who continue purchasing into, I guess, "perpetuity."
10:34	Shaan Puri	And you picked a name that—if you had told me, I would have said, "Hey, brother, do you wanna win? Or are you gonna put an umlaut over one of the letters and nobody knows how to say it?" And then you won. So I'm an idiot. What... what... what's the—what gives?
10:50	Chad Janis	So, what I always say here is—and Sam botched "Gruens" at the start. He said "Grooms," which is totally fine. What I tell people is: I do not care how you pronounce our name as long as you're buying. You can call it "Gruens" if you want. You can call it "Grooms." Which is correct? It's "Gruens."
11:07	Shaan Puri	But did you think it was a good name? Did you know something none of us do, or did you just not care about the name? And how the hell did you arrive at that name?
11:15	Chad Janis	Yeah. So the word "gruns" — with an s — I guess I can show you here — actually doesn't mean anything in the German language. The word "grun" means green in German, but once you throw an s on it, there's actually no meaning to it. So when I threw an s on it, it just seemed kind of fun and playful. You've got this natural smiley face. It felt like something that we could brand over time really well. It's simple. But you're right — at least in America, very uniquely in America — like [percentage unclear] of consumers don't know how to pronounce it.
11:48	Sam Parr	"That would be your argument to the team: 'No, guys — it makes a ton of sense now. It may not make sense in America, but... yeah.'"
11:54	Shaan Puri	It does.
11:54	Sam Parr	"Sean, we had — we had this guy, David, on who runs a company called Lexicon. His whole job is naming companies. He's named Swiffer, Febreze, Sonos, BlackBerry. Sean, what do you think David would say about that name?"
12:09	Shaan Puri	Well, it's hard to know, right? Because he's got this little AI computer brain where he's like "yes/no," and it's almost like a sommelier describing the taste of a wine. Then you just have to nod along like an idiot and be like, "Yeah—I sense the notes that you're talking about there." I thought notes are for music, but I definitely sense... So, you know, I think it's hard to know, but I would have guessed low, right? You're talking about something that doesn't make much sense in America, the market we're going after—but you did it anyways. What was the runner-up name? Or, you know, in the brainstorming process, sometimes you start with, "Here's what we're definitely not gonna call it," because it kind of guides you away from maybe some typical areas.
12:46	Chad Janis	Honestly, I hit it pretty quickly, so I guess I didn't mention this: I grew up Mormon, and I served a two-year mission in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. I'm fluent in German, and so, when I had the thought...
12:59	Sam Parr	I have a pretty sick assignment.
13:01	Chad Janis	Yeah, totally. It's literally called the "Alpine German-speaking Mission."
13:05	Sam Parr	Yeah, someone else could have been assigned to reading California... or...
13:09	Chad Janis	Yeah, totally. That wouldn't be too bad. That wouldn't be too bad — there's worse.
13:14	Shaan Puri	alright so you have the ideas how long did it take you to go from idea in your head to I know what the product is gonna be and I have my first batch and then I go for sale like what
13:25	Chad Janis	was that timeline like yeah so coming up with gummies took about a day I I grew up you're gonna think it's crazy you know those like big like I guess they call them like single day servings of sour patch watermelon yeah slices yeah yeah I would eat those gummies one of those every day in college like a full 450 calories every day I've always been a gummy fiend and so now I get to obviously have like a productive health gummy every single day and there's a ton of them that we sell I have a ton of ideas always circulating in my head and this notion doc I have and typically I sit on those ideas for about a year this one I was like it's so obvious I gotta do this I'm the right person to do it and so I started working on it immediately getting it to launch now to answer your question there I immediately like within a week of having the gummy sort of connection said okay why hasn't somebody done this in gummy form right like you've got a ton of gummies why hasn't somebody put comprehensive nutrition in a gummy and the big moment for me was the entire gummy industry is built around these 60 or 30 count bottles transparent bottles with a cap on the top that that is as gummy exists so I asked the question what what would need to change what would it need to look like to have gummy be comprehensive nutrition and then that's when I went down the path of like okay if it's a you know a pack how big is the pack how many gummies are in it what's the flavor of the gummy right what's the total
14:55	Shaan Puri	sam sam you've never taken the product
14:57	Sam Parr	right no I'm gonna buy it now though
14:59	Shaan Puri	so the way it works is this is a good. You just brought up which is you don't like when we say it's a gummy you think it's a it's a gummy no a single serving you eat eight of these things so it's literally like having a pack of sourbatch kids which I think was you know seems fine whatever it but that's actually pretty non obvious and if I'm reading between the lines of or if I'm understanding what you're saying you're saying one of the reasons nobody had done the comprehensive gummy was because the gummy would need to be like you know four inches large to contain everything but what if we made it what if we made it where it's not a gummy a day it's a pack of eight we we exactly package them as little pouches of eight and that's how that's how we can do this when other people may not have tried to do this
15:41	Chad Janis	yeah yeah it's it's our packs are it's about eight we go off of gram weight which is about 20 grams and some grams are smaller or bigger than others but yeah it's a it's a full every gummy is identical in terms of nutrition it's sort of the total of the eight in this case that make up the full dose
15:58	Sam Parr	I just think that it's insane that I asked you a question that I thought was gonna be ridiculous about like you pointing like babe ruth and saying like you know we're gonna get to this and you're like yes that was part of the plan I mean it's pretty audacious to say I'm gonna get to a 100,000,000 in revenue in less than three years for the people listening what are the inputs necessary to get to a 100,000,000 in revenue for an ecom brand in three years
16:21	Chad Janis	so it doesn't have to be consumables I think everybody points at consumables these days and they're like ah supplements it it's like it's a better business it's not necessarily a better business because if you're selling a a hard good like bedsheets or furniture your margins are gonna be worse it's gonna be more difficult to ship like there's a lot of things in there but you theoretically make money on day one in supplements you don't you gotta make that money on the retention so that that's a new lever you gotta pull to make the business work so to answer it directly sam I think first and foremost you've gotta have a good product and good product doesn't mean like make a better version of greens like that's not gonna work for people what's gonna work is finding that product category that white space good product equals new white space so you've seen I'm sure you guys have seen these like nicotine pouches the whip and like ultras of the world I would not encourage
17:10	Sam Parr	an energy it's basically looks like a zen but it's not tobacco or nicotine it's energy
17:16	Chad Janis	yeah yeah it's like like caffeine and other things that like the nicotine pouches amazing not because I'm a believer in the product but amazing because now you're taking a new format a form factor that doesn't have competitors and so I think anybody looking at it and be like oh I'm gonna do it too like you might find a little bit of success but you're not gonna sell your business you're not gonna be the winner here go find a new product format symbiotic I came out with these little liposomals who else have I seen that that's created new oh you've got like do you know the product dose it's like the liver health product it's like these little shot glasses it's like it's like a concentrated liquid that's another one I wouldn't
17:55	Sam Parr	even refer to them a concentrated liquid of what liver
17:58	Chad Janis	like their supplement is a concentrated liquid for the liver so look up I think it's dailydose.co is the website that's another product that has like a unique format another one for you you guys know mary ruth organics or roe nutrition r h o
18:15	Shaan Puri	uh-huh so
18:16	Chad Janis	those are like I'm not sure if they're liposomal but they're like liquid vitamins right like their approaches were the liquid vitamins and I'm shocked there's no not more competition doing that like these are big businesses every single one of the ones I just mentioned is a big business doing really well
18:31	Sam Parr	so the framework of this is taking a thing that everyone knows or or many people know and just slightly changing the form the the the way you consume but everything that you've named so far has been a consumable
18:42	Chad Janis	correct because that's the space that I'm like most familiar with and people typically are looking at right now but like it would be the same thing like do you know how big cozy earth is their whole thing was bamboo sheets right and and I don't if you ask me I'm sure other businesses sell bamboo sheets but like that's their thing and and like they're a big business as well and so I I could give you examples across all sorts of categories obviously supplementation is the easiest for people to visualize
19:10	Shaan Puri	wow so the step one you're saying is good product but let's say that less generically what you're saying is the right product and the right product is a category that's not already supersaturated and you either either you take an existing category you change the form factor to make it new or you find a new pain. New problem new supplement new whatever and you're gonna do it you you need some. Of key differentiation your vitamins but your liquid your sheets but your bamboo yep your you know your greens but your gummies and you find that key. Of differentiation which gives you new category alright that's step one
19:43	Chad Janis	exactly machine and to be clear a couple that I've just seen recently and then I'll tell you the step two I've seen jelly beans as a form factor I've seen lollipops right like people are it it do I think that those businesses are gonna be huge probably not like it's a little bit niche but like they're probably gonna be more successful than somebody making a gummy like us
20:02	Shaan Puri	hey stupid question yeah you started this by saying sour patch kids yeah how come none of the gummies are sour
20:08	Chad Janis	this is well why doesn't
20:10	Shaan Puri	anybody be like it's sour vitamins
20:11	Chad Janis	t I would that tbd we we might we might give you something like that sean I'm a sour fiend as well I'm I'm gonna hit that don't worry
20:19	Shaan Puri	sometimes I wanna start the business and then sometimes I realize oh I know I'm just hungry and I just wanna eat that thing and I don't need to start and that this might be the category where maybe I'm just hungry
20:28	Sam Parr	wait you actually said something interesting you said it's too niche is there a what's your to getting to a 100,000,000 in revenue is there okay so you said take the form factor and then the second or I don't know if it's the second name but there there is a tam related thing here is there like a threshold where you're like this has legs
20:46	Chad Janis	look like I'm I'm I'm a bit psycho right like all I've seen around me is businesses getting to hundreds of millions of revenue quickly so like my gauge for success is in the business I started the first business I started I literally sunset six months in it was in a 100,000 of revenue and 90% ebitda margins and I sunset it because I said this isn't big enough like this isn't but that's how I'm wired right like if somebody wanted to get to a $5,000,000 cash flow business and run that like that's that's massive success so I'm I'm not gonna like deter people from
21:16	Sam Parr	but I wanna know your your threshold
21:19	Chad Janis	yeah my threshold well I mean my my sites are even bigger now right like I'm still working on grooms and nutrobes and juiced and these products you see behind me we have more than just gruens now happy to talk about that but I mean at this. I'm looking only at stuff that can be $110,000,000,000 outcomes somewhere around there
21:39	Shaan Puri	so let's let's keep going in your formula what's what's do we do step two or no
21:43	Chad Janis	number two and this is the end of it is ltv to cac so if your if your business has an ltv to cac of three times + you are golden anytime people talk about profitability anytime people talk about mer I'm not sure if you're familiar with that it's like marketing efficiency ratio I the way that you think about it is like if you're if you spend 20% of your marketing or of your revenue on marketing then the inverse of that is a five x mer right so one divided by
22:14	Shaan Puri	two all you're saying is I want a machine where I can buy a customer for a dollar and I know that in thirty six months that customer will pay me back $3 I'm gonna dump as much dollars I can into the front of that funnel as long as that's possible and I'd say the key here is most people I I don't know maybe maybe I'm just wrong but I think a lot of people think lifetime revenue lifetime value as just revenue and what you're saying importantly here is it's the you know totally fully loaded gross profit so to get to three you're probably actually doing $6 of revenue on that customer close to a $5.05 to 6 to get $3 of gross profit off that off that customer
22:48	Chad Janis	whatever your margin is but yeah that's correct you've gotta do but if you hit that three times fully burdened gross profit ltv divided by your cac and that equals three or more you've got a business
23:01	Sam Parr	how did you know that grooens was gonna be one to three
23:05	Chad Janis	I didn't I've I'd seen enough to know how it might play out but we we came out with a cac everybody in our company since day one knew what our cac ceiling was that would result in a three times or greater ltv to cac
23:19	Sam Parr	can you say what that number is or no
23:21	Chad Janis	when when I first started I mean I can't really tell you but what I'll tell you is it's two x higher today than it was on day one of launching the business why it's not because we magically got better ltv it's because I set the cac so low to ensure that we'd be able to hit it
23:36	Sam Parr	so what does that mean then your ads need to be extra catchy in order to make extra catchy ads you need like a super good offer or a super good story or a super like it's
23:46	Chad Janis	all of it it's kind of all of it and that that's where like I think this gets so difficult is people are like you know sometimes I see the shadow figures that are running these drop shipping companies and they're like gruen's ads are bad like they're not even good they're so like non creative and that's because we're like a reputable company that doesn't say we can cure cancer or you know like do these things that some of these shadow figures do like that's not creative that's just actually like bad to do as a human but like to answer your question like it's not just like creating good good ads you gotta have the good offer you've gotta have the good retention you gotta have a good product you have to have a product that people actually wanna take on like our amazon ltv to cac is phenomenal like and and that's on a platform where we're not advertising the way that you do on meta we're not like you don't have your subscription portal in a certain way it's like a one click cancel button and that's like leagues beyond what I've seen with other brands in terms of amazon economics
24:39	Shaan Puri	d2c is one of these funny spaces like I I think I dmed you
24:44	Chad Janis	I I read our dm sean from like it was a couple years ago it would it would have been like in 2023 like three months into the business you're asking about the landing page
24:52	Shaan Puri	yeah so three months into the business I was I think I just sent you a compliment I was like I think your landing page is really great yeah I guess the interesting thing is you were really you were quiet right because there's this weird paradox and I would call it the drop shipper's paradox which is sort of the louder somebody tends to be about their ecommerce success I sort of I sort of proportionally increased my skepticism and I feel like you were very quiet and you built a killer business and then now once you've kind of like you know reached a big exit and amount to top sure you could talk a little bit more about it you're doing a little bit sweating one more time what do you think about that what do you see when you look out at the landscape of like people who are are quite vocal quite loud on on d2c twitter and other places
25:34	Chad Janis	you know I I wanna have sympathy for how others run their businesses and so what I will say is like I've had chats with some of these people who are louder who are running you know these businesses that they they're little shadow businesses like you don't know what their business is but it's doing a 100,000,000 of revenue or whatever and I and what I've come to realize is some of these people just don't know yet that what they're doing is inappropriate right that the ads they're running is inappropriate they don't really understand the consequences they're you know they're fist bumping their friends about the lamborghini they just bought and so what I would say there is like I think it's less about how loud people are I think it's about the natural evolution that we all go through as we learn what it means to be like a a reputable business person running like a a clean business and and that comes with time I I have to learn most of it through amazing brands that with the great executive teams that I learned from who are mentors and friends and and I think for some of these people they're learning and it's gonna take a little bit of time
26:32	Sam Parr	so from the outside I look at you and I think well you seem really I I've only known you for thirty minutes you seem very calm you seem very well balanced you seem like a lovely person the success has been off the charts and I think well everything's perfect this guy has just had it all of course that's not the reality so what has what has sucked about this journey
26:51	Chad Janis	you know it's funny the team we have this joke internally that I'm the chillest guy we know and it and it's like sort of kinda true like I am actually a pretty calm person and I think mistakes are all part of the learning like no business is perfect a perfect business is one that learns quickly from the mistakes that it makes and people aren't to blame for that what I'll say is I you know I I could give you an example of actually like a really rough day we had on 01/29/2024 and I'll I I can tell you a little bit about that but I would say the hardest thing about building a business like this that folks just don't appreciate is just how difficult it is to build a team of all stars and more difficult than that unleash them give them the space to play and run and execute according to their abilities and that's really been our unlock is one getting amazing individuals I think if you look at our executive team if you look at our entire team right the 130 people + of this company I think people would be like that is a stacked team they're not going anywhere we're having a good time like we've got a lot ahead of us that we wanna do and the culture here allows for them to take sell in a way that they wouldn't be able to do elsewhere
28:01	Sam Parr	can you dive deeper on that because people always say hire the best people and and all that and I say that too and but it's that's I hate when I give that advice or when I receive it because I'm not trying to hire the worst people like I am I am trying so what does the best people actually mean what is what what do you look for what attributes
28:18	Chad Janis	yeah you know what's so funny about this sam I've heard people be like oh well like somebody could be the best for your role and I'm like no no no there's like legit people who are the best like like you're probably just not able to hire them if you're saying like well we got the best for this like narrowly carved out role so when I say like the best is what we're looking for is people who have confidence to make decisions right so everyone has the ability to be essentially a ceo and frankly I would not be surprised if we're talking five years from now and a lot of the folks here at gruens have started companies that are really successful because they've had that skill set that repetition of making decisions as if they're the ceo and so I I would say that it comes down to just being like reps experience training and and whatever function if you're a marketing person a retention person if you're a product person and then the hardest part again and this is where I think the people listening to this who might be founders or ceos have to check themselves is how do you unblock these people how do you get out of the way to ensure that everybody together is building something massive
29:25	Shaan Puri	I wanna ask you about your marketing because I think you did world class marketing like we said years ago I thing I ever said to you was yo nice landing page right yeah that's the highest form of of respect I give you I wanna actually open up here let me screen share I wanna show you your facebook ad library and I just want you to talk us through a sort of a ten minute master class on marketing yeah so I want you to tell me what you see because you know the average person will look at this they don't really know what to take I want you to. Out what's interesting here let me see if I can zoom this a little bit what's interesting here what to notice what to learn from that would apply to other people in their businesses how to think about marketing the way you guys thought about marketing yeah I mean
30:06	Chad Janis	the first thing I see when you go back up like what does it say poop more like what other supplement brand do you know that's like being a little bit sassy with commentary like that now you see it a little bit more from these brands that are like just talking about their clinicals all the time which nothing against clinicals like we do clinicals too and we do test our product electively well beyond what's sort of required but like we we just don't talk about it because that's not fun and so like what I would say here is like these are fun ads right like this is like somebody sees that and they're probably laughing a little bit like if you scroll down you always spent some time on glp one as an angle and I'm really proud the day that we decided to do this because everyone around us and I I don't spend enough time on instagram to know everyone around us is like nature is ozempic
30:49	Sam Parr	or
30:50	Chad Janis	like they they'll say something like that which is like objectively wrong like you're not supposed to say that we've never taken that approach we are what we would say the best friend to ozempic tirzepatide zepbound whatever the sort of g m p ones are
31:04	Shaan Puri	so you were able to kind of surf that wave you were able to hijack some of the momentum of that product and position yourself not as a replacement but as a companion wait
31:15	Sam Parr	why do have why do you have an olipop okay
31:17	Chad Janis	well it the g l the glp one's new crush ad was an olipop image on it and so we're running a limited time offer right now with olipop so this
31:27	Sam Parr	is oh it's like a flavor it's an olipop flavor
31:29	Chad Janis	got this is groon's which I guess you can see right here I'm pointing to it in the video maybe people are on audio but we've got grooens sort of original and then you know every month or two months we do these limited time offer drops with in this case it's olipop strawberry vanilla flavor you know the first one we did was like a groooney smith apple like granny smith apple flavored we did a grinch sour grinch punch last year in november so we do these this again back to the whole like how do we make this fun like you tell me one other stuff I want a brand that's doing like drops and and making it actually fun to to take the product each day
32:04	Shaan Puri	so and so it looks like you've got different angles so you've got yep hey we're we're you know ozempic's best friend you've got poop more you've got nurse you know the nurse here who's
32:15	Chad Janis	probably talking about nutrient gaps
32:17	Shaan Puri	nurse jackie talking about nutrients you have these angles and I'm guessing that the these each lead to a landing page that aligns with that message correct so it's like
32:24	Chad Janis	yeah
32:25	Shaan Puri	five six different angles each to a tailored landing page that continues that message and then you are you doing that just to experiment to find one winner or you're like no we're gonna keep running five or six of these because there's just different markets of different customers who have different mindsets and we're gonna try to get all of them
32:40	Chad Janis	yeah to to make this super applicable for people you should test ads in high volume so find new angles test all over the place find what sticks with an eye towards being a good human right don't don't say that you like you're gonna make somebody sex better if your product doesn't actually do that like actually do the science validation if your product can help with certain things once you've identified an angle that seems to be running then you build the entire funnel around it so you've got you've got static ads that talk to that angle you've got ugc sort of hoist the camera angle ads that run at that you've got like more like cinematic type shoots that run at that angle everything that you're just plowing all sorts of ad concepts toward or sorry ad structures to that angle from there where people land is really important what people receive as a pop up is really important what people receive as email and sms is really important everything is tailored to that message so if you came in on a gut health ad we want everything tailored to hey you know sam just expressed interest in the gut health ad great then sam's probably interested in gut health let's give a pop up that helps them understand what about gut health is he interested in that pop up informs what messages we send on email and sms towards sam's expressed concern that page is dialed for sam's intent and then on the back end of that once people have purchased this is something that we're trying to put into process now is how do we talk to sam long term yeah he may have started on gut health but how would he how do we get sam to understand that there's so much more to this product than just gut health and do that over time building on sort of the foundation of why this product was important
34:20	Sam Parr	most everything you're saying it's sort of like when I win read the book how to win friends and influence people I'm like oh yeah this is obvious makes sense makes sense but the hard part is execution totally and it seems like you're ruthlessly in a kind way executing what's so I'm gonna ask a bunch of questions that I think you can answer in one in one go how many ads and landing pages per month are you putting out and I think you only said you had a 30 person team that seems like a lot of output for a relatively small team can you talk about like who's doing the work
34:51	Chad Janis	yeah we're probably putting out hundreds of ads a month cycling in and out just trying to find that next you know unlock we try to create new concepts pretty consistently so it's not just about ad volume it's actually structured around like how much of that is like business as usual ads that we already know or is it structure or sorry concepts themes that we know already work and how much of that is like we're trying to find new frontier of applicability in terms of the team you know when sean reached out to me in december 2023 saying hey nice landing page that was me right like I was the guy that built that landing page we didn't use an agency I think I even said that in the the message because you asked that was me from the beginning and you know you you see our buy box instead of place where you do the add to cart we've seen people rip that over the last three years copying that buy box and if they only knew that random dude named chad who's not like an ecomm expert you know broadly across d two c I I know quite a bit but like I'm not an ecomm guy who builds these sites the whole industry is mimicking this this format yeah it's really interesting to see that and I think people need to test their own and since then we found new formats that work but talking about the team we've got people across we've got like three folks on the retention team who do the emails sms who set up all the flows that allow for our consumers to have a good experience so they're focused on after order one what does that journey look like through order hundreds right we've got a large team doing paid so creating ads the actual creatives we have probably four + maybe five or six creative strategists who actually create the ads and then we have people who design and do the video edits and then we have the people who actually manage the ad accounts right there's probably four or five of those who actually like are looking at the analytics evaluating passing back to the creative strategist saying here's what's working iterate on that we've got an ecomm team that's absolutely dialed the the velocity coming out of ecomm now so landing page designs iterations on the cart checkout post purchase like all of that good stuff we're we're constantly iterating on I mean it's so fun to see right like it used to be me throwing up a quick website against that ad angle and now we've got like a full infrastructure around it
37:08	Sam Parr	still that's crazy that just not seem like a lot of that doesn't seem like a big operation for creating hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue and hundreds of ads
37:16	Chad Janis	it it doesn't require a lot and I would tell people that they can do it themselves right you create a template and you know shout out to replo is the platform that I used and I think you can do hundreds of millions of revenue on replo I think it's replo.app is the website and it's a shopify plugin I mean it's such a good platform you can just create a template the only thing you need to swap out is like the headline whether it says gut health or it talks about pick your other ad theme so substitute the like little blocks on the page with the new ad copy it's like it's not that hard like in a day you can create a completely new ad funnel that is gonna have incremental performance against it sort of general landing page
37:54	Sam Parr	that guy's gotta clip that clip and make that mad get ready to see your face on a replomat
37:59	Chad Janis	look and and I have no problem they don't charge I mean I've told them before they don't charge enough it it it's it's stupid how much value you can get out of that and and I would say this about a lot of our platforms they're just giving a shout out because it's relevant here what do you
38:13	Shaan Puri	see when you look at average marketing versus world class marketing what do you think if I'm somebody who's got a brand or a company and I have a landing page I got ads I'm doing all the things he said test creative I'm testing creative he said test landing I I think I'm doing that what are the most typically missing when you either advise a founder or you go look at somebody else's brand and you're like oh man they're just not doing this one thing this these two things well enough
38:36	Chad Janis	yeah
38:36	Shaan Puri	to really jump from average or good to great
38:39	Chad Janis	have a better product is typically what it comes down to which is like so unhelpful because it's like you gotta cut your losses but like a lot of the people who are trying to like find these hacks they're doing it with like a mailed in product like they they like didn't we took a year to develop our product it's custom blends
38:58	Sam Parr	well how did you know that it worked because a lot of times when I take vitamins I don't necessarily know if it's working did you like get your blood tested a bunch
39:05	Chad Janis	this is the beauty of this industry is if you go to pubmed are you familiar with pubmed
39:10	Sam Parr	it's a public it's a where studies are right
39:12	Chad Janis	yeah all the studies are published there I mean you put vitamin c in your product and there's thousands of studies about what vitamin c does sure maybe I don't know the precise outcomes of a hundred 20% blind sample survey placebo controlled trial but like I can pretty much guess what the outcomes are gonna be based on the thousands of other published studies against vitamin c so to answer your question sam no I didn't prior to launching I hadn't done those tests but like I looked through thousands of articles to land on what I believed the the right formulation would be for our product and that's also when I tested with consumers prelaunch is what's your perception of of this label what's your perception of this many gummies the size of gummy this flavor of gummy all of that stuff
40:00	Shaan Puri	what's on your ideas list but you're not gonna actually go do it so you can you can riff with us here of brainstorming other brands other ideas that you think are interesting may not may or may not work but interesting
40:12	Sam Parr	yeah and also you mentioned that you have a notion doc if you if you're comfortable
40:15	Shaan Puri	if you wanna pull up your bank balance we can also just do that
40:19	Chad Janis	tell you wiring instructions too here's what I'll say one thing that I that I disagree with is people say ideas aren't worth anything oh man do I disagree I I think ideas are worth so much in the right hands and in my hands they're in the right hands I believe and every founder should believe that about themselves and so there's certain ideas I can't share because I'm like guys like I I legit have an idea that years from now like I've still got a lot I wanna do with groons like like actually there's a lot I wanna do with this business I'm not done here but like years from now I think there's an idea that no one else is gonna be able to run at there's a $10,000,000,000 business idea
41:00	Sam Parr	and I'm you should just say it now we'll bleep it out and we can react
41:03	Shaan Puri	totally give us like a code word or something so we can we can at least give you credit for it years later hey like we're
41:09	Sam Parr	the we're the wrong heads
41:11	Chad Janis	when when you see it you'll know you'll see it and you'll go oh yeah this is a bill this is a big business idea so and I don't think anybody's gonna do that in the meantime while I'm finishing my chapter here at grooens and doing what I set out to do
41:25	Sam Parr	okay well what what what are some other ideas that if in the right hands are great that that aren't your hands
41:32	Chad Janis	I had this idea one time it has nothing to do with consumer and I actually almost ran with it around the time I was starting grooens and I still think it's a good idea but I'm not gonna be the one to do it so I'm happy to share it right now there is no way to direct the money that you have coming in from like direct deposit so that direct deposit hits your checking account and then we've all gotta have the willpower to decide oh put 10% in savings and put this against your bills and do this over here blah blah blah what if you become the essentially the distribution layer of ach transfers so it hits this distribution layer and before that person has to have the willpower to decide what they're gonna do with it and and this is helpful for so many people in their lives right it it gets wired out to the the rent that they have it gets wired out to their car payment it gets wired out to blank over here over here into their investment and so what actually hits their account that they're spending against is $500 for groceries or whatever it is and the technology exists to do this right it hasn't been structured I I can't remember what platform allows for but there's a platform that can facilitate what I just described to you so like this idea could be done tomorrow
42:40	Shaan Puri	that's a great idea even whether it's for consumer or for businesses I have you ever read the book profit first no somebody recommended on the podcast and they go it was like the time when my girlfriend bought me the book the game before I went to college and we were gonna break up and I was like you need to learn how to talk to girls and I like oh thank you I was like was a gift but it was also a message and my friend told me about this book profit first I think it was a gift and a message and the message was hey you're running this business you've been doing it for years but you're not pulling out any profits and you don't know where all the money's going it's profitable on paper but like you're not getting money out of this yeah and that's a very common business owner problem and there's this book called profit first which has this philosophy which is basically you preset the budget so what most people do is they say I have this much revenue then they have all their expenses and then they it's kinda like surprise whatever's left over that's your profit and you're usually quite disappointed with that surprise the better way what this guy advocates for is like you just set a budget for your p and l you say oh I'm gonna spend 25% on opex I'm gonna I need to reserve 20% for taxes so I'm not stressed out every tax season so I just wanna put that and you bay literally just create four separate accounts you create a tax account a checking account so automatically 20% gets go goes in there and that's waiting for it's in a like a money market account until tax season have your opex account and so now your team has to run on a budget it's like this is how much you have to spend you don't get to just spend whatever and keep eating out of profits and you set a profit threshold where you say I wanna have 50% profit so it basically preallocates to your as every dollar comes in 15¢ will go to the profit bucket 25% 25¢ will go to the opex bucket and there's it's actually kind of a life changing idea it's pretty cool actually forces it forces discipline you think you're running pretty lean until you actually have a hard cap on expenses and then you realize like oh actually there was way more fat I could trim I actually could have been this profitable yesterday I just I let it be an output rather than an input but but unfortunately there's not an easy way to do this a very you have to like set up seven accounts with your bank and then you have to tell your accountant hey keep doing these sweeps every two weeks
44:45	Sam Parr	have you guys heard of simp do you guys remember simpul I loved simpul it was really cool I I don't I think it's gone it got it it was one of the very first silicon valley banking
44:56	Shaan Puri	neo banks
44:57	Sam Parr	yeah neo banks and it was I don't know if like neo bank was a description
45:00	Chad Janis	like the envelope system where you like put digitally money into different envelopes yeah and
45:05	Sam Parr	like I didn't I didn't make a lot of money at the time and I was like but I wanna like fly home to st louis to see my family and so like it's gonna take me four months and so I automatically when it would come into my bank account the way it would visualize it it was still one bank account it was like well this is this is how much is left you know you have $350 in your spending account but you have another 400 in your vacation account so like don't touch that money it was pretty cool
45:29	Chad Janis	so so sam here here's what I love about this idea and sean you're bringing up actually why I think this is even potentially more compelling for businesses because if you're changing the way that the p and l works I mean venture capital firms want that because now there's more discipline around the money that they're giving
45:44	Sam Parr	totally
45:44	Chad Janis	the small founders who are making 5,000,000 a year who wanna pull 500,000 out they want it because now it's like oh well I'm forcing myself into that discipline to pull 500,000 out every year like that's a huge use case that I wasn't thinking of in terms of personal the problem with budgeting today is it's done I I grew up in a family where at the age of six I was in quicken and like I had to take every receipt scan it type it in back in the the know
46:09	Sam Parr	your mom and dad made you do that
46:10	Chad Janis	my my dad taught me budgeting yeah and that's awesome and and like we were still against debt and everything else but I had like it was so it was awesome until there was an imbalance at the end of the month and I had to go search for the 20¢ that was off
46:22	Sam Parr	is that like a mormon thing because I've I've I think I've got a bunch of mormon buddies who are very disciplined with their monthly budgeting
46:29	Chad Janis	yeah it might be honestly it might be something that's I mean there's a lot of like financial discipline in general but but to put put the headline on it to me what I love about this idea is it solves what I think sucked about the granularity of like wasting hours a month a week on like typing in all my stuff right and it also solves the other end right like people they get to the end of the month and it's like that was actually a hassle to do did I change any of my behaviors based on it I don't know and then the other end if it's like mint back before that got acquired or whatever and I think the other one today is monarch which I like monarch love monarch yeah more money it's like it's helpful to see but like monarch's not really like a proactive platform right it's like oh I'm just like getting information
47:11	Shaan Puri	about is like I'll tell you how bad you're doing at it versus hey let me just fix it for you totally but you wanted to fix it for me solution I really wonder whether you know with agents or you know you take the popularity of like mercury or the kind of all the popular neo banks that are pretty product first yeah and they're more programmable I wonder if either somebody could build it on top of one of those banks or if they'll end up releasing something like this themselves
47:37	Chad Janis	I think you get acquired I I think if you run this business you're gonna be acquired for 500,000,000 to 1,000,000,000 in like two years if you execute this right like somebody out there listening right now feel free to send me a dm when you do it like this this idea the infrastructure exists to be able to do this if you execute it correctly you you are one making a massive impact in millions of people's lives and two you will have a financial outcome
48:01	Sam Parr	what would be cool is in if in twelve months we have to say hey everyone we did this podcast with chad here here's what he said and then we heard this clip that you just said and then we're like here's the update yeah because this is this is fantastic this is really cool yeah we we we do this segment all the time this is this is a top tier idea
48:17	Shaan Puri	you you have a couple of quotes that you sent us or like kind of philosophies we always ask people what are your what are the philosophies you live by that you think are not not something everybody does or not everybody believes in you said one one of them that I like to go access is everything and you explained how you didn't have a ton of access early on but you know through summit and stanford like you explain your access is everything philosophy
48:40	Chad Janis	yeah I think access and the privilege of having access in the world is something that when you don't have it surround yourself with people who do and do good work for them and you will get access every time and then when you do have it like the privilege I now have I see it as your obligation my obligation to give that back to others
48:59	Shaan Puri	so explain what you what you mean by access what's the personal story where where where this kinda resonates
49:04	Chad Janis	yeah you know like I'm a dude named chad I I worked in private equity what you see today would not have existed without people leaning in and giving me access every time incrementally and me doing good work for them so like if you go back I mean I was always curious on this because I think you get asked in those questionnaires like you are you middle income high income low income and like I was aware of sort of wealth but if I looked at sort of the income that my parents had and I have seven there's seven of us kids so six siblings in in our income I think I was like bottom end of class it's like how it was defined and I'm I'm not saying that from a standpoint of like ashamed like I'm grateful to have lived in this area and seen these people because I think you can solve a lot by just giving awareness to kids about what's possible it's like the grasshopper moment once they know it's like oh now you can go get it so I get I was recruiting for the big three consulting mckinsey bcg bain through a contact who who put me in touch I didn't get it but I landed through another mentor this this gig at lazard I did really good work and lazard's an investment bank so in new york city one of the top premier investment banks working on mergers and acquisitions that mentor I'm still close to him I went in and visited him right so he gave me access and that access then landed me at summit partners at summit partners I did phenomenal work for them I deployed I I literally invested like 30% of that fund a $5,000,000,000 fund like I invested that I sourced the deals that made them the money behind that I did really good work and there's this moment when I got into stanford that I was like oh man like should I feel bad because I I know how this works like I only got in like yeah I've had a ton of accomplishments I had a got 3.95 gpa I've worked at great places got this white dude named chad like should I feel bad about this that I got into stanford and and what I came to appreciate is like no I shouldn't feel bad knowing that the reason why I got in is because you know two people who are very close to the stanford folks sent a text and a nice letter of recommendation for me I shouldn't feel bad about that because they're not just doing that right they're doing that because I did good work for them I made their lives easier I earned their trust and so maybe I wasn't born into that access where my dad can send a text to stanford and say let my let my son in but you can earn that by doing good work for the people who do have that access and they're they're so eager to help you have that sort of accomplishment so that's how I think about access and it's part of when you know I got asked recently like what's your legacy that
51:33	Shaan Puri	you wanna leave on the world
51:34	Chad Janis	and I'm like you know it's like 33 years old but the way I think about it is like I wanna give that that access that I've sort of like either been granted or earned over the last many years and I and I wanna ensure that more people have access to that who who spend their their lives working with me and putting good work
51:52	Sam Parr	dude you're you're awesome you are so cool I think that when I was younger I met this really successful guy named Scott belsky who was the chief product officer of adobe and an amazing entrepreneur maybe a billionaire and he used this word with me that I'd never heard before this idea he used he said I'm gonna invest in you and you need to be a steward of my capital and I was like I don't know what is that word steward I'd never heard of that it's just like this idea that you need to be the vehicle that that protects and passes on like a little bit of greatness that that's kind of how I interpreted it and you are that person so my friend austin reif do you know austin reif
52:31	Chad Janis	he's the one of the morning brew yeah founders
52:35	Sam Parr	he started of company and sold the company for hundreds of millions of dollars when he was 30 years old he was texting me about this new idea that he was working on or brainstorming I and was like you think it's gonna be successful he goes it can be successful if I want it to be and I love that because what you and him both said something very similar you have this similar mindset but I find myself being around him and people like you and it's contagious
52:59	Chad Janis	yeah you know what I've thought about whether I should be I've I've tried to figure out whether my impact on the world is more narrowly focused on the people who spend hours thousands of hours with me working inside of grooves or if I should have more of an impact publicly trying to relay some of this message it's hard though you know like to relay all of these these experiences that I've had in in a public forum that allows for millions to to learn but you're totally right sam like at the end of the day why why was I able to build what I built it's because I knew it was possible right like I saw it done many many times by others and if I ever had a question I could I could go ping those people and so network experiences awareness of what's possible
53:41	Shaan Puri	I think there's a maybe a different way to say what you just said you know the way you just said it was kind of like hey I got I was pretty fortunate that these things happened and I did my part but they did their part this happens a lot with entrepreneurs as we sort of stumble and fumble our way to success then afterwards you can actually look back and realize like there it wasn't complete random it wasn't complete chance and in fact you could recreate the conditions of success more reliably knowing what I know now and so I would just. To three words that you just said the first one is exposure you really can't imagine what you've never seen your brain won't go anywhere if you don't have any exposure to things I I I was talking about this with ben my business partner about my kids I said my kids have never been exposed to so much in the world right like we literally keep going to the same resorts I was like they've never seen a third world country they've never seen this I I started bringing them to just do adult stuff with me because I to do kids stuff with my kids and now what I realized is let me just bring them along for life and kids actually love it they like doing laundry they like cooking they work out with me now in the gym every day they like going with me to to meetings they like you know they they actually kind of enjoy that because they're getting exposed to new stimulus that they've never really seen before and even if they're five years old and they can't fully grok it there's some part of it that just breaks some fence that they had around what the world is and it starts to poke holes and it lets new things in growing up I didn't know any entrepreneurs I didn't know anyone in my entire family my mom has nine siblings my dad has four out of all of them there were zero entrepreneurs every single one of them was an engineer like a typical indian family and so the highest calling was you get a good job what's a good job a 6 figure job that has health insurance so that was all I knew I was all I was exposed to if what was possible and then my senior year of college I took a class called getting rich in and the very first class she brought in a speaker and there was a girl who started a t shirt company and then the next class she brought in a guy who started his own hedge fund and I just thought looked at them and I said why are these guys having all the fun this sounds awesome maybe I could do that instead I just finally exposed to the thing you know when I was 21 years old and it changed the trajectory of my life had I not had the exposure it literally would have just not happened and so the first is exposure how do you get yourself in a position to see new things or help other people see new things the second is access and then you you the way I would put it for you is earned access because you said something very casually like I did good work for them you know what I bet if we peeled back there probably is a lot there I bet you over delivered I bet you didn't get paid proportional what you did and you didn't whine about it these are my guesses you tell me if that's true or not but the access is earned through showing that you're somebody who deserves greater opportunities and greater access and you sort of delay the payoff of those actions and you just have faith that I'm gonna just I'm gonna kill it right now and I'm I trust that you know the ball will bounce my way over time and I don't need to immediately tit for tat measure what I'm getting versus what I'm putting in
56:39	Chad Janis	yeah I think I I I think it's true and frankly I think you know I'm young I'm 33 years old I think about the impact I wanna have on this world I think it's that first one exposure how can I facilitate exposure to everyone right young young kids how do they get exposure that honestly I think that's where my wife and I wanna make an impact is making it possible through some some effort in the next chapter of my life to ensure that the random kid who's six years old or 10 years old in a place that would never get exposure to this at least knows what's possible because if they know it's possible maybe they'll go after it themselves every time
57:16	Sam Parr	hey can I let me ask you a question that you might not feel comfortable answering when you're wired hundreds of millions of dollars what do you what do you decide to do with it where'd you invest the money and that includes like did you decide to give any away
57:28	Chad Janis	yeah tbd on it but I one of the hardest things I have is I've thought about my my impact like it's the same as I don't even know if I'll invest in other companies and and it's not because I don't believe it's like what's the next best use of a dollar it's gonna it's gonna take a lot to convince me that it's something other than what I can go after and do and that doesn't mean it's always business profit centered like I don't always have to make money like can I sam go out and make make an impact on the world by taking my own funds and building like something special out of it right that has an impact on whether it's mentorship exposure or whatever it is so tbd I mean as you know when when you receive money you spend a lot of time thinking about deploying it you don't wanna rush into anything but but I would expect that the more meaningful deployment of my capital is gonna come through some personal effort in my life that I do to to make an impact
58:27	Sam Parr	so well first of all can we let me ask a boring question where'd you invest it the the current money where'd you invest is it just boring index funds is it well
58:33	Chad Janis	you you know there's a difference between signing and closing so you have to go through anti regulatory so we've signed but the closing happens as soon as it's been approved by government
58:45	Sam Parr	so you don't have yet
58:45	Chad Janis	the money's not been wired yet by the
58:47	Sam Parr	deal I don't know what that I've not had a deal there's a threshold
58:51	Shaan Puri	yeah my first acquisition they just venmoed me
58:57	Sam Parr	yeah we've not I've not I've not dealt with the with the department of justice yet so that's pretty cool
59:02	Chad Janis	that's funny
59:04	Shaan Puri	yeah there's a crazy there's a crazy story you know the company applovin
59:07	Chad Janis	yeah yeah
59:07	Shaan Puri	my my co founder was the co founder of applovin at the time so he's sitting next to me at the office and they signed this deal and I'm like oh my god you just sold they sold the company for I think 1.2 or $2,000,000,000 I forgot which the what the number was but 1 or $2,000,000,000 and I was like wow dude you did it you sold a company for a billion dollars $2,000,000,000 that's amazing and I was like should we go dinner's on you what's up he's like dude we haven't got the money it's gonna be like months he's like if it's over I forgot what the number is 750,000,000 a $1,000,000,000 whatever it is like literally like the government you know the way he put it was like it's gonna sit on trump's desk until he stamps it the crazy thing was they sold to a chinese company so there was actually a lot of risk and so he didn't know this at the time he thought he you know it's over well nine months go by a year almost goes by and the deal is still not approved but they've been running the company they've doubled revenue in that year yeah and so instead of waiting for the approval what they did was they went and renegotiated they were like hey here's what the 2,000,000,000 gets you instead and now it gets you 25% of the company instead of whatever 85 100% so they renegotiated the deal because the business had grown so it was the best thing that ever happened and so they took a minority investment got some liquidity it kept growing the thing it's now it was like it was a $100,000,000,000 company in the last
01:00:19	Chad Janis	yeah
01:00:19	Shaan Puri	it's last year right so it went a 100 x since then
01:00:22	Sam Parr	a quick Google so I haven't had time to read all this I believe it's a $130,000,000 is the threshold where the doj has to
01:00:29	Chad Janis	interesting
01:00:30	Shaan Puri	one thirty
01:00:30	Sam Parr	you have to notify the doj and the ftc anything north of a $133,900,000
01:00:37	Shaan Puri	dear doj I'm rich do you do what you notify
01:00:41	Chad Janis	there's like an official form and then they they're just reviewing it as they should to make sure that it's not bad for the consumer
01:00:48	Shaan Puri	dude that's cool that's awesome dude thanks for coming on man and congrats again on on building something pretty epic I remember when I saw the product it just seemed like oh that's it and the best products actually are simple like that where the proposition is easy for the customer to understand it it makes sense in the world it was almost like hidden in plain sight I feel in in a way and you know to your credit you you ran with that you acted on it and you you built something pretty incredible
01:01:16	Chad Janis	of course thank you for having me on my hope is that three years from now we're talking and you guys are like jeez dude we didn't realize there was that much ahead of you we've got so much this team wants to do and so eager to to show the consumers what we've got for them new products new innovations new fun limited time offers
01:01:34	Shaan Puri	what's the best thing on that shelf I should buy
01:01:36	Chad Janis	so have you tried the hollypop we've got some products here that are launching soon but have you tried our hollypop that's
01:01:41	Shaan Puri	actually I've only ever had the original I know I didn't even try anything else I just got the original like subscription
01:01:46	Chad Janis	that's it so yeah you you may know this but we've got gruens which is the comprehensive nutrition greens multivitamin fiber we've got nutrobes which is a nootropics product we've got immune which is like a almost like an immunity shot like the two ounce bottles but in gummy form and then we've got juiced which is this one right here which is like a pre anything energy product so I mean we've got like 12 innovations in the pipeline that's what I'm saying like it's so exciting we've we've like done something so big but like we're like maybe five miles into a marathon
01:02:17	Sam Parr	good man thank you so much for coming on you have an open invite whenever you want you're you're you're a wonderful guy we're we're so happy for your success and it feel makes us feel good to promote you so thank you for coming on that's it that's the pod

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I Went From Broke To $1B+ In just 3 years

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