Transcript

00:00 This is Karthik. He turned 500 bucks into 10 million dollars by building four different e-commerce companies. What's even crazier is that he built these companies with no funding and he had a full-time job. I'd go in at you know 8 AM and I'd get off around 5 36 and then I'll be working till midnight. I do it all over again. This guy is a hustler one of the hardest working people I've ever met. We were actually starting a bunch of other businesses. So we had a promotions company a discount card storage company and then we had this apparel business. In this episode he invited me into his New York City Apartment to show me exactly how he's made Millions.He also told me the secret to why his newest company has become one of the biggest brands in college sports and it's got something to do with changes to the NCAA. Karthik also told me how he's made millions in sales without spending a dime on ads get into these marketplaces right that's free marketing you guys are gonna love. This interview it's a master class of what it takes to build a 10 million online business I'm Pat walls and this is starter story iPod that you're running multiple businesses right. Now can you give us a breakdown of everything that you've built yeah. So we actually started off doing custom fraternity and sorority. Merchandise custom is the key word right at the end of the day. We we went after one niche market which was serving fraternities sororities on campus. But we were doing custom stuff for their events which then led into doing custom stuff for the colleges and departments. On campus. We went ahead and got essentially 300. College licenses to do all that merchandise for the campus organizations departments on campus and then naturally as we started growing out our sales team. We started getting ancillary business to do custom merchandise for businesses. So then we launched threadly which is our custom apparel business for businesses. You know fundraisers non-profits and then in the last year with us kind of building out these other businesses. We built Tech along the way to kind of manage these different brands and all the back-end processes and us being in the license space.

02:00 For so long. We actually saw an opportunity when the name image likeness Supreme Court ruling came out where student athletes can monetize on their name image and likeness. So with that we actually got into making merchandise co-branded with the college and the athlete which is the brand is athlete's thread and so really focused on custom branded merchandise and licensed. Merchandise is the two buckets that I would put it in as far as what we do as a whole. But it is kind of Nest within four Brands. So you got Greek house for fraternities and sororities. College thread for all the Departments and organizations threadly for corporate companies and then now athletes thread for athletes and colleges yeah. So essentially you know different niches within the apparel industry and these are all websites where people can buy merchandise like Shopify websites or exactly so one is custom right you would come to us and say hey we want.This custom design or product made we would design it and produce it for you on a kind of like a bulk basis or bulk order basis so that's a little bit less on the direct to Consumer side. It's more business to business but then yes for athlete's threat you're coming on and you're buying one item for for that athlete in college and just use yeah through. Shopify tell us a little bit about your life before athletes threaten your business that you're running. What's the journey that brought you to building this business yeah. So one of my fraternity brothers. And I we just saw a need to fill the market with just a better vendor on the custom apparel side and this was back in 2013 when you know technology was really really kind of coming to the Forefront of every business.

03:31 We really rode that train hard and we started building out an order management platform as well as a customer portal but as we were figuring out this business Luke and I my co-founder we were actually starting a bunch of other businesses. So we had a promotions company where we threw concerts. We had a discount card that we would sell to uh students student organizations to raise money and then we had this apparel business and you know uh. Luke also started a storage company a storage and retrieval company for College college students so we had multiple tries at entrepreneurship in college. But this one it happened you know the first year. We did 50 000 second version a hundred thousand and this was us kind of working on it part time in between school. Doing all the stuff that a student would do and then also um our other businesses. We were trying to stand up and get running as well and then upon graduation I actually got a full-time job at Amazon. You had a full-time job and you're working on this on the side.Uh yeah. I mean it was uh you know what was crazy about. Amazon was I had to work from Wednesday night to Sunday morning so I'd come in Wednesday night at literally 11 pm and I would get off between 11 A.M to 12 p.m go home sleep and then I'd wake up in the evening start working on Greek. House then go into Amazon do it all over again um and in Salesforce same cycle. But I had a little bit of a more normal schedule. I'd go in at you know 8 A.M and I'd get off around 5 36 and then I'd be working till midnight and do it all over again and then week guns. You know typically got maybe one weekend day off uh Saturday but yeah it was. It was pretty much Six Days on um and one day off kind of deal for a good good. Two two and a half years.

05:15 We'll give you the motivation to do all that for so long yeah so um my family's an immigrant. You know have really humble beginnings. Since we moved here um you know I we immigrated to from India. To here. I was born in Bangalore when I was seven years old. So I think one we've you know I've always seen my parents work hard. And I think that's always hard. Work has always been instilled in me um but two you know my parents gave up everything from a family perspective to to move my brother and I over here and now my sister is here as well um. But you know we. We just you know we're very fortunate to have the opportunity to live in a country where the opportunities you know you can go out and get it and so uh you know I think just wanting to make my parents proud. It would be like number two and just like really. I think that's supersedes almost everything but three you know I think ultimately uh you know every time I go back to India or you know. We have employees all over the world. I just like realize how fortunate I am and we are to live in a country like the US to be able to build startups without barriers so um yeah you know I think it's just. It's just what I've always known um. You know I have entrepreneurship all throughout my family. We have you know over 24 restaurants in India so it runs all throughout our family as well.So I'd say. It's a combination of all that and I'm just very fortunate that I get to do this every day all right. So you started Greek House in your dorm room or your college basement with only 500 bucks. What did that look like at the time yeah. So um. We were basically in our fraternity house and so we would literally meet in the common areas and and basically get a sales plan going and um you know a lot of what we did to start. Our business was there's Savvy college kids and this is before you know we had in Instagram and different ways to reach the you know different folks. There. We would just go out start texting our friends and in different sororities and fraternities. Try and figure out who's making the decision to buy T-shirts and just we're out there hustling and kind of working through our networks. Meeting people on campus going to different you know the student organization meetings going and pitching to them there.On hey. You should use us to buy your shirts and that was kind of our Edge. Was we were these young Hustlers that could go out and just you know. We were we were sharp. We really liked sales and really just going out and pitching people and you know we probably sucked at sales in the beginning but you know over time you get better and better your pitch. Gets refined but you know putting yourself out there and just going for it.

07:45 It's the best thing you can do as a college student. So I always tell students to just go for it. If you're in college. You know there's no reason. You can't be starting a side hustle or a business. While you're in school I know building a licensing business can be complicated are there any really scary moments while building this business or any big obstacles that you had to get through to get where you are today yeah actually um. When I went first went full time with the business. In 2016 you know moved all my stuff down to Los Angeles where my two other business partners were. One of my co-founders were there uh you know we're we're three months in and uh things are going great you know sales are picking up. We're seeing a lot of growth working a lot of hours but having a lot of fun working our living room. At this one middle desk in a really small apartment in La just really working and grinding away. But you know about a month about four months.In in April we get a notice from one of the licensing organizations saying hey you're not paying royalties and we're finding out that there's all these sales that you're basically not reporting on and we're like what are you talking about and so we started looking into it and ended up finding out a way. Licensing's a whole thing we have to get approved rude. We have to pay royalties and so we basically got audited and long long story short. We had a forty thousand dollar bill four months into it which you know. At the time you know we were doing just under a million in sales and that was really scary right that's like four percent of our costs and we didn't even have 40K in the bank to roll with and so you know we went back to the licensing agency and said hey you know we want to be in this industry. For the long term. You know we will make it right give us some time to make these payments. We'll give you one lump sum now and the rest over the course of you know 12 14 months and so um it was a very valuable lesson. But you know at the time you know I thought I was gonna have to go back to work full time working in. In Corporate America. I know you probably have a million skus how do you ship out.

09:54 All. This take orders and and manage this whole operation yeah. So we've uh we've built out a supply chain um. So we don't manufacture anything in-house. But we work with amazing print and production. Partners all throughout the US and so that's been accumulation of just us building relationships over the last 10 years but in most Industries right on a distributor level like us it's easy to find manufacturers. It's hard to find good manufacturers or great manufacturing partners and so these are relationships we've had to develop over the years but in managing that right one is we've built out a Vendor Portal so that they can manage all their orders effectively. So in some cases you know we've come into that shop that we work with the the printer production partner and said hey you know we want to work with you. These are our prices but we are also going to provide you Tech so that when you service our account it takes one tenth of time to service than it does for your other customers because we're going to keep everything so organized and so clean for you so that you know you don't have to to to manage 100 other aspects of the admin side of the workload and so um. That's what's really kind of led us to having great Partners is being able to build out you know systems and processes for them that makes their job easy so that you know there's no question when an order comes through on what needs to be printed who it needs to go to.We give that to them in an organized fashion and we've helped automate and streamline their workflows on the production line all right let's talk about competition in the e-commerce space. Anyone can start a Shopify store and I know that 90 of Shopify stores fail so how do you differentiate yourself as a brand and how do you look at competition one from a like just a company and Landscape perspective what's great about being in the licensed industry right. There is a lot of hurdles to get to where we are first and foremost you need to have licenses for the call colleges and then you need to get rights for from each athlete so that hurdle alone 99.99 of companies will not get through that hurdle so that really Slims down you know the vendors and the competition in the first place. The second area that we've really been focusing on is building a true brand. So you know we went from doing custom merchandise to now doing our own brand with athletes thread right and how we've been differentiating from building.

12:19 A brand I mean one is amazing customer service and turnaround time right when we ship product out. You know that is the first kind of like way that we differentiate is making sure that each customer when they reach out to us they're getting a response in less than four hours time. They are also you know products are not shipping out in the two to three business days. We guarantee we harp on our vendors to really get those out and making sure that we meet our slas and so that's the first area where our brand is really strong is good product and good product delivery. The next area I would say is that we've been doing a lot of things around our brand. So we're doing neck labels. We're doing custom packaging so really starting to build a brand there and then the third is from a social media perspective right.We have a fairly young team who loves sports so we're really trying to lean into that and so really put out really engaging and cool content that not just the students Vibe with but the athletes survive with and also the sports teams the individual teams right. They all Vibe with marketing is the hardest thing to do as a business. It's easy to start a business hard to grow it. What is your marketing strategy look like and what's all the ways that you get sales and reach customers yeah. So when we first started we went deep into a few different channels. We originally started with outbound email marketing which is one-to-one emails called outreaches and then that turned into outbound sales. So we were going much more of a direct response route and that's what really worked for us. It was cost effective scalable. We were able to find a lot of emails and contacts online. The second approach that's really worked for us is building out an affiliate or an ambassador program right what's great about those kinds of programs is that you're not just spreading your word about the product.You're finding. Advocates that are selling your brand on your behalf right. Whether they're you know posting content. They're sending it to their friends. They're posting their discount codes. You know what's great about. That is you know if you do send them free product. Yes. That's some initial investment up front. But they can also give you content on the back end right so that you're able to reuse it repurpose it and start building your brand further and then it's kind of like you know kill two versions one stone. They're also going out and promoting it so you get content and you get promotion of your product um and then third right is paid marketing um. You know we love paid search because when somebody's searching for Google for a Bryce young t-shirt right they are really looking for that specific item. So um. There's there's very high level of intent right people are looking for these items whereas social media you're trying to just get more products in front of them based on interest or based on different demographics. And so we found that page search on Google has been highly effective and then lastly get into these marketplaces. Right that's free marketing meaning if you can get your product on Etsy get it on Etsy if you can get it on Google shopping get it on Google shopping right.

15:16 These marketplaces go a long way because you know I found that a lot of people now out they just go to they click on shopping when they Google something and they're looking for products to purchase. They're literally clicking on that shopping tab so that it Aggregates all the sites that Google might be connected to on the shopping side. Hi Karthik what would you say are the most important skills to building a business like yours yeah. So I think uh first being remote right communication is so key that's the speed of communication. The quality communication the clarity. I think communication is just a huge undertaking and there's different forms of communication right written verbal uh even recording videos and sharing it with your team creating that kind of asynchronous Harmony within the company where you don't have to meet to you know figure out. These issues right. I think is what has really led us to be successful on the internal side and then externally right how you're communicating with customers and clients that's really really key so. I'd say communication is very top there written verbal and just even yeah recording videos.I would say is its own form. Um. Then number two is like the ability to learn anything or teach yourself something right. There's so many resources online you know. Everything is a Google search away from you learning it on your own and oftentimes you know.I think even I see it in our employees where they'll get stuck on a problem and I'll they'll come to me. And I I don't know the answer to the problem. What do I do I go to Google and I search it right so trying to get in that mindset where there is always an answer out there for your problems and then third I think surrounding yourself with either a good co-founder and or advisor right or mentors that have done it before and have been in your position right. But also they can be very blunt with you and very critique. It so I don't know if it's necessarily as much of a skill or as a tactic right is getting and hiring good people around you whether it be advisors co-founders employees. I think really getting that skill down is really really important um and just kind of getting getting it getting a good team under under you or behind. You is is really really important. What advice would you have for someone who's just starting a Shopify or e-commerce or anything in the retail and Merchandising space yeah. So I think the first is like just get started. I think like a lot of people overthink how and when or what to do do to get started whether it's writing up a business planning strategy right. And I'm not saying go right at 50 page business plan but develop parts of a business plan and then start implementing some of that right away. You're going to learn more on the job than you will uh just kind of reading stuff and articles online and then lastly I'd say humility right and just making sure like you don't know everything and kind of having that learning mindset and that just really wanting to engulf yourself in the industry or market and learning from the ground up. I think that's a really key aspect of Entrepreneurship is just having that intellectual or that that genuine curiosity. I think is really key to success as an entrepreneur.