This episode features a founder’s story on how they exited and what life looks like after the exit. It’s a great episode you do not want to miss.

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Welcome to the 2X eCommerce Podcast. The 2X eCommerce is a podcast dedicated to digital commerce insights for retail and eCommerce teams. Each week, on this podcast, we interview either a commerce expert, a founder at a digital-native consumer brand, or a representative from a best-in-class commerce SaaS product. We give them a tight to give you ideas that you can test right away on your brand so you can improve commerce growth metrics such as conversions, average order value, repeat customers, audience size, and gross merchant value or sales. We are here to help you sell more sustainably.

This is an interview I had with Jay Perkins. Jay Perkins is an interesting individual and he used to work for BigCommerce, believe it or not. While in BigCommerce, he was moonlighting to set up a D2C eCommerce brand called Kettlebell Kings. They sold Kettlebell. This was in 2013. In 2021, he had a mid-seven-figure exit with his three other co-founders. He sold to a Spanish aggregator, at the time, which was then eventually acquired by Razor. You might know Razor, they’re a big German eCommerce aggregator.

What you’re about to read is an interview I had with him where he tells the story of how he ideated Kettlebell Kings and how he brought it to market, how he built it, how he grew it, supply chain, challenges, their branding, their marketing, their focus on product, and where they are in an earnout. They got a good chunk of capital off the back of the acquisition. Now, they’re in a three-year earn-out. They’re in year one of their earnouts. They’re about to wrap up year one of their earnout.

It’s super interesting. We talk marketing, M&A, and a bit of finance and organization in terms of keeping your house intact. A fun fact is that they didn’t go through a broker, which is good because they didn’t pay any percentage or any commissions, which is good for the deal. He also gives me the intricacies of how they had to get their house and order the deal. It took over three months to close and it was in the heat of it all. 2022 was crazy for eCommerce M&A and they were part of that wave and they sold at the right time.

Right now, he’s running a fitness brand called Living.Fit. Living.Fit sells digital products and physical products in the fitness space. It’s not Kettlebells. They’re in a non-compete as you can imagine. We talk a bit about Living-Fit and their journey to where they are right now and general strategy advice, what it’s like as a founder from his perspective, and we exchange notes about what we are doing at Octillion. Enjoy this episode. If you want to find out what life is like after an exit, what the anticipation of building a brand for an exit for a mid-seven-figure exit looks like, read Jay Perkins’ story. Enjoy.

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Jay, welcome to the 2X eCommerce Podcast.

I’m glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

It’s been a long time coming. I’ve followed your journey a little bit. I have some context and I have lots of questions. You sold at the right time but you also put in a lot of grunt work at the beginning from 2012 to 2021. That’s a lot of time to build value in the market. I’ve learned a thing or two in our pre-interview, amazing stuff. I’m looking forward to this one. I’m going to start with who you are, your childhood, and where you grew up. I want to know more about the beginning, the genesis, or the origin so let’s jump in.

I grew up in San Antonio, Texas, I was born and raised there. I moved to Austin, Texas for college in 2004. For me, that’s when life began. I got to Austin and I was blown away by the city. I could feel the difference from where I grew up and I said to myself, “I want to be here after college.” Fortunately, that turned out to be a good decision as it’s been one of the fastest-growing cities in the world, especially in the tech space.

My first job out of college was doing financial sales, which if you’ve ever talked to anybody who does that, it’s a meat grinder, you’re making 100 phone calls a day, and this was in 2008. I started this career right as the entire global financial system is melting down and I’m having to talk to people about, “Now’s the best time to invest. Please invest with this 22-year-old fresh-faced and cleanly shaven human being.”

That was tough. I will say that I learned some of my most important lessons at that job, which is to not be willing to give up on anything. working hard, making 100 phone calls a day, and going in on Saturday mornings to make phone calls. I did that for about 6 to 7 years. After a brief stint in Las Vegas trying to consider if I wanted to play cards for a living, I quickly decided that I wanted to go back and get a job.

I had a few friends working in tech sales at the time, it seemed like they liked it, and they were making good money. I started working at an eCommerce company called BigCommerce and I was there for about a year, that’s where a lot of the financial sales experience kicked in big time. I came in and I was making way more calls than everyone every day. I was willing to work longer hours and that led to a lot of success in that career. That’s where I started my first eCommerce store, which is the beginning of what brings us here today.

Are you still in Austin, Texas?

I’m doing this call from Palm Springs, California but I do live in Austin, Texas.

Do you know Eric Bandholz?

I do not.

He’s based in Austin, Texas and he has a brand called the Beardbrand.

I feel like I know the name of the brand. Anytime anyone asks me, “Do you know so-and-so? They’re in fitness or they’re in eCommerce.” I feel bad because I usually don’t because I’ve been head down and working very hard. I feel like I constantly disappoint on those questions.

No, it’s fine. It’s okay. There’s a lot to unpack from what you said. We know BigCommerce. I know a few people in BigCommerce. I’ve written blog posts for their website. When you were in BigCommerce, were you privy to the eCommerce opportunity? Was Kettlebell how you were working out? Was it like your fitness regime where it was your passion that you were trying to monetize in a way?

Being in BigCommerce, you would hear the executives throw out numbers about what the anticipated size of the eCommerce market was going to be over the next decade. You’d hear numbers like hundreds of billions of dollars or trillions of dollars. Honestly, it didn’t compute much for me that I said to myself, “That’s so big. I got to get in this.”

Kettlebell was not necessarily a passion. I used them pretty frequently in workouts. I was exposed to them through CrossFit like a lot of people were. As my co-founders and I was kicking around different business ideas, that popped in our heads because we were using them in our workouts. My two co-founders were college athletes so they had exposure to them and used them quite a bit.

As basic as it is, the number one rule in eCommerce is you got to find your niche. Out of the thousands of websites that I sold while at BigCommerce, no one was selling kettlebells. There were lots of e-cigs, lots of lingerie, and lots of that type of stuff. As we looked at it, we were like, “There’s not a lot of people focusing on this niche. It seems like we can build out an entire strategy around serving this community.”

You let the data guide your decision from the get-go and you were privy to a lot of data points. What about your two other co-founders? Were they colleagues at BigCommerce themselves or were they not?

We were friends from college. They were teammates of one of my good friends from growing up. Through hanging out in college, we got to know each other very well. We continued to hang out quite a bit after college. They lived in Houston at the time and they’d come and visit Austin a lot. We’d go on guys’ trips together, that type of stuff.

We had a common goal of wanting to start something on our own, that right mix of wanting to do something, having a little bit more control over our schedule, and more autonomy and decision-making. We would have weekly conferences for about a year kicking around business ideas and what should we do. Eventually, we settled on an eCommerce product as opposed to a service or a software product or something like that. At some point, you go for it and that’s what we did.

Was it initially a side project or did you drop everything and go for it?

Yeah, it was a side project. I continued to work at BigCommerce during the first 6 to 8 months of the business. One of the partners was doing that and as well as another business he was starting at the time, full-time. He went for it. He was not working his corporate job. I was still at BigCommerce for the first 6 to 8 months of the business.

With a new eCommerce undertaking, that’s not drop shipping. Did you start out dropshipping? Were you shipping yourselves? Did you fulfill yourselves?

We did fulfill ourselves. We didn’t have any experience in eCommerce other than the conversations I was having with potential BigCommerce customers. We hadn’t run shipping infrastructure. A lot of it was learning on the fly. You can imagine with Kettlebells, there are some challenges there, the cost of shipping, and that type of thing.

With a startup like yours in eCommerce, there are three key levers to push to get things off the ground and one is a supply chain. You’re not manufacturers, you’d need to work with a factory. The first question is, was the supply chain localized to the United States? Did you have to go as fas Asia? You have the second, which is brand. Sometimes you don’t focus on the brand that much but you still need a ton of voice.

The third is marketing, which is, “How are we going to get customers?” We’re going to start out with the supply chain. In the early days, how did you figure out the supply chain? Did you jump on Alibaba or did you look for a specialist artisan at Kettlebells? You said you were more on the premium end of the scale.

To me, that was the first example of something that served us well throughout the life of our business, which was willing to evolve and change what we’re doing and constantly adjust and treat the business like an organism that has to grow and change over time as opposed to being rigid about what we do. We had no experience importing. We had never bought anything wholesale before. We did look at things like Alibaba but because we had no experience, we didn’t know what to do.

The original premise of the store was we were going to try to be a kettlebell superstore, which sounds absurd in retrospect. We were going to source different brands of kettlebells and then sell all kinds of different brands of kettlebells, that was the original premise. Our first load of product, we bought wholesale from another company and we were selling that brand.

We quickly realized, “This is not going to work from a margin perspective or a tactical perspective.” That’s when we did start to look to source from overseas. That was a challenge too. Any stereotype you’ve probably heard about importing, we certainly found it to be true. Suppliers don’t always do what they say they’re going to do. You’re going to receive plenty of bad products sometimes. We constantly had to figure it out and tweak it over the first year and a half there.

You started at started in 2012 as a side business. When did you know, “I could go full-time with this with my other co-founders.” When did you guys each make that full-time decision to work solely on the business?

Knowing and doing were two different things. It probably took me about four years to feel like, “We’re good. We’re going to be okay.” We’ve got the rankings online, we’ve got the customer base, and we’re building that critical mass of, “As long as we don’t mess up here, everything’s going to be okay.” It was August of 2012 when we made our first sale online. Some random person showed up to the website from Google Ads and bought and it was in February of the next year that I started full-time. It wasn’t necessarily because I thought, “We’ve got something here.” It was doing it and devoting more effort to it.

What were your roles, each of the founders? Three founders in the business. Would you recommend an eCommerce business having three founders based on your experience?

Two of us were pretty much working in the day-to-day of the business. It was pretty mixed and combined in the decision-making process. A lot of it was a combined effort of doing social media, talking to a marketing firm we had hired about the strategy, tweaking things on the website, and shipping out products.

We originally rented a 10×10-foot storage unit. We had to drive over to the storage unit, get it, and take it over to OfficeMax to ship it out. There was a lot of back and forth between the two of us when we started. One partner was still working and he was mainly in charge of accounts payable and paying bills and that type of thing. That’s how it started.

As far as what I recommend having co-founders, every situation is different. You have to be aware of what your specialty is and what you’re not good at and what you’re not going to have time to do. Are there people who can bring something else to the table for those things? Different perspectives. Also, it is important to have a structure in place of what decisions are final.

It can become a challenge when you have people with different ideas about how to do things. I would say this to my partners a lot, the ideal business setup is you have three people who are super geniuses, always write about everything, never wrong, and work hard. That would be building the ultimate corporation. The second best alternative is you have people who are those same qualities but maybe think differently and you can work with that gridlock and come to a conclusion about what the right decision is.

It’s painful and it’s going to suck at times because you’re not always going to agree. If you’re friends first, it can be painful. In the end, differing opinions are the next best thing if you’re not going to get it right every time. That’s true with any business, you’re going to feel a certain way based on your interactions with your co-workers or your co-founders. As long as you can trust that you’re going to come to a consensus, I do think that’s an important part of the business process.

The checks and balances are absolutely important. I was recording another episode and my guest has been in business for twenty-plus years. He was like, “Don’t let it get into your head as a founder. Have a counsel and lean on their advice.” You don’t necessarily need to take it but perspectives are important. We only have so much from an angle perspective in terms of what we could see right in front of us. There are blind spots everywhere. I agree with you.

It’s not easy. I certainly always wanted to try to understand what is the experience in perspective that whether it’s a co-founder or anyone that we’re dealing with that’s helping them arrive at this decision. It’s not always easy but it’s probably for the best. The worst-case scenario is you all agree and you’re wrong about everything and you go off a cliff together. In some ways, gridlock is much better than agreeing and completely ending it all but at least you got along with each other.

The supply chain evolved over time with Kettlebell Kings. What about the brand? How do you think your brand evolved from 2012 to 2021 when you exited the M&A deal?

To me, this is another thing that I feel like I took for granted in the beginning. I don’t think I had a real grasp of the importance of branding and aesthetics and luckily, my other partners did. They understood from the beginning the importance of how people perceived the brand, how a logo looks, and how people even feel about the logo. What does a logo make people feel? I was willing to roll with some random design that the Adwords firm we hired was going to give us as our logo but they were stickler about a different way to do it.

The brand changed from being a kettlebell superstore to, “We’re going to brand our own items now.” We realized that we had to do that from a margin perspective and that was pretty much the main driver of that. The brand shifted from the idea of being a kettlebell superstore to, “We’re going to go source our own products and start putting our own logo and our own name on items that we get.” Even then, two years into that process, the products we were selling were different from when we started that first endeavor.

We started working with people who are experts in the kettlebell community, asking them questions about what makes a good quality product, what would they like to change about this prototype, and what would they change about that model. In a lot of ways, the products that we have today, which are still subject to evolution, were almost crowdsourced in a way from experts telling us, “This is what I would like to see on an item, for example.”

What I’m picking up from there is the brand evolved but your attention to detail on the quality of the experience you wanted your products to deliver also evolved. There was that nice amalgamation of both brand and product from the feedback you got from the community towards improving and making the perception of Kettlebell kings premium.

Early on, I wouldn’t have been able to necessarily tell you what makes a good brand and that’s a message that we picked up on listening to our customers and experts over the first couple of years, that our brand stood for high-quality and superb customer service experience.

What did the revenue look like over the years from 2012 to 2021? When did you think it was ripe to sell? 2021 was a fantastic year, talk about great timing. Interestingly, your logo is like a king. I’m not sure whether this is linked to your Vegas days where it’s a king. It’s lucky. What was the revenue over the years and why did you decide to sell in 2021?

We were fortunate that we grew every year that we were in the business. We never had a down year and we were always limited by inventory. In the first couple of years, we’d go six months without our best SKUs at some point as we tried to figure out the whole logistics process and projections process. In our first year in business, we did about 60,000 in sales in 2012, the next year, we quadrupled, the year after that, we tripled, after that, we tripled again, and then after that, it was about 50% growth by the time we got to the exit point.

That was the traject trajectory that we were on. Your question about why we decided to sell, we would even talk early on in the business about, “What would it take to sell right now?” Those discussions are helpful so you can know how your partners think about things and be thinking about them ahead of time. I wouldn’t say that there was ever a set number that we wanted. It was more about life goals. We knew we didn’t want to be doing this business forever.

Two is what’s the current state of the market? Three is what’s the offer that you are getting and how does that apply to what you think is your own potential upside if you were doing it on your own? We got an offer that we felt was rewarding us for all the work that we had put in but allowing us to participate in any future upside of the business where it could do things that we would not have been able to do running it on our own.

Was this a strategic acquisition from another sports brand or did it come from an aggregator of brands?

It was an aggregator.

What was the name of the aggregator you sold to?

The original aggregator was called Factory14. They were based out of Madrid. Within 2 or 3 months of working with them, they were acquired by a company called Razor Group which owns the brand and who, along with one of my co-founders, work with on a weekly basis to continue to help grow the brand.

You did have a side project over the course of Kettlebell Kings. Why did you have this side project? Do you want to shed some more light on the side project you had, which was another eCommerce brand?

Within the kettlebell business around 2015 and 2016, we were trying to think about, “We’re only selling kettlebells. What if tomorrow there’s a bunch of bad press about how nobody should use kettlebells? What if there’s a shortage of metal to make kettlebells? How can we diversify this business to protect and grow over time?” We started a brand called Living.Fit under that brand. That brand houses all things that are non-kettlebell equipment like dumbbells, slam balls, battle ropes, bands, and things like that, as well as digital items.

There are courses designed for trainers who want to be able to teach kettlebell, be able to teach battle rope, and there are workouts for people who want to work out with the equipment as well. We started that brand and it was a challenge to try to build another brand with all the limitations of needing to fund the main business, the main money maker. In the transaction, I did retain ownership of that brand and so that’s part of what I’m now working on building while I split time with the new owner of Kettleball Kings.

With your other co-founders?

It’s along with one of the co-founders from Kettlebell Kings.

Going back to the deal, what multiples did you sell? Was it based on your EBITDA? Was it based on revenue? What was the deal structure like?

As I recall, it was about a 5.5 EBITDA multiple, which we felt pretty good about. The decision to sell should probably be a decision that changes and adjusts over time based on market situations and personal situations. We were talking to our accountants and different contacts we had about current multiples for eCommerce businesses. We were pretty good about that particular multiple.

We had a couple of offers at the time and that was the best multiple offer that we got so we accepted that because it also had a good earnout provision. We felt that if the things that we had been telling ourselves about our ability to grow the business with the right funding and the right marketing and inventory were true, this particular deal allowed us to continue to do those things post-acquisition because we would be working with the buyer.

Did you go through a broker? Were you proactive in saying, “We’re going to market, we’re going to go through a broker, we’re going to present ourselves, and we’re going to get all our books and processes in order to sell?

No, we didn’t go through a broker. We were fortunate that we had built pretty good visibility in our space.During that time, 2020 and 2021, if you were to go to Google and search the term kettlebell or kettlebells, our business was showing up number one on Google above companies like Amazon and much larger fitness companies and those are because of deliberate strategies we used to work on that over time.

As these aggregators were going and looking for potential acquisitions in the fitness space, fitness is a fantastic niche for any aggregator or anyone building an eCommerce portfolio. You can make the case that it’s almost recession-proof and it’s going to be good in a good recession and it’s going to be good in a bad recession. There are limitless possibilities around a fitness business. It’s one of the best you could be in.

We started receiving lots of, one from people wanting to know if we wanted to take on capital and two from people looking to potentially buy. As we received our first handful of people who wanted to start the conversation about the acquisition, we did some proactive outreach on our own at that point with all the main aggregators. We wanted to have enough information for any conversation we were having about what people were offering and what people were looking for. It started with organic reach out to us but then we did some of our own in order to make sure to see what was out there on the market.

It’s interesting that it was all inbound. How did you prepare yourselves? Speaking to a lot of sellers, when you are facing potential suiters in the market, preparation can be all over the place, particularly from a financial standpoint when they’re trying to do their due diligence. Did you have any stories to tell about that?

I don’t think any disaster stories. To me, one of the number one pieces of advice I would give anybody running an eCommerce business or starting one is to make sure your books are in good working order. We did a lot of things well over the course of our business in building our brand. A struggle, for me at least, was finding good financial people over time. It certainly would’ve been helpful to have things a little bit more tidy in the sense of, “This cost goes here. This cost goes there.”

To the credit of the purchaser, it was a pretty rigorous due diligence process. We were in communication with them almost every day for about a two-month period. You spent $100 here this month that wasn’t here that month. A lot of even super tedious little questions about stuff like that. A random piece of advice would be don’t run any of your subscriptions or SaaS that you’re paying for through PayPal.

That was a bit of a nightmare for us having to try to see what was this $100 charge we ran through PayPal that has some corporate entity rather than the actual name of the product on it, for example. That’s one of the lessons I learned going forward, pay all that off a bank account so that’s tidier and easier to parse out in something like QuickBooks as opposed to a big PayPal reconciliation. It was quite a process.

Your conversation about keeping Living.Fit away from the kettlebell king deal, was it uncomfortable? Was it from the get-go? Did you flag that out from the get-go so you just manage expectations?

In the conversations we were having from the beginning, it’s like, “These are two separate entities.” Yes, we’re selling X, Y, and Z products on Kettlebell Kings, for example, but these are owned by this other brand. Living.Fit, at the time, was in a completely different place financially compared to Kettlebell Kings.

In a lot of ways, it didn’t even make sense for someone to want to acquire it at the time. We were saying, “Here’s what’s for sale, these kettlebell items, and this brand as opposed to these other items.” That makes a lot of sense for anyone who’s looking at acquiring. The analogy I would make is Kettlebell Kings is a nice piece of real estate in the sense that it has good domain authority. It can rank any item fast. It has a tremendous reputation for customer service and quality.

In the same way that someone might purchase a piece for real estate in a shopping mall and then start adding the product selection to it, any owner of the business could do that with Kettlebell Kings. Living.Fit items were not selling because they were Living.Fit items, they were selling because they were sold on Kettlebell Kings at the time if that makes sense. Any new owner could quickly rebrand Kettlebell King’s new XYZ items and maybe even do better. There wasn’t a lot of back-and-forth discussion about that.

It makes sense Now. You had Living.Fit products on the Kettlebell website as separate SKUs. Where you are now, what does it look like? You sold in 2021 and we’re in 2022 now. It’s been one year. You’re in a three-year period. What do the weekly catch-ups look like with Razor Group, who is now in Berlin, as compared to when you are running Kettlebell Kings yourself, the brand yourself? What has changed post-acquisition as you earn out?

Certainly, the time difference. They’re seven hours ahead and so there’s coordinating meetings. Mornings are pretty busy right now with kettlebell Kings-related items, it’s pretty much from the moment we get up. I’m in California right now and the first scheduled meeting of the day, which I did not attend, was scheduled for 4:30 AM. The mornings are pretty busy with that.

There’s a lot of organizational knowledge that we need to continue to help impart and build out SOPs for them. There’s a lot of SOP building about, how would we handle this situation? How would we think about that situation? How would maybe this new product do versus that new product? We stay pretty busy and pretty involved on a weekly basis working with them.

What about decision-making, how has that changed? Obviously, there are specialists. Within an aggregator, you’d have finance specialists, procurement specialists, marketing specialists, and you even have platform specialists, specialists working on specific bits of Amazon. If you want to effect a change that’s linked to growth, what does it look like as compared to when it was just you three?

There are way more people involved. When you’re building a much larger company like Razor, it’s important to have a lot of people in decision-making because you don’t want some rogue decision-maker taking the company off a cliff. That’s a perfect example. Our inventory ordering process before was we had a piece of software we used called Inventory Planner, which we found to be effective. We had college kids working for us.

We groomed these kids, “Here’s what you do. You read the software, you tell us what to do, and we make the order.” Those guys were great working for us and a lot of them worked for us for their first year so after college. That would be super easy, “Inventory Planner says to order this. Go place the PO.” That’s a much different process now where there are people whose entire jobs it is to project inventory needs across a bigger corporation. They’ve got their own new formulas and new things that they want to do it.

We have to try to come to some agreement sometimes about what’s the art and science behind how we should be ordering. Something might seem blatantly obvious to us based on our experience but there needs to be a numerical justification for them to pull the trigger, which I do completely understand. They don’t know us. It’s like they’re getting to know us still over the last 6 to 9 months. I wouldn’t expect them to make a $500,000 decision based on us. That would be the biggest example.

It’s data-driven decision-making and there’s a chain of command in there.

The challenge is even when we were in the business, we would’ve wanted to be as data-driven as possible. We don’t think numbers lie. We try to remove all personal biases from decision-making. Sometimes, especially in a small business where you don’t have access to data scientists and the funding to create all this reporting, it is about the intuition of the entrepreneur, and you have to go with it sometimes.

To reframe it, it’s experience-driven. From your perspective, you have the data, which is sometimes in your head based on experience and spreadsheets, and that gives you intuition to make the decisions because it’s fluid, it’s based on experience and the data. From their point of view, they don’t have that experience bit so they’re using numbers and data science to back it up to try and get that time back and make more informed decisions. It’s interesting. We can go on and on about it.

Marketing, you guys commanded quite a strong multiple for your EBITDA. Typically, it’s 4 or 5. 5.5 is pretty solid. Do you think it’s down to your SEO? You talked about adding products. Google views Kettlebell as a fitness brand and so you’re able to add categories that would rank well or fairly quickly and those categories would lead to revenue, interest in traffic in revenue. Was your key differentiator your SEO? Did you do performance? How did marketing evolve from the early days to the point of exit in 2021?

Marketing is one of the most important aspects of the business. We had built an incredible reputation for quality and how we treated customers. We viewed every interaction with a customer as a way to differentiate our brand from how someone else is potentially interacting with that customer. The combination of marketing and all facets of marketing, whether it’s SEO, paid, or social followings, we were strong.

At the time we sold, we had maybe close to 350,000 followers on Instagram with a blue checkmark account. A number of celebrities were following the brand and we tracked that. We had a spreadsheet of other celebrities and blue checkmark people following us. When we finally did start talking about selling, we would show that to people. We had a strong reputation in communities like Reddit, which is organic. People are sharing their experiences with the product and the brand.

As far as marketing in general, you name it, we tried it over time. I would hope that in future businesses, I would never be rigid as to say, “That didn’t work in Kettlebell King so I don’t want to try it now.” We were aware that we were novices at everything. Whether it was about the product itself or marketing, we were willing to try and listen to a lot of different things and experiment and see how it worked. If that’s helpful, I’d be glad to go into some of the specific strategies that we used but that’s generally how we thought about it.

Let’s jump into the specific strategies you used. What do you think propelled your acquisition?

We always had a baseline AdWords budget. Over time, you’re building sales, you’re building repeat customers, and that is a must, you almost always have to have that running. Like n any business, you have to think about how can you market a little bit differently. The most successful things for us that paid off over time were some of the lead campaigns we were in.

Instead of just saying, “Buy this product. Let’s stick it in your face on Facebook or Instagram.” We created a lot of value for people by creating content about how to choose the right kettlebell or, “Here’s a weekly workout you can do with our kettlebell.” We would have created workouts that people could do at their homes. That evolved over time and we would just post it on social media for people to do. It then occurred to us, “Maybe we should try to get more email addresses this way.”

We had campaigns going for a long time where people could sign up to receive weekly workouts from us. In those emails, they’d have a workout to do, we’d include blog posts about how to choose the right kettlebell, or to know when to increase the weight of the kettlebell that you’re using. That had a lot of effects, one is you’re creating value and building trust with people, which is important. You’re creating value for people as opposed to trying to sell them something.

Two is it gives something for people to share. They’re going to send it to other people and they’re going to post links to it and it’s going to help your SEO rankings over time. Three is you position yourself as an expert in knowledge as opposed to a product salesperson. Over time, we were, on average, getting leads anywhere from $0.30 to $1.

Is that still the case, $0.30 to $1?

I’m getting that in Living.Fit still. I don’t know what Kettlebell Kings is getting. I’ve not looked at what they’re getting. Over time, we found that we were getting about a 10 to 1 ROI on ad spend by doing that, creating pure value for people. Eventually, when it comes time they need a product, they purchase. That also helped us build followings in markets before we even got there.

We would’ve been a global brand years ago if we sold something that wasn’t damn hard to ship across the world. We get inquiries all the time from Europe before we were there or India, “How much to ship to this country?” It’s astounding, it’s $400 or $500 often to ship across the world. We always knew whether we would want to move to those countries. We ran inexpensive lead-driving campaigns in Europe, Australia, and India. $5 a day on Facebook driving leads and getting people in our email workflows.

By the time we moved into Australia or moved into Europe, which we did while we still owned the business, we had pretty solid email lists and people ready to market to who are interested in the brand before we even got there. That’s spending $90 a month in an area and building leads over time out of sight and out of mind. The last thing that we did that worked well all stems from the fact that we knew we were novices.

We looked for experts to work with who could help guide us on what would be the best possible kettlebells. That had a couple of effects and one was these people felt like they were part of the process and they wanted to share their product with people who listen to them. Two, there are events where people compete and lift kettlebells. The way that those worked is these were people who are kettlebell fanatics. It’s not like a professional basketball league where there’s a lot of uniformity to it.

People would show up to these meets or these events with their own kettlebells so there wasn’t a standardized weight system. Everybody is competing with the same product. Someone would have X-kettlebell and someone would have Y-kettlebell. We agreed early on to sponsor some of these events and we provided all the products for them to use so that they could have a standardized experience for everyone attending it.

People loved that because other companies weren’t willing to do that and they weren’t willing to give up that much product because it was a lot of product, $20,000 to $30,000 retail value worth of product. That created a lot of grassroots support for us over time. I’m forever thankful to that community for how much they supported the brand after we supported them.

Those are your advocates right there. You’re touching their lives and they will spread the word moving forward. When they’re in buy mode, they’ll think about you guys first given the fact that they’ve tried and loved what they tried in those events. Interesting story. One other thing I picked up on from what you said is the long-term view. You are not looking at eating today. It was not just about, “What’s in today? What’s the haunt like today? What are the results? What are we going to get? What sales are we going to get?”

It was like, “How can we add value? How can we start a relationship? How can we start this conversation? How can we be valuable and relevant to these people? How can we gain their trust over time?” My question to that is what was the nurture at the time? You acquire a lead today and how many months’ time would they look? There’s no typical use case rate but when did you expect to get that payback? What was your payback period?

I want to say the last time we looked at it, it was over three months. It was pretty long.

That’s not long. That’s one quarter. You’re buying leads at $1. A $1 lead gets into something that’s automated and then in three months, they purchase from you.

It takes a while to build that. I remember in the first year, I was like, “Wow, this works.” We were having a good year. This was probably over 5 or 6 years ago. We were having a good year. There were several times during the year when we considered cutting the lead-driving spend but then Black Friday rolled around and it was a monstrous Black Friday. It was like, “This is why we do it.” It’s completely the biggest sales day I could have imagined ever at the time. That’s why we’re always going to do this no matter what.

It makes sense. It’s a clear funnel case study right there. What about other channels? You are clearly a DTC brand. From my understanding, Razor Group is an Amazon aggregator but they started to acquire DTC brands, hence, you being part of the portfolio. Throughout the expansion, over that 9 to the 10-year period, were you multi-channel? Did you sell through retail? Did you sell through Amazon marketplaces and Walmart? Were you just trying to build that customer relationship and customer data and have that one-to-one relationship with customers through DTC?

We thought about other channels the same way we thought about marketing, which is you should try it and do it and see if it’s going to work because you don’t know where you’re going to have that success. Theoretically, if any of them had been bigger than DTC, we would’ve thought about how that should affect the trajectory of our business.

We did sell on Amazon prior to the acquisition and we were on there for about a year and a half. It was about 20% of our sales or maybe 25% in the biggest year. It’s not a majority by any means but we had an experience where we got delisted from Amazon. When we first hired outside parties to start doing our fulfillment and we were not doing it ourselves, we had a pretty terrible experience with the first company we used.

The fulfillment, by the way, is crazy, it’s almost like the Wild West where there are a lot of inexperienced companies doing it right now. I’ve worked with a couple of different ones that I can’t believe how not good at fulfillment they were compared to what we were on our own. We were delisted on Amazon for about two years. Throughout the pandemic, we were not on Amazon.

Amazon randomly reached out to us about the time we were going through our due diligence process and that they had an interest in rehabilitating our brand on Amazon so we got back on through that. Your question about Razor, they want to help us grow Amazon sales. To us, that’s exciting given that’s their specialty in what they do. We’re eager to learn and see how we can grow Amazon sales throughout the world.

Let’s get back to Living.Fit, your new brand. On the face of it are workout plans, membership, and certification. At the back end, there’s equipment, media, and then courses. Is it more like an Alo Yoga model whereby you sell the courses first and then people get into the ecosystem and then buy gear from you? Is it eCommerce first? What’s the priority? Where do you spend 80% of your time on Living.Fit? Courses, content, digital products, or physical products?

Personally, we’re still in the process of discovering what that is. I would say right now we’re much better at selling equipment.That has a lot to do with the relationships that I built while owning Kettlebell Kings, understanding how to talk to different influencers or review websites or content creators so I can make that happen a lot faster now than before. My goal certainly is to grow the digital aspect of that and the courses’ aspect of that.

For most of the life of that business, it’s been exclusively Living.Fit products but I’ve opened it up to now we’re building more of a courses marketplace where any course creator can sell their certifications or their courses targeting trainers on our platform. That delivers a lot more value for our community because it expands what we are able to showcase. Ideally, it has trainers coming back to us for more than kettlebell or battle rope courses.

It’s a fitness platform.

My goal over time would be to build it into a fitness media entity. I’d like to have fitness-related shows and podcasts. I’d like to create an experience where people are using our equipment, they’re reading articles written by our experts and our trainers that are helping them make better fitness decisions in their lives, and then consuming a show about a health and fitness-related topic as well. That’s the experience I’m trying to create.

There’s a term for it, content commerce. I forgot the term. Speaking about your influencer marketing strategy, what tips do you have for readers who are trying to reach out to fitness influencers and build genuine relationships that translate to value on both ends? How do you approach it? What’s been your approach and what works from your perspective?

The main thing is people who are viewed as subject matter experts are the type that I have found worked best for us. I’ve done collaborations with WWE wrestlers who have 5 million followers and it doesn’t lead to a single sale or maybe 100 new followers. I’ve done collaborations with micro-influencers but they’re more subject matter experts who have 10,000 followers and they’re driving way more sales and way more interest in the brand. I do think that people who are legit subject matter experts potentially have some type of designation or accolades in the field that they’re in or what has worked best for us over time.

Jay, I could go on and on with this conversation. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Before I let you go, we have an evergreen lightning round. I’m going to ask you about 6 or 7 questions. If you could use a single sentence to answer each of them will be, it will be okay. Ready when you are.

I’m ready, let’s go.

Are you a morning person?

Yes, I am.

What’s your daily morning routine?

It’s a pretty simple routine, make coffee and start answering emails. I do like being up early. It feels like you have more time to yourself before everyone else is up and active. When I first started Kettlebell Kings, I was driving for Lyft as well. I would get up at four 4:30 in the morning because that was the best time for people going to the airport and you could earn more. I got into a habit then. I don’t get up that early anymore but that’s where it started.

Are you into sports?

Yes. I like pretty much all sports. What would be another sports question?

What’s your favorite team?

San Antonio Spurs. I grew up in San Antonio, there are not any other pro teams there so that’s pretty much my main allegiance. I’ve tried to adopt NFL teams or MLB teams over the years and it’s been fake and I end up not caring when they win or lose that much. The Spurs are the only real ones and the Texas Longhorns because I went to UT.

They say home is best. What two things can’t you live without?

For better or for worse, probably my cell phone because I do look for information on it all the time, constantly googling things, and trying to read things. Let’s say water because no one can live without water.

Fair enough. What book are you currently reading or listening to?

I’m currently listening to Le Misérables because I’ve gotten on a French kick here over the last couple of years, which all started with a musical that was popular in the United States, Hamilton. There was a French character in that called Lafayette. I got interested, read a couple of bios, French Revolution stuff, and now I’ve been taking French lessons, and have been reading French novels. I’m listening to Le Misérables but reading a book something about time and it’s accounts from people living in the Soviet Union.

What’s your French like now?

Trévia.

The final question is what’s been your best mistake to date? By that, I mean a setback that’s given you the biggest feedback.

There’s been so many. It’s so cliche to say but making small mistakes is incredibly helpful because you learn from them. We had an experience where we brought on a new supplier, we sold through that product, we reordered from them, and they sent us a completely different product that time. The second time, it was unbelievable, a completely different product, looked different, and they’re like, “It’s a kettlebell.”

I would say just being able to understand a lot more about the supply chain and how much you need to monitor that so that you can have consistent quality and consistent experience for your customers because there’s a giant trickle-down effect in how people view your brand and view their interactions with you.

We could record a masterclass on just supply chain in and of itself. Mr. Jay Perkins, it’s been an absolute pleasure having you on the 2X eCommerce podcast. For people who want to find out more about you, it’s Living.Fit. Are you active on any socials?

No, I’m not very active socially. I am on LinkedIn so that’s probably the best place. Anything else, pretty much just look for Living.Fit on Instagram, Facebook, and all the good stuff.

It’s been a pleasure having you. I enjoyed this conversation. Thank you for coming to the 2X eCommerce Podcast.

Thank you as well.

Cheers.