Dan Demsky's Unbound Merino journey
Years ago, Dan Demsky wanted to buy a merino wool t-shirt for travel to lighten his load... and he couldn't find one. It haunted him. He knew this product should exist, and after a business coach told him he shouldn't do it, he spent 18 months on research and development that resulted in a crowdfunding campaign that raised $380K USD.
That brand was Unbound Merino, purveyors of quality merino wool clothing. Today, Unbound Merino is a multi-million dollar global brand selling in over 100 countries.
Its not all puppies and roses: they had positioned the brand as a travel accessory, impacting their sales in a pandemic world.
Key Takeaways:
Kurt Elster: Today on The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, we are talking to a man who, not that long ago, managed to raise $380,000 through a crowdfunding campaign. Yes, we’re talking to you about a Shopify apparel brand called Unbound Merino, which if you are familiar with fine merino wool clothing, that’s exactly what this brand is about and sells. But in 2016, they raised almost $400,000 through a crowdfunding campaign and in just a few short years, have grown this brand into a multimillion dollar global business, selling in over 100 companies.
Joining me to discuss it is cofounder, Dan Demsky from Unbound Merino. Dan, thank you for doing the show. I’m your host, Kurt Elster.
Dan Demsky: Well, I have to say I’ve been on a few podcasts, but I am actually a fan of yours and I listen to it all the time, so if there’s ever a podcast that I just really don’t want to screw up by being a guest on, it’s this one. And that’s probably the reason that if I will screw up, it’s going to be for that very reason. So, I hope I’m good. I hope I live up to all of the hype I have in my heart to be here. And it really is awesome to be here.
Kurt Elster: Oh, I have total faith in you. I’m looking at the store. All you have to do is speak to this experience and we will be thoroughly impressed.
Dan Demsky: Awesome. Well, I’m here.
Kurt Elster: Like as many times as I’ve done this, and I’ve consulted on so many projects and brands with various clients, I myself have not personally built an eCommerce store. That’s the dark truth of what I do. I’m a champion for entrepreneurship. I haven’t done this. So, when I’m impressed by it, like I’m genuinely impressed. I am thoroughly over and over impressed, because number one, I know how hard it is. And two, I’ve never personally done it directly myself.
So, Mr. Demsky, what the heck is merino wool and why are we so excited about it? Why build a brand around this?
Dan Demsky: Well, you know, when I first discovered merino wool, I was looking for a way to travel lighter. Because I was just so frustrated. I went on… It was the first trip I went on before my honeymoon, and I was having to drag my then girlfriend, who ended up my wife, all of her enormous, unnecessary, massive amounts of luggage up hills to get to the hotel, and I just said, “There has to be a better way.” And when I started doing research, I discovered merino wool apparel as a little travel hack. Because it’s naturally antibacterial and odor resistant, you can wear a t-shirt for example, and it feels just like a really nice cotton. It doesn’t feel like wool. People think it might be itchy. But you can wear this multiple days in a row and it will never smell, it’s antibacterial, so if you’re gonna pack for a long trip, instead of packing 14 t-shirts, maybe you could pack three and you can reduce that load.
So, I started thinking this is perfect. This is the exact solution I was looking for. But everything I found on the market was just not made for going out for a cocktail, for example. It’s stuff that you’d have, going like on a… You’re going portaging. You have a canoe. Or you’re going hiking. It was made as athletic wear or as outdoors wear.
Kurt Elster: Yes.
Dan Demsky: And I just couldn’t find, like I want to have like a really nice, black, V-neck t-shirt, where if I put on a nice pair of jeans, put on a watch, I can look okay if I’m out for a cocktail. And I couldn’t find it, and I had another business at the time. I just wanted to create an eCommerce business. I had my head in that game. I was for years trying to think of what is the thing I can sell, and I had this aha moment where I’m like, “If I can’t find this, I can make it, so let’s just do it.” The problem is I had no money to start this business, and I was already running another company.
So, we opted to do a crowdfunding campaign as a way of validating the idea, but also a way of getting the funds to supply ourselves with some inventory to sell. So, it was literally… You know what? And my thinking at the time was if this doesn’t work, I’ll have created a lot of samples, and at least I made the clothing that I wanted to have anyway, and I’ll have some nice clothing for me, and I’ll have scratched itch to see if this thing works or not. So, crowdfunding was that way of validating the idea.
Kurt Elster: You know, it’s funny. I talked to… Years ago I talked to Leo from Mugsy Jeans, I believe it was, and he… It was the same thing. He made the jeans for himself to fulfill his own need, and then… I don’t even know if it was his intention to make more of them. But his friend said, “Whoa, those are pretty nice jeans. Where’d you get those?” He goes, “I made them.” They go, “Holy crap! You made them? All right, let me get a pair.” And so, it spiraled from there.
Dan Demsky: I think-
Kurt Elster: You had some more intention, though, about it. That you thought, “Yeah, at least I might make this for myself.”
Dan Demsky: Well, this is the thing. You know, I started one eCommerce brand before that, and I’m not… I’m proud of… And we never really got it off the ground. It was a sock company and it was socks designed by street artists, and there’s lots of really cool street artists here in Toronto, where I live, and I have access to them, I connected with them, I had them help design these funky socks, and we had this thing where they’ll get… We pay them for the design and then they get royalties for every sock they sold. It was really cool packaging, was a cool brand. The problem was we can see this idea when funky socks were starting to become really popular in a lot of cities, and that’s kind of the worst time to start a business, because if it’s becoming popular, you already missed the boat.
So, I thought I have a friend who started a very successful hair extensions business, and he started it because he was going to get married in a destination wedding, and he had a really terrible experience, or his wife did, a really terrible experience finding hair extensions online. They were all out of stock. The shipping was terrible. The customer service was terrible. They thought, “We can do this better.” And then another good friend of mine, he started a company called Dbrand Skins, which is a vinyl skins company, and it was the exact same thinking.
What happened with him is he bought these Beats by Dre headphones and he thought they were the coolest headphones ever, and he wore them to his university campus, and when he got there, he saw everyone was wearing these headphones. And all of a sudden, he didn’t like them anymore. He thought, “Oh, man.” Yeah, it’s like, “I thought these were the cool, but everyone has,” and he felt kind of like a loser wearing them.
Kurt Elster: They were like 300 bucks, the original Beats, and they were conspicuous. They were big and glossy with bright accents, like these-
Dan Demsky: And everyone had them and it irritated him. So, what he did was he sat there in class with some electrical tape or hockey tape and a pocketknife, and he just started cutting the tape and he skinned the Beats by Dre headphones into this really cool matte black. So, they were just a solid matte black, perfectly skinned, and when he would walk around listening to music, people would stop him and say, “Where did you get that skin?” And he didn’t know what they were talking about. He said, “What do you mean, skin?” They said, “On your headphones. On your Beats.”
And then he discovered that skins were a thing, so he went, and he bought skins from other companies, and he was so irritated by how poorly they fit onto his Beats by Dre headphones that he thought, “This is a travesty. I could do better.” So, he did that. Created a massive, massive company. Just like this hair extension business was a massive company. So, that was the insight I needed to say that if you have that moment where you think, “Ah, I can do this better.” Or the market isn’t doing this right, that was the opportunity. And with this sock company, and I had a video production agency, and I had no time, I’m so tired, I hated my life. I wanted to create this eCommerce business and I thought, “This is it.”
And I couldn’t sleep. I even went to a business coach and I pitched him this idea and he knew all about merino wool and said, “Dan, this idea is amazing. I love it and I get it.” And he said, “But you’re not the guy to do this.” And it was like, “What?” Like I was so… I had my arms in the air when he was saying this was an amazing idea, because I’m like, “I found it!” Right?
But he said, “You have two companies you’re trying to run. Your cashflow is tight. You’re drained. You’re always tired.” And he was right. But the thing is, I couldn’t go to sleep. I was thinking about this all the time. So, I thought, “I don’t care what he says. This is my opportunity. I’m gonna do it.” And that’s why I resorted to crowdfunding, because I’m like, “He’s right. I don’t have the money to test something. I’m not gonna put 50, 60, 70, $100,000 into building out an inventory and a business when I don’t even know if I can flip this product.”
So, we did a crowdfunding campaign, and it gave us the platform to come up with the brand, with the positioning. We had to obviously source the product first. We pieced this whole thing together. I did it with my two best buddies and it took us a year and a half, and we did it every… Because one of my business partners has a couple kids, so he had to put his kids to sleep, and he had a full-time job, so Friday nights at 8:00 PM, we’d meet up and we’d go until midnight to 2:00 AM, depending how tired or how much whiskey we drank, and we did that for a year and a half building out this campaign, and it was all on that pretense that this is a product that we could bring to the market, that it’s not in the market in the way we want to do it. It’s not positioned the way we want to do it. I want this for me.
And if you want it for yourself and you see that, you’re the best person to do it, because all of the positioning, all of the marketing, all of that becomes easier, because you know how you’d want to receive that message and you know how you’d want that to be communicated to you, to solve the problem you may have. So, that’s how it sort of initiated.
Kurt Elster: So, recapping, you’re living in Toronto. You have two businesses, one that you’re struggling to get traction with, so-
Dan Demsky: That’s the sock company.
Kurt Elster: The fancy socks. And you had a video production company as well?
Dan Demsky: Yes.
Kurt Elster: Okay. That’s helpful as a marketer, certainly, to have access to a media team and an understanding of video production. Absolutely.
Dan Demsky: Absolutely.
Kurt Elster: Especially with Kickstarter and crowdfunding in general, where telling a story with that video is what makes or breaks you. And so, you experienced that same entrepreneurial lightbulb moment that so many people, so many guests on this show have, where you have a pain or problem in your own life, you have a vague idea of what the solution should look like, like this abstract idea, and when you go out to try to find it, that’s how you know that the existing solutions aren’t it. And so, this was… Well, based on the timeline here, working backwards, you had the idea in 2014, I’m thinking?
Dan Demsky: I think we first started talking about it at the end of 2014, and we really started working it in 2015.
Kurt Elster: Okay, and then the brand or the Kickstarter launches in 2016, right?
Dan Demsky: In the summer. Yes.
Kurt Elster: Okay, so you had this idea, and I had around this time, maybe… Yeah, probably a few years earlier I discovered merino wool because I was riding my bike 50 to 100 miles weekly, just nonstop, and so you need street clothes that aren’t gonna sweat and smell, and the answer was, well, merino wool was the solution. So, I wore merino wool t-shirt often. I wore a merino wool hoodie often. So, I’m familiar with the joy of this brand or this material. It’s exactly what you described. It just feels like a really quality, soft cotton, but it takes some serious effort to smell the stuff up.
The downside is you pay a premium for it.
Dan Demsky: Well, it is not a cheap material. It’s a very premium material. But it’s for… You know, we make a plain black t-shirt, and the people that buy our clothing, they’re not buying it because it’s this trendy, cool, supreme shirt, where you can have a logo on it and show everyone how expensive this thing is. It’s for people, they understand, they want a really good quality plain black t-shirt, for example. And they’re willing to spend the price to have something that’s not just a brand that’s expensive, but it’s a really functional, high-performing material that has… As far as a black t-shirt can improve your life, this is the most it can. Because your laundry machine will run less, it regulates temperature, so it keeps you actually… If it’s a little cool, it’s insulating, but if it’s hot, the moisture wicking and the airflow, it will keep you cool.
It’s more environmental and sustainable. It’s 100% natural and biodegradable. So, literally in every possible way that you could think of a t-shirt, it’s just a better t-shirt. So, people are willing to pay the price. It’s expensive to make, it’s expensive to produce, so that’s why it’s expensive to buy. But we’re just after making the best. Literally, that’s our main core product is our plain t-shirt, and we’re tinkering with it, and the changes we make now are so small, but our goal is we are making the best t-shirt in the world. Period.
Kurt Elster: So, the core concept, the original Kickstarter, and I would love to Google this, but my internet is dangerously slow at the moment. Wait. No, that’s not it. Was this on Indiegogo? Okay, got it. So, I keep saying Kickstarter and really I mean Indiegogo. The think you were after was what article of clothing, this black V-neck t-shirt?
Dan Demsky: The thing we were after in our original campaign was what are the few items we can make that would reduce someone’s luggage when they travel the most? So, we did two color t-shirts, we did socks, and underwear, because we thought if you’re traveling for a long period of time, if you bring less of that stuff, you’re reducing the most amount of your luggage.
Kurt Elster: And the original Indiegogo, so I got two t-shirts, which I’ve got a merino wool shirt. It’s great. Highly recommended. Two pairs of underwear, which I have not tried merino wool underwear. That’s gotta be nice. What was the cost on that bundle in the original Indiegogo campaign?
Dan Demsky: Well, we had all sorts of early bird pricing. You know what? I don’t remember the Indiegogo, all of the Indiegogo pricing, because every week we’d have different bundles, and a sale on this, and that was a whole idea, is like you’re buying the crowdfunding to get a deal. But on our website now, we’ll have for $210, you’ll get two t-shirts, two pairs of socks, two pairs of underwear. Our t-shirt’s $68. So, some people, and we get this all the time on Facebook, like, “$68 for a t-shirt? You guys are insane. You’re out of your mind. I can buy 100 t-shirts for that.” And I get it-
Kurt Elster: It’s not quite the same.
Dan Demsky: It’s not the same. And we can’t sell a t-shirt for the price that you are willing to pay, because we would lose money. So, it’s a premium product for people who really are… The people that know, know. It’s like they’re buying something that is of a different level of quality.
Kurt Elster: Well, and even I, before I bought Merino wool, I was like A, how good could this really be? And is it worth the cost? And I just wrestled with it, and finally on a Black Friday sale I buy this merino wool hoodie that’s like normally over a hundred bucks and I got it for under a hundred bucks. I was thrilled. And that was when I became a convert, and I’m like, “All right. This is a really, really nice material.”
But all right, so your point about you get those troll comments about like… I’m an individual who is advertised to and I don’t see the value, so I need to be mad about it in a comment. I don’t know what possesses those people. They wouldn’t just run into a Ferrari dealership and be like, “I could buy a Honda for 25 grand!” Yes, you absolutely could! And it would be a perfectly good car. But you don’t have to go yell at the Ferrari salesman about it. It’s very strange.
Dan Demsky: Well, here… Yeah, and-
Kurt Elster: There’s a bonus here. Listen to this. I asked Andy Bedell from KeySmart, because they’ll get stupid comments like that on various ads, and he’s such an amazing Facebook advertiser, I always pay attention to what he’s doing. And I said do you ever moderate these comments? Do you delete them? What do you do with these idiots? They’re troll comments. And he goes, “Oh, I love the troll comments.” I said why? He goes, “Because it ups the engagement rate on the ad and that drives the cost down, and it shows that people are paying attention to it.” He’s like, “I want people to go and get mad in the comments. They’re not gonna buy. They never were gonna buy. But it’s gonna increase visibility for everybody else.” I thought that’s very interesting.
Dan Demsky: Oh, you know what? I just… See, this is why I listen to your podcast, because my strategy is way worse than that. What I do is I just hide them. I could just respond to them, because it’s not like they’re wrong. The price is the price and they don’t think the price is fair. But I can just explain why it costs what it costs and have more engagement. But I always was wondering, like these… You know, you go on an ad for some brand and you’re gonna troll it, and I can hide it, and the only person that will see that comment is the person who posted it, so it’s just like they’re yelling at themselves, and I always thought it was a very strange thing. I don’t even get mad at it, but now I feel like I need to just let these people just yell all they want and just take it on the chin. That’s a way better idea.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I would try it. See two ads, and on one moderate the comments, on one don’t, and see what happens. But this engagement rate, it does control part of your cost and visibility on the ad. It’s kind of interesting. But yeah, that changed how I saw it.
Oh, so I lost my place. Okay, so on this, when you’re running your Indiegogo campaign, running these things is a full-time job. It’s quite time consuming to maintain them. And at this time, you’re still… You’ve got two other businesses that are going. Tell me, hindsight being 20/20, what do you think made your campaign as successful as it was?
Dan Demsky: A number of factors. I think that you have… I really do think timing really matters, and that’s why my sock company I started didn’t… We weren’t really able to get it off the ground too much. So, I think that’s a factor in that we’re positioning something to people who haven’t really heard of merino wool like this before, so that matters. But everything you do to make the campaign successful, it really, really matters, and we left no stone unturned. So, anything that was on the internet, like any blog about creating a crowdfunding campaign, we read. Anyone I know that has created a crowdfunding campaign that was successful, I talked to and I got their opinions on things. And all of the successful campaigns I really liked, we just picked apart and ripped off and duplicated the elements that we liked.
So, we pieced this whole thing together, but a couple strategies that we did to make the thing successful, and one that was unique to us, one of them was we used Indiegogo instead of Kickstarter. I’m not saying that is the solution in itself, but what we liked about Indiegogo was they were very accessible to us. Kickstarter, it’s like you can’t talk to a person. They’re way too big. They don’t care to talk to you. But with Indiegogo, they’ll assign you an account rep that handholds you through the process and helping you get set up. And what they did, which was huge for us, and I know that they do this… I imagine they still do this for anyone that wants to create a crowdfunding campaign, is they cut a deal with us that said, “If you are to get 30% funded in the first 48 hours, then we will commit to featuring you in our newsletter.” And the newsletter I already knew, but they pitched to me, is a really, really good driver of crowdfunding sales.
So, I thought, “Perfect. We need to get 30% of our funding goal.” Now, what we really needed to make to start this business was closer to $70,000, but we made our funding goal $30,000, because it was easier to get to 30% of $30,000 than it was to $70,000. And we figured what we’ll do is we’ll get that and hopefully that momentum will get us past 30, and then we’ll look like we’re 100% funded fast, and then that will get us to $70,000 faster than if we make it $70,000, it might be a slower start and we might not really get that momentum early. So, it was all just this fake momentum we were creating.
Kurt Elster: Is it fake? Is it fake, though? Because you’ve got… Like, those were real sales. You’re just playing with what the goal is.
Dan Demsky: Well, let me get to the next part.
Kurt Elster: Oh, here we go.
Dan Demsky: Okay, so it was a little bit of an artificial momentum we created to start it, but it was real sales. What we did was for a month leading up to the launch of our campaign, I reached out to anyone I knew that I was comfortable enough to ask them would they buy a t-shirt to support us at our early, super early bird price. So, it’s still an expensive t-shirt. I think it was $45 or $50 was our early, early bird price. I could ask… Can I ask my brothers? Yes, I’m comfortable. Can I ask my buddy Dave, who I haven’t talked to in three years? Yeah. You know what? He made the cut.
But I would make this list of anyone I’m comfortable enough asking and I just asked them all. And they all said… I said, “In a month, I’m gonna start this campaign, and will you support it? It would mean a lot to me.” And they said yes. Now, I know it’s easy to just say yes and then not do it, so what we did, two days before the campaign, is I went to… I put on my recorder on my webcam and I started a video, and I said, “Dave, remember a month ago I asked if you can buy a shirt? Well, our campaign is launching tonight at midnight,” or whatever I said. “And you know, we’ve been working for a year on this and this is the passion project of all passion projects for me. Blood, sweat, and tears went into this, and if you could make good on that, and if it’s not good timing for you, there’s really no worries. I don’t care. You don’t have to in any way be obligated to this. But if you could support it and buy a t-shirt or something, it would make such a big difference to me. Can you please do that?”
And then I exported that video, I called it Dave.mpeg or whatever it was, uploaded it to YouTube as a private link, and I sent it to Dave. And then Dave’s gonna get this video thumbnail in his Facebook box with a thumbnail of me talking to the camera. It says Dave, his name.mpeg. He’s gonna be very compelled, because when people send out these mass messages that are asking you to, “Can you please upvote my thing?” or, “Can you buy this?” Or whatever, everyone knows it’s a mass message and those are very easy to ignore. But when it’s Dave.mpeg and I’m making a video, I’m talking to him and I include an inside joke in there, and I talk about when we were in math class, and whatever we were doing, it’s like at the very least, they want to respond. And some people said, “Do you know what, dude? It’s not a good time for me to buy anything, but I wish you so much luck. This is awesome.” And then no problem, you know?
But I did, and we did those all night, and we were drinking whiskey, so these videos got chaotic. Some of them were just like nonsense. But when you looked at the first, let’s say two to six hours of this campaign, you’ll see Brian, my brother, that was the first sale that came in. Or Sandy is my business partner’s cousin. You just recognize all these names. But then we hit $10,000 like in the first hour, so we’re already good. We locked that in. But now we’re trending on Indiegogo. So, all of a sudden, Johannes in Berlin orders, and like I have no idea who that is. And then we started seeing something from the UK, and then in the US. All over the US these orders are coming in.
And it just had this momentum of its own because we’re now trending. Then I think it was not even… We didn’t even get to the 24 hours before we hit our $30,000 100% goal, so now we’re 100% funded and it looks amazing, so now people are like, “This is a hot product.” So, people want to back this thing, right? Because there’s this momentum. So, we’re like, “How do we stay trending more?” So, we engaged with an ad-buying company that focuses on crowdfunding, and we just invested money in ads, because there’s like an algorithm that Indiegogo uses. It’s called Indiegogo factor or something. And there’s all these pieces that contribute to it, so we’re like, “Well, we’ve hit our funding goal day one. We have good momentum from the trending page. Now let’s just keep driving people to the campaign, just so that it’s busy and just try to trend as long as possible.” So, that was like the wave we wanted to surf on, was trending on Indiegogo. So, we’re driving traffic and the momentum was there, but it did start all friends and family, so we had $10,000 at least in sales just from friends and family and asking people to support us.
But we worked really hard to ensure that we’d get that done.
Kurt Elster: I am amazed by the grassroots strategy you implemented, where you said… When people ask me, “Hey, what’s the standard operating procedure for start a business?” At some point in there, there’s that early validation and audience building exercise that’s you gotta hit up your friends and family and try to get them to buy. And that’s such an awkward and weird thing, and we all go through it. Well, many of us go through it. And you figured out such a clever way to do it, especially considering this was 2016 or 2015, so video production and ease of use has changed dramatically in five years. Especially on mobile. So, you guys recorded these personalized videos and reached out to people one on one with video via Facebook Messenger. That’s literally like a SaaS business now called Bonjoro, that does this.
And you guys came up with the home brew version of it five years ago. That’s very cool. So, that’s already one of my key takeaways here, is that you came up with that idea. For the Kickstarter campaign, I love that you start small with the goal and then stretch it, stretch it, stretch it. We have a… For many years now, we’ve had a Shopify app that adds a Kickstarter widget to… Sorry, not Kickstarter widget. A Kickstarter-style type crowdfunding widget to your store. And yeah, I’m already plugging my own stuff. And that’s what we’ve seen in the successful stores is we’re like, “Look, don’t go with some giant goal, because when people show up and it’s zero out of $200,000, they’re gonna freak and they’re not gonna fund it.”
But if you show up and it’s like, “Oh, it’s $2,000 out of $5,000.” Okay, now it seems reasonable and you’re like, “Well, I can see that if I make a single purchase, that’s gonna move the needle on this.” And so, you want to go with a smaller goal and then blow past it. And again, tooting Andy’s horn from KeySmart, Andy Bedell, that was the second attempt at this idea ever we tried was launching one of their products, and that’s what he did, was keep it intentionally low, so that as social proof you show how much beyond that goal you could go.
Dan Demsky: And you see that everywhere. You see that with any… When Nintendo releases a new console, are they really not able to supply everyone? Or are they just-
Kurt Elster: I’ve always wondered that. It’s like, oh, you really couldn’t meet that demand?
Dan Demsky: You really can. No, they want people to want it. And then that’s like a buzz of its own.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, you want that scarcity. If everybody else wants it and I can’t get it, now I want it.
Dan Demsky: There has to be a reason. Why did this thing get 100% in less than 24 hours, right? If we did $70,000 and we got to 30%, like, “Well, you know-“
Kurt Elster: It’s not the same.
Dan Demsky: “… this looks kind of interesting.” But it’s like if people are making a decision with their hard-earned money and something like, “Whoa, this is something. Something special about this. This got funded fast.” It adds to that momentum and it helps people make that decision, so you really have to have that momentum, and that’s really… You have to make it happen. That was our absolute singular, number one priority was we have to make this hot. Look hot out the gate, because people have to want this thing.
Kurt Elster: Absolutely. Yeah, that one earns a major key alert. So, after the success of this Indiegogo campaign, you’ve already got eCommerce experience, from direct experience, and close friends with experience. I assume that you go straight to a Shopify store, but what happens after the success of the campaign?
Dan Demsky: Yeah, so that was the moment where we thought, “Okay.” And we really did believe that we can make this thing work, you know? You have to believe it really, that you can do it, but you have to make it happen. But when we were successful with the crowdfunding campaign, we sat down and said, “Listen, we have a start here. We are so lucky to have this start, but we do not have a business. We just have a start.” A business is when we create our eCommerce store and people are going there for whatever reason, however we get them there, and they’re buying there. That’s a business. Right now, we just had this campaign.
So, we decided to go with Shopify for a million reasons. One, I can see the Shopify office out my window and I felt like that was comforting. I can walk over there and wrangle them if I needed them. [crosstalk 0:29:31.6]
Kurt Elster: Have you ever gone over there?
Dan Demsky: I know some people that work there, so sometimes I set up meetings there because they have free lunch and it’s awesome.
Kurt Elster: I’ve not been to the Toronto office, but I have been to the Ottawa office, and I did eat the lunch. They joke internally. I don’t know if Shopify folk will be thrilled that I’m sharing this on a podcast. But they joke about like, “The Shopify 15.” The catered food that they do for lunch is so good people end up gaining weight working there.
Dan Demsky: This is not a joke. If this business didn’t work, I was so frustrated with my other entrepreneurial life, I was at wits end. I was like I don’t know how to write a resume, but I’m gonna find a job, and I think Shopify is the only place that might hire me. It’s the only place I’d want to work. I’d be thrilled to work at Shopify. I love Shopify. I love what Shopify is to us and our business. They made this thing possible. And I love Indiegogo for the same reason. But it’s just such an awesome company. I’m so proud to… You know, there’s not a lot of companies like that, that are on the world stage, this amazing, that are from Canada.
There are great brands from Canada, don’t get me wrong, but Shopify is one that I just love. They’re so near and dear to my heart and I see that little Shopify logo out my window. I’m looking at it right now. And I’m proud. I’m like, “I’m proud that that is in my city.”
Kurt Elster: Can I ask how old you are?
Dan Demsky: I’m 35.
Kurt Elster: Okay. I’m 37, so as long as I’m asking people their ages, I may as well throw that out there.
Dan Demsky: Yeah. There you go.
Kurt Elster: To be clear, for someone who’s like, “Oh man, I’m 30 and I’ve not started a successful business yet.” You did not start a successful business until your early thirties, right?
Dan Demsky: Well, I had… My first business did really well. I just hated it after a while. I started it in my mom’s basement in my early twenties. It was a video production agency. We were pretty early into doing video for the online world, and we grew really fast, and being in your early twenties and having a successful company is a volatile and dangerous situation, because I had a little bit of an ego, because we did this thing fast and I thought I knew what I was doing. I had no idea what I was doing and-
Kurt Elster: Yeah, you don’t know what you don’t know, and in your twenties, you don’t have the humility to figure that out.
Dan Demsky: Yeah. We grew really fast and it was like within three years, we had a big downtown… I was up in the suburbs in my mom’s basement, and then two years later we had a staff of 20 in a big downtown studio, and everything was… It was awesome until it wasn’t, but that business I’d say was successful. It’s just I, after many years, felt really stuck in it. It was draining all of my energy. You’re only as successful as your last hunt, like we were hunting big… We had big brand clients, but if we didn’t have a big pipeline, we’d have cashflow issues six to nine months later. I had to be pitching all the time. I felt like a dancing monkey. I was just unhappy. Even though I did something cool and I’m really proud of what we did in that business, I was just… I just knew I needed out. And for years, I was trying to think of what is…
This is what I wanted to do. I wanted to create an eCommerce business and start some kind of product. That was it. I’m like, “I don’t know what it is. That’s it. I want to sell product.” Because I don’t want to have to go and pitch people in person. I don’t want to have clients who… The revenue that each client is worth is so substantial that if the deal doesn’t close, it’s like will we make payroll? I hated that hunt. I loved it at first. I hated it.
So, we started the sock company and that was something I did on the side and I had these two businesses. When the crowdfunding for Unbound Merino was successful, I walked away from my other companies. I gave it to my partner. I didn’t get bought out. Nothing. I’m just like, “I’m done. I’m going to focus on this.” And that was it. Now, I don’t think it was… I could have been more… I don’t know. Maybe unceremoniously walked away, but I just knew what I needed to focus on, and they understood, so I started this new company. I now have this awesome kickstart. Well, I used the word kickstart. I should say I had this Indiego.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Kickstarter’s become like Kleenex as far as crowdfunding is concerned.
Dan Demsky: I Indiegogoed it and I had to make this decision. Well, you know what? I’m gonna go all in on this. Now, I don’t have any kids. I didn’t own a house. I didn’t feel that I had this pressure, so there’s something there. I’m like, “You know what? Worst case scenario, worst case scenario is this thing won’t fly and I’m gonna go live in my mom’s basement.” I was all in. And looking back, I feel almost like anxiety thinking that I had my back to the wall. That’s crazy, but I was so into this, and I knew that it could work, because we had the validation from crowdfunding, but now we had to go build the Shopify store and cross our fingers, and hope that… Will this momentum carry over?
So, we built out a Shopify site. It’s now December of 2016. And it was so simple. There’s like very little dev work. We put the site together. We threw assets from our crowdfunding campaign in. And I remember meeting in the morning before our other partners had to go to work, because we still, they weren’t full-time in this yet, but I’m not full-time. And we met in a Starbucks and we were going to tweak some stuff on our Shopify site, which was on the internet now, but we haven’t launched it. We haven’t done our big launch, which we were starting to think that we need to plan, because we’re now an eCommerce business and we’re gonna launch and whatever. We didn’t even know what that launch was gonna look like, but that’s what we’re about to plan.
We’re throwing some photos, we’re doing some copy in our Shopify site, and I go to the back end and the Shopify dashboard, and I saw over a dozen orders on the website. Now, I did not expect a single order. It was on the internet. We did not announce this. We were still working on this. This was an incomplete website. And at that moment, I went, “This is a business.” Because people were looking for us and they were looking for us because we were already shipping crowdfunding orders and there was word of mouth that was starting to build.
And when I knew word of mouth was making people find us, this brand new Shopify site, and they’re going on our website and they’re buying our stuff, I rushed over to our… We were running out of a storage locker, like I said. We gotta fill these orders! This is crazy! And that was the moment this was a business. Now, I had no salary at the moment, but I’m like, “This is going to work.” So, we just were running entirely on momentum of the crowdfunding campaign. The word of mouth got us the continued momentum. And we were starting to think, “Okay, well, we can’t run on just that. What’s next? What are the other traps that were put out there? The other little fishing nets that will capture more people to come to our site?”
Because our site is converting already. People are coming here and they’re buying. How do we get more people? How do we do what we did on crowdfunding, but apply this to an eCommerce business? And we just had great momentum right out the gate, and we worked our ass off to get all the way until… Even until today, we’re working harder than we’ve ever worked now because of COVID, but we just had… It all started with the crowdfunding, and just applying anything else we could figure out. The next was Facebook Ads. The next was SEO. And email is a big thing now. The next thing we’re doing is affiliates. So, it’s always just trying to think of how could we focus on one thing at a time but try to do it really well? And we’ve been very, very lucky to continue to grow, and having the time of my life.
Kurt Elster: I love that story that you said, “Hey, we’ve built the site, but we hadn’t launched it.” I think that’s an important distinction to recognize, especially for very early merchants. Maybe people who are still building their first Shopify store. Especially now, we have a lot of people who never had a strong online presence thinking about it or starting it for the first time. And one of the dead giveaways that someone has never launched an online brand before is when they’re worried about someone seeing the website before it’s finished. And it’s like, “Oh. No, you don’t know the dark truth.”
Just because you put that website out there doesn’t mean anyone’s actually going to see it. And that’s why you were very excited and surprised it sounded like when the website was up and live, but it didn’t have advertising run to it, so you’re like, “Yeah, it’s out there, but it’s not launched.” Just putting it… Publishing something on the web by no means launches it.
Dan Demsky: Yeah. It felt to me like I painted a painting. It’s like as if I painted a painting at home but I left it in my living room. Because it’s not for the world.
Kurt Elster: And then you’re like, “Okay. Well, where’s the art dealers at?” Right? Why are they not here?
Dan Demsky: It felt to me like that painting in the living room, but someone emailed and said, “The painting is beautiful, I want to offer you this money.” Like, “How did you even see it?”
Kurt Elster: Right. And so, it was word of mouth and it was demand from that campaign carrying over.
Dan Demsky: Yeah, and repeat customers. They wanted to buy more t-shirts.
Kurt Elster: Okay. And repeat customers who were like Googling it, like, “I gotta order this. I’m sure these guys have a website.” And then, so then the actual launch was, “All right, let’s start running Facebook ads to get new traffic to the site. Start retargeting people. Let’s build an email list. Let’s start sending out newsletters. Let’s start doing affiliate marketing.” So, you kind of ran through that playbook, and then… This steady growth, incremental improvement leads you to a multimillion dollar global brand.
Unfortunately, it’s a travel brand. It’s not a clothing brand. It’s travel, lifestyle apparel. And that’s what got one of the industries, verticals, niches, whatever you want to call it, that got hit hardest in the pandemic. So-
Dan Demsky: Fortunately, we’re not like a… We’re not a cruise ship.
Kurt Elster: Right.
Dan Demsky: You know?
Kurt Elster: Yeah, you’re not selling airline tickets.
Dan Demsky: My business partner’s brother works on a cruise ship, so right now he’s just sitting at home learning to play the trumpet. But no one’s paying him. So, yes, we got hit immediately, and then we just went into this wartime mentality. You know, I’ve been listening to your podcast, hearing what people are doing. And now, you said something a couple episodes ago where you were talking about some apparel brands that you know or clients of yours, and they’re seeing Black Friday-level numbers selling, having promotions right now, because people… They can still buy stuff, they still need things, and this is a good opportunity for a big promotion.
Now, we are kind of anti-sale. So, there’s this airline that runs out of Toronto called-
Kurt Elster: Well, merino wool is a premium material. You have a premium brand. So, generally, premium and luxury brands will avoid discounting, because it erodes the brand value, so that makes sense.
Dan Demsky: Right. Well, we did at the beginning a very light one. We only do a promo usually on the Black Friday, Cyber Monday, into the holidays. We’ll do some promo stuff. And other than that, we don’t do anything. You know, we’ll do free shipping, but that’s it. And so, we did a very light promo and we had amazing sales. But then our sales went right back down and they’re not doing very well, right?
Fortunately, the nature of the way we built this business, all of those lessons I learned in my early twenties by being dumb and young… You know, successful for a young person, I told you, it’s like it’s a curse. We’re a lot smarter now, so we run this thing very lean. We haven’t had to lay off anybody. We’re chugging along. It’s just like all of our growth plans are really tight. It’s going to make things a little tight, so we’re in this wartime mentality now, like what do we do if we’re not gonna rely on sales? And I’m seeing emails come in from all of the brands that I buy from.
I buy clothing from a lot of other brands, just to see kind of what they’re up to, and it’s like they’re selling off the whole house. It’s like, “Buy $100, get a $50 gift card, and everything’s 25% off.” And it’s just like… And you’re getting these letters from CEOs that are saying as a small business… I feel like we made this choice that through this, let’s instead of cowering and reacting. Cowering sounds like it’s too negative, because I don’t think that it’s always a negative choice to discount stuff, but let’s instead of react and do things as just a reaction, let’s just get sales because we want our cashflow to be as good as it was before. We want as much cash coming in. Let’s just stand tall. Whatever that looks like. And let’s just get smarter.
So, operationally we did a bunch of things to be smarter and spend less where we didn’t need to spend. But when it comes to keeping our cash coming in, to keep sales high, we started to resort to other strategies. So, one thing we did, for example, is we found a supplier that had a few massive rolls of extra material of this beautiful merino blend white shirt, which is whiter than the white shirt. Very hard to do a pure white in merino. It’s impossible to have a pure white without bleaching the merino, which completely destroys its antibacterial and odor-resistant properties, and makes it super delicate, that it will rip very easily.
So, creating a really good white is hard, but we found… They had this extra material. Enough to make about 150 to 200 shirts. So, we bought it, we quickly… We manufactured 150-ish t-shirts here in Toronto at a local manufacturer. And we did a limited run. And it was more expensive. More expensive than our other t-shirts. These were $85 instead of $68. We sold out in an hour.
Kurt Elster: Whoa.
Dan Demsky: So, we thought, “Wow. There’s a strategy.” So, we’re now calling our supplier and we’re buying out material. Small runs. Not huge. And the beauty of this is there’s the lead times are super short. We’re able to react. So, we just bought a really cool heather grey material that’s the exact material that we make our hoodie in, and we don’t have a grey hoodie, so I think we’re gonna do about 300 of those. So, we’re doing things like that, and we’re not… And again, your podcast is helping us figure out some apps that we could use, like what are things we could do? Should we do Afterpay, because we have an expensive product? Maybe that’s a good idea. Or Sezzle, or whatever are the options.
We’re incorporating a rewards program now, so refer a friend and you’ll get $25, they get $25. We haven’t done that yet. So, it’s pushing us to do these smart things that we haven’t done yet, and we’re going on this offensive where it’s every week is an email that is designed to drive revenue, but it’s not designed to drive revenue by discounting, so it’s really forcing us to get extra creative.
And then the third thing that we’re really in battle with now is we’re a travel brand. So, if people are coming to our website, they’re all… First of all, all of the ads, Facebook ads which we’ve been spending years now tinkering with, and we’re really good. We do all of our Facebook ads in house. I say we’re really good at it. But we’ve been tinkering for years with putting a challenger ad in there and getting that, changing that word, making this one capital. All these little details. But almost all of them are about travel, so these ads are now not only ineffective, they’re kind of like tone deaf, right? Like you... People are making fun of us.
Kurt Elster: Right. Yeah, no one’s traveling.
Dan Demsky: Yeah. It’s like, “What are you talking about? Are you guys dumb? Do you guys know what’s happening in the world?” And they’re right. So, all of these ads we’ve worked so hard to create over the years are useless, so we’re thinking, “Who are we as a brand?” And we’re trying to figure out what are the different customer pillars that exist, that are not just for the sake of travel? Well, our brand promise that we talk about internally is simplicity, versatility, performance. And like that is sort of the guiding light of how we’re gonna position ourselves now, because all of the things that make this a good product for travel, all of the problems it solves, for example, you don’t need to wash it as much, so you can bring less stuff and pack less.
Well, you don’t need to wash it as much, so you can have less stuff and you could have your staple. It helps reduce decision fatigue. There’s some people, especially in Silicon Valley, which is for this reason, we sell a ton of stuff to Silicon Valley and the Bay Area. They subscribe to this mentality that they want to wear… They want to show up wearing the same thing every day. Like Zuckerberg is like that, Steve Jobs was like that. But also like some developer that works at Google, he looks… That makes sense to me. I don’t care about my outfit. I would want… So, we have customers, and a lot of them around San Francisco, around Silicon Valley, that buy like 10 black crewneck t-shirts from us and they’ll do that like once a year, and they just wear a black t-shirt. If you’ll ever see them, they’re wearing a black t-shirt. That’s just… So, this could add to your life when it’s not travel.
There’s a sustainability angle that if you care about the environment, well, maybe you don’t want to be wearing synthetic clothing, which is very, very bad for the environment in production. It’s also bad in the disposal. Fast fashion is terrible for the environment, so we’re taking everything that makes sense about what our brand is and how it helps as a travel product, and we’re showing that this is like… The ethos of this is it’s freedom through simplicity. It doesn’t just have to be about travel. It is a life thing. So, we’re trying to think now, it’s like how do we create the ads for that that take you to the website? Well, what does the website reflect?
And when they’re making a buying decision, they might go to Instagram, and now our Instagram, it looks like there’s just travel photos everywhere. Well, is that okay? Or do we need to start incorporating some kinds of different messaging? And our blog is all travel. So, this is an opportunity now where we’re thinking this is an opportunity for us to become a bigger brand. The travel has worked really well for us. Are we becoming… Is this an opportunity for us to become broader? Are we gonna become bigger of a brand now because our messaging that we’ve worked so hard for can apply to being something bigger? Or is this a temporary thing?
So, right now we’re gonna be in this phase where we’re gonna do both, and we’re gonna A/B test, and we’re gonna dip our toe into saying something bigger, but everything that we need to think about, we’re like… We have a morning huddle every day on Zoom, which we would do before anyway, but like they’re super important now and they last a little longer. And now we added this nightly huddle where every day we’re talking about things and just… It’s like going to the war room. Like what… The world will change. Who are we in this new world? How do we continue? And how do we keep driving revenue? How do we stand tall through this?
It’s scary, because everything can be changing even more in the future. No one knows what’s really going to happen here. But it’s exciting and it’s fun, and it’s definitely making us smarter. And the fact that we’re that lifeline, we’re an eCommerce business, it’s definitely something I count my lucky stars for right now.
Kurt Elster: Oh, yeah. I’m beyond grateful that we find ourselves in eCommerce. And everyone in eCommerce should hopefully recognize that. Even if your business got hurt by this, especially the people who are in B2B, there’s still… Yeah, you may be suffering now, but you’re still in an industry that is closer to the money than others, so if you can pivot, if you can reposition, if you can retool, you can possibly thrive in this new environment.
I know like in our case, people still need to wear clothes. It was a matter of retooling the positioning and the messaging to get [crosstalk 0:49:55.2] back.
Dan Demsky: Yeah, and you really have to think about where this world is going, because there’s a part of me… I’m always optimistic. I’m optimistic to a fault sometimes. But that’s been good for me, because I’m like, “I believe this crowdfunding campaign could work. And I’m willing to be homeless if it isn’t.” So, my business partners are a little bit more realistic, but it balances out. But my optimistic side says, “This thing sucks and everyone is dying in their apartments right now, and their homes, and houses, and when this thing is over, there’s gonna be this boom. Everyone’s gonna be on airplanes.”
And like okay, let’s relax. People are not gonna jump onto airplanes and go to Australia the second this thing is over. People are still gonna… They’re gonna be wearing masks. People are gonna be wearing masks for two years, probably. That brings up one question. Do we make masks?
Kurt Elster: Where’s your merino wool mask?
Dan Demsky: Well, our suppliers have been… I mean, they’re like, “Do you want to make masks?” And I’m like we’re thinking… I don’t know. Everyone’s doing it, so I have that feeling. I’m like, “If everyone’s doing it now, it’s already too late.”
Kurt Elster: No, I have so many clients who have launched masks. If they’re able to manufacture themselves or source them. And all of them did extraordinary product launch numbers just by virtue of having a mask. I think you’re right that people are gonna be wearing them for the next several years, at least. It could be a cultural change where, like in Asia, masks are normal. The same thing could very well happen in North America.
I go out, I wear a full on respirator half mask. I look a little crazy, but it makes me comfortable. I like it. My wife wears the cloth mask. A lot of people are wearing the cloth masks or the N95 surgical masks. But I think it’s just like a year from now, it will very much just be like a fashion accessory. I agree with your interpretation of events and your view on it, and for me, I have been viewing it through the lens of what happened after 9/11, and like 9/11, there are many thematically similar things, events, and feelings. Like the travel industry. Well, suddenly both after 9/11 and after coronavirus, suddenly travel doesn’t feel safe. Right?
And what happens where we go, “Okay, it’s okay to travel again, and it’s okay to live our lives the way we did previously.” There has to be some event that kind of makes that cultural shift again. But it wasn’t immediate, and we never went back to the country exactly the same way as it was with 9/11, so I really think coronavirus will be the same way.
Dan Demsky: And 9/11 changed everything. But the thing that was different about 9/11 is it was so… The reality of what was different was so hard to decipher for the average person, right? They felt the horror, but what’s happening with the government, is there… Did George Bush know about this? And there’s conspiracy about all this stuff. The difference now is that the impact that it happened to the average person is more completely direct. It’s like your business that is a bagel bakery is closed. But then a week later it’s like, “But you can do takeout.”
It’s like you’re seeing the innovation in records, like some of the… We did our quarterly strategy planning yesterday. Now, this is a big event for us. We love doing it. Usually we’ll go somewhere, like we’ll drive an hour away to Niagara Falls or something, and we spend two days, and then we have a big steak dinner at the end of it. It’s like a tradition that we’ve had since we started. Yesterday, we did it on Zoom. We did a steak dinner over Zoom. We all went and did takeout. We went and got, to a nice steakhouse, and we got steak dinners for home that they give you reheating instructions, like it was really good. And this is like a… So, the person who owns that steakhouse, the change that’s happened to them is not some kind of really it’s this horrific terrorist event which they don’t have any control over any outcome that comes from this. It’s like everyone’s reality is impacted in their specific own lives.
My business is different. Your business is different. This podcast is different, because this is what we’re talking about. So, it’s just like figuring out how we’re all going to work together and come back to it. I just keep saying the same thing, but it’s just like it’s super scary, but it’s super exciting, and everything will be fine. This is just a phase of time. Everyone just has to fight through it, and we’ll see where the world ends up.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I 100% agree with that. We’ve been at this a while. This one went a little long because you’ve got a great story. The closing question: Advertising now is very different than advertising when you started this business in 2015, 2016. I mean, five years have passed. If you had to do this same thing again, this business gets blown up for whatever reason and Dan’s starting over, he’s doing another apparel brand. How do you market it? How do you launch it? What would you do? What would be the playbook? And that’s what we’ll close on.
Dan Demsky: A new brand? Completely new brand?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Knowing what you know now.
Dan Demsky: You know, this is a tough question for me to answer, because I still continue to be the core, fit the core customer profile of who we’ve positioned to. You know, there’s a couple other types of people that buy from us, but I couldn’t see… Like this is the clothing I want to wear, so naturally I’m thinking that I’d just want to make this again, because I don’t even know what else I’d want to wear. I don’t know.
Kurt Elster: So, you’re always gonna go for, especially with your past experience with businesses that you didn’t necessarily love versus this, where it’s you love it and it’s successful. You’re looking for those business opportunities where you’re your own best customer from day one.
Dan Demsky: Yeah. You know, so that’s the thing, is if this thing blew up and I had to start again, it would put me in a pretty bad position, because this company itself, I wouldn’t want to start today. I’d want to start it when I started it. And I talked about that timing thing, you know? I’m like the hair extension thing, the vinyl skins thing, that happened at the right time, and that’s why I was like, “This is the idea. This is the one I need to pursue.” Because I felt like there wasn’t the right thing there.
Well, there have been companies that come up that have straight up ripped off our positioning, and I think it’s fine, because I’m like ideas… I can come up with ideas. But the thing that made it work was I wanted it at a time when the market needed it, I felt. So, what I would do, I’m not kidding. This is what I would do. If everything blew up right now, I would apply to work at Shopify. I’d say, “Listen, I know Shopify. There has to be…” In an entrepreneurial way, I’d go in there, I’d find a role that made sense, because I am really a Shopify customer. I’ve done this and I’ve done it well. And while I worked there, I would have that idea board going again, just like I did that got me here. I’d be waiting for that moment where I’m like, “Ah, this is the idea.”
I can’t say it on the phone. I don’t know what it is… I really think there’s something to finding that aha moment, and knowing that there’s… It’s not just because, “Oh, socks are cool. I’m gonna make a cooler sock company.” You have to really feel like the market needs your idea. That’s the best way I think to start a business.
Kurt Elster: So, your advice is find and follow that passion. The thing that you’re passionate about is where you are most likely to find your success.
Dan Demsky: Yeah, and pay attention to timing, and the thing that was important there that I did was we… At least once every two weeks, and this went on for years, before and throughout and after the sock company, is we sat at a whiteboard or a chalkboard and we just wrote out ideas. Like we were constantly thinking we want this idea, and if you frame your mind that you’re looking for it, when the idea falls in your lap, you’ll be ready to receive it. If you’re not… A magical idea won’t just pop in your head. It helps to chase the idea. I said to you before, I want to start a product business. I want to start a product online. And that was all I knew.
Because I knew I didn’t want to sell a service to a client. It was the opposite. What that product is, the chalkboard had many, many ideas. We even thought maybe we’ll start a pickle company. I’m glad I didn’t start a pickle company. It wouldn’t be very good. I know what pickles I like. I don’t think I could do better. The world doesn’t need my pickles, but we were thinking about it. So, that’s what I would do. I’d work at Shopify if they’d hire me, and I think they would, and I would wait, and I would ideate again.
Kurt Elster: I like it. That’s good advice. Yeah. Dan, where can people go to learn more about you?
Dan Demsky: UnboundMerino.com. Unbound Merino, that’s M-E-R-I-N-O on Instagram. I’m Dan Demsky. D-A-N D-E-M-S-K-Y. I’m on Instagram and if people hit me up there, I love chatting, so…
Kurt Elster: It’s always good to talk to successful entrepreneurs. That’s what energizes me, like the show does two things. You’re hearing my continuing education in action and you’re learning with me, and then at the same time, I’m an extrovert. I love talking to people. But talking to passionate entrepreneurs, that fuels and excites me. I did… We’re recording this in the morning. I’m gonna go eat lunch and then this will empower me to get through my work and enjoy it through the afternoon.
Dan Demsky: Good. Good. Because what you make, this podcast, is really, really helpful for the people in my position. When you talk about this app that’s helpful, this is a no brainer thing, I pause your podcast all the time and I go on Slack and message my business partners like, “Check this out.” You know? “What do you think of this?” And we talk about it all the time. I think you’re doing the best job at it, so thank you so much. Thanks for making this podcast. Thanks for having me on it, and I look forward to connecting with you again if we can.
Kurt Elster: Oh, absolutely. All right. We’ll end it there. Let me end the call recorder. Thank you, Dan.
Dan Demsky: Thank you so much.