Veteran Tommy Tartaglia reflects on building two successful Shopify stores in his garage.
Our guest today is Thomas "Tommy" Tartaglia, the self-described World's Okayest Exerciser, who sold more than $100k in t-shirts with "World's Okayest Exerciser" printed on it last year on Shopify.
Thomas Tartaglia has a bunch of degree's from various colleges, a significant amount of time in the Military, and a handful of years trying to figure out E-Commerce. He relies on other people to make himself look good.
Tune in for more details!
Kurt Elster: Hello and welcome back to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast. I’m your host, Kurt Elster, recording from unreasonably cold right now Skokie, Illinois, and today we’re talking to a Shopify merchant with not one, but two successful Shopify stores. My guest today is Tommy Tartaglia, who is self-described as the world’s okayest exerciser, and as such, has sold over $100,000 in t-shirts with that phrase printed on them last year alone, all on Shopify with his two stores, reconrings.com and tangocharlieapparel.com.
Mr. Tartaglia has a bunch of degrees from various colleges, a significant amount of time in the military, thank you for your service, and a handful of years trying to figure out e-commerce. He relies on other people to make himself look good. I like that system. That sounds pretty good. Tommy, how you doing?
Tommy Tartaglia: What’s up? Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.
Kurt Elster: Oh, my pleasure. Okay. Let’s start at the top. You’ve got two stores. Which did you start first?
Tommy Tartaglia: So, Tango Charlie Apparel was started first. We started TCA in 2013, when I got out of the military and opened up a CrossFit affiliate, and realized that there was a gap in the market for comfortable, inexpensive apparel for the CrossFit community.
Kurt Elster: And what year was that?
Tommy Tartaglia: About 2013, so we’ve been going strong for about five years now. We started on… Man, what did we start on? I think we started on Squarespace, and then immediately was shunned in all of the meetings that I went to, to talk to people about growing my business, and everyone just shunned us when they found out we were on Squarespace, and they pushed us to Shopify.
Kurt Elster: Oh, weird.
Tommy Tartaglia: We merged over to Shopify in 2016 and we’ve been running and gunning since then, so it’s so much better than anything else that we’ve ever used.
Kurt Elster: Okay, so you leave the military, you start, it sounds like a gym? Question mark?
Tommy Tartaglia: Yep. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Okay, so a CrossFit-focused gym. And in doing that, it occurred to you, “Man, there’s no…” Well, what was the gap, the pain, the problem? What did you see when you were running this gym?
Tommy Tartaglia: So, the problem, pain, solution, right? That we talk about from time to time, is there’s really funny t-shirts out there that are sold on Amazon for 15 bucks or 18 bucks, but you put them on and it’s like you’re wearing a cardboard box. It’s just not comfortable. And then there’s those really, really comfortable shirts, but they’re like 45 bucks when you buy them. And then there’s us, right in between. We sell $25 t-shirts that are all printed on tri blends here in America, and they’re just super, super comfortable at a reasonable price point. So yeah, we really wanted to just fix that pain point for us.
Kurt Elster: I think part of it also, being in the right place at the right time. Jumping into comfortable, amusing, quality, affordable, CrossFit-focused t-shirts or apparel was the goal, right?
Tommy Tartaglia: 100%. Absolutely.
Kurt Elster: Okay, and let’s jump into the manufacturing there. What’s the deal with good t-shirts being so expensive, and $18 t-shirts being total garbage now?
Tommy Tartaglia: So, there’s a handful of different varieties of t-shirts that you can purchase wholesale. 100% cotton, or tri blends, or poly-cotton blends, things like that. But nobody really had it right, and what we wanted to do is kind of decrease our margins and play the long game, so we spent a little bit more money on the t-shirts on the front side. Purchasing the tri blends, kind of having that poly-cotton rayon mix that’s just super, super comfortable, and understanding that we’re not gonna make as much money as we would if we bought a Gildan 100% cotton t-shirt and printed on it and sold it for 25 bucks, we’d make three or four more dollars with that crappy t-shirt.
But we really wanted to keep those customers for life, and that’s kind of how that was born, and then our slogan came out slightly thereafter as… I don’t know if this is a clean audience or not, but, “Comfy as Fuck,” is typically what people refer to our brand as.
Kurt Elster: You could certainly do worse than that, right? If somebody doesn’t like… Man, this brand is, and then anything positive AF, and that was how customers referred to it.
Tommy Tartaglia: Yeah. It was just when we would go to these events and we’d have people try our shirts on, it would close the deal right there. Everybody knows that one t-shirt that they have, they open their drawer and they’re like, “Cool, that’s the one I’m wearing.” It’s their favorite t-shirt. It’s the one that their wife steals to wear to bed at night. It’s that shirt.
We wanted to be that shirt, so we figured out what that shirt was, we replicated it, we made it slightly better, and then now we are that company, which we’re super excited about. But yeah, we actually stole that from somebody when he tried the shirt on at an event. He’s like, “Man, this shirt is just comfortable as fuck.” And yeah, we just turned that into our tagline a couple months later and it really took off.
Kurt Elster: There are a fair number of t-shirt stores on Amazon, and certainly apparel and fashion I believe is the biggest vertical on Shopify. Should someone start with the shirt or the design?
Tommy Tartaglia: I guess that’ll come into your voice and what are you good at. If you’re funny, and you want to start with the design, and you think that that design’s gonna sell really well, then 100% start out with that. If you’re not funny, and you want to just create a quality printed t-shirt, then I would just start with a really high-quality t-shirt.
We are also on Amazon, but that has been nothing but a goat rodeo since we’ve been on that, and I would avoid Amazon at all costs.
Kurt Elster: I’ve not heard the phrase goat rodeo before. It seems negative.
Tommy Tartaglia: Yeah. It’s a mess, and we brought a big agency in to help us with that transition and help us with that process, because we’re very confident in our brand. We’re very confident in our Shopify store, and our customers love us. We have a great lifetime value for our customers, and we are constantly trying to grow essentially what we give them, grow the value that we give them. But we also understand that Jeff Bezos is a monster, and that Amazon is essentially taking over the world, so we kind of took that back end and just said, “You know, let’s do the just in case, and let’s have some products on Amazon, some of our more consistent best sellers on there.”
And what we noticed was two things. Amazon is just rip-off central, so Amazon itself actually took our design, with our logo and our name on it, and I believe it was a bot, but they realized what was selling really well in that space, and they created it on an Amazon t-shirt.
Kurt Elster: Oh my God.
Tommy Tartaglia: And it was literally within, I don’t know, six weeks of launching on Amazon, and it was a very large investment for us to go through that process with that team, so we got the lawyers involved and sent a cease and desist, and they took it down. But realistically, the only reason we were able to send that cease and desist is because our name was actually on the t-shirt. If it wasn’t a bot that produced that and it was an actual human, we wouldn’t have had a leg to stand on, I guess.
So, it’s very intimidating for me to look at that, but yeah, we’re kind of coming back to Shopify, and just rolling full steam ahead with that, and avoiding Amazon if we can a little bit.
Kurt Elster: So, you listed your stuff for sale on Amazon, it started selling, and they then began reselling the same product, the same design, on their own t-shirt.
Tommy Tartaglia: Oh yeah. Yep.
Kurt Elster: No permission. They didn’t get… You don’t get anything.
Tommy Tartaglia: Nothing. Not a penny, and I actually believe that it’s… I shouldn’t say that I’m 100% sure, but I believe it’s an Amazon bot that does that. I believe they just look at the top-20 selling shirts, or top-50 selling shirts, and they say, “Let’s produce this ourselves and increase the margins by selling it on a crappy t-shirt.”
And yeah, we saw a dip in our sales. I was like, “Well, what’s going on with that?” We looked, and we’re like, “Oh. There it is. That’s the reason.”
Kurt Elster: And 100%, you’re sure this is Amazon who did this. Not some other shady merchant.
Tommy Tartaglia: No, it’s definitely Amazon. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Geez.
Tommy Tartaglia: I know a ton of merchants, and a ton of Shopify store owners that have just balked at Amazon, and I kind of put my foot down. I’m like, “We need to be on there. We need to differentiate ourselves from our competitors, and we need to sell on multiple different platforms.” And man, was that a mistake.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. In the past I’ve always said, like, “You know, Amazon’s a marketplace. You gotta play by their rules. But hey, they’re bringing the qualified traffic to the site for you, and if you’re already selling online, hey, you may as well add Amazon as a sales channel.” But at this point, it seemingly seems less and less like that is a good idea, or certainly something that you should jump into without at least strongly considering it first.
Would you do it again?
Tommy Tartaglia: You know, there’s a couple things that we would, if we decided to do it again, there’s certain risk that we would try to mitigate. If we were to launch another brand, we would potentially attempt to launch it on Amazon, just because you’re absolutely right, the audience is there. There’s one thing that nobody can deny, is the first place people go to look for something is on Amazon, so if I had something that I wasn’t connected to, that I wasn’t passionate about, and I wanted to launch a coffee cup company or something like that, that I wanted to just kind of bring to market as quickly as possible, I would absolutely launch at Amazon.
But our benefit, and who we are, as CrossFitters, as veterans, as guys that drink beers and exercise, that’s who we are. That’s our voice. I can’t get that across on Amazon. They own that customer, they own everything. You don’t have an opportunity to communicate with them. You can’t really put any inserts in the package that you ship them, to bring them over to your platform. Amazon is very protective of their customers, so it really doesn’t allow us to prosper on their platform.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Well, yeah. That is the catch. You have this revenue source that you are 100% at their mercy, and they own the customer, and there is no way you are changing that under any circumstances. Okay, so backing up, you came up with the brand, you started it, you launched it on Squarespace, you were talking to folks who laughed at you for being on Squarespace, so you had to make the migration to Shopify. What kind of people were you talking to that were saying, “Wait, hold up. You’re on Squarespace? GTFO.”
Tommy Tartaglia: There’s a lot of them. I can’t remember if any of them on your private Facebook group were pegging me. There was a couple other Facebook groups that I was a part of, and then I’ve always been… At least one mastermind I’m always trying to be a part of throughout any quarter, or throughout any year. There’s different masterminds that I’ve been in that are six months, they’re a year, before you go through your life cycle with them and they say, “Okay, time to hit the road again.”
But everybody that I was talking to was like, “Dude, what are you doing? Why are you on that? Just go to Shopify. They’re the best and they’re growing the quickest.” And yeah, it was an amazing… It was the next day that I transitioned. I was like, “Oh. This is what e-commerce is, and here’s all these reports that I was never able to generate, and look at all these apps that I can do, and I don’t need to do back end coding anymore.” And it was amazing.
Kurt Elster: So, what you got on Shopify, you started from zero with this brand. How did you grow this brand? How did you grow Tango Charlie Apparel?
Tommy Tartaglia: Yeah, so Tango Charlie was a combination of in customer, I guess in-person acquisition. We talk about trade shows, and a lot of the CrossFit events that I would go to, so we wanted to get everyone into our system, so we would specifically at a CrossFit competition, or where somebody is doing a weightlifting meet or something like that, we would have people come up. We’d set up a booth there, and we would be giving away a YETI cooler, or an iPad away, or something like that. And it was just, “Hey guys, sign up for our email list.” And that was the first way that we started to acquire customers was we would sell them a t-shirt in person, or they would try winning a brand new YETI cooler and put their email into our list, and then we would put them into our Mailchimp list, or our Klaviyo list, and we would retarget them from there.
But the other way is Facebook ads. We have such a tight niche market, when we first started Facebook ads in 2015, late 2014, early 2015, we were seeing just incredible numbers. 10x, 11x, 12x return on investment, and my only regret now is that I didn’t exploit that that much more. It was fish in a barrel back then. Obviously, the algorithms have changed. There’s a lot more competition in the marketplace, and we’re very grateful if we get a 3X or 4X multiplier now, but Facebook and now Instagram is a very easy way for us to invest money and know that there’s money coming back in, and customers seeing our products.
Kurt Elster: We’ll work backwards. With Facebook ads, initially, because it was niche, you were doing… It sounds like you were doing interest-based targeting, right?
Tommy Tartaglia: Yes, so we would create lookalike audiences from, and actually it was… I think when you and I were working together, Kurt, for a while. You would create a lookalike audience, and then you would target it even smaller by saying, “In this lookalike audience, they must also like maybe two or three of our competitors,” or, “they must also like CrossFit,” or, “They must also follow these people.” And that was really when we were seeing our biggest jumps.
Kurt Elster: I’m gonna caution people. This is a thing to test, so it depends on the brand. There have been scenarios where leave the lookalike audience alone, it will just do better on its own and you can’t outsmart the algorithm. And then there’s other instances where the algorithm will do a good job, and maybe it’s the data source, maybe it’s the audience, maybe it’s the offer, but then using that lookalike audience, and then dividing it up a little bit with some extra layer is going to radically help things. But it’s one of those run both and see what happens, like run the same ad to both audiences.
Tommy Tartaglia: And that will actually change, too, over time. We’ve noticed what was working six months ago or eight months ago isn’t working right now, so as we’ve grown as a brand, and as our brand has morphed into almost a media source, we’ve seen that it’s changing. And what used to work six weeks ago isn’t working now, and that’s why I always push people really, really heavily in hiring an expert.
Know your strengths and know your weaknesses and that’s great, but surround yourself with people who can fill that gap. That was one of our biggest issues, was starting out, I didn’t know anything. And learning through those mistakes, but learning through people like you, listening to the podcast, figuring out the mistakes that other people have made, but know when you’re in over your head. I think that’s a big lesson learned for me.
Kurt Elster: And I’ll say the inverse of that is when you don’t know what you don’t know, it makes it really easy to shoot for the moon. When I started this business, our initial attempt was a two-man shop building our own e-commerce platform. This was not something anyone should attempt. But we didn’t know enough to know we shouldn’t do that, right? And then that eventually led us to here, so there could be advantages to that entrepreneurial ignorance.
But yeah, I think to your point, ultimately the goal is if you surround yourself with people smarter than you, people who push you, you will be… Look at the five people you talk to the most in a week. That’s who you surround yourself with. That is who ultimately you are going to be like. You’re holding up the mirror there.
Okay. You had also initially started out with doing a lot of in-person events, trade shows, how did that go? What was the ROI on that? Would you do it again? What would your advice be on that?
Tommy Tartaglia: Yeah, so 100%, and again, everything that the entrepreneur should be thinking about is the long game. It’s never, “I spent $1,000 on this event and I only went and sold $2,000, plus I lost a weekend with my family.” Right? You have to understand that and say, “Yeah, you know what? Maybe it’s not worth it for us to do that,” but you have to consider now that person is wearing your shirt in front of hundreds of other people every single day, or maybe they’re using that beer koozie in front of dozens of people every day, or whatever you sell.
But the biggest thing for us then was how do we keep that customer in our ecosystem. So, we acquired them any way that we could, and it wasn’t just the, “Hey, put your email,” after the receipt comes through on Shopify point of sale. It was, “Hey, do you want to win this?” Or, “Hey, how about you do something like this?” The ROI is never calculated the day after the event. It’s always calculated six months or a year after the event, after you go through their life cycle, and you send them your introductory sequencing emails, and your segmentation emails, and all that stuff.
But I’ve never been to an event where we haven’t. I shouldn’t say that. I’ve been to one really poor event, but I’ve never been, I guess I should say I’ve never been to an event where I haven’t been able to at least break even.
Kurt Elster: Okay, so you were able to break even on the event, and then overall, it is a long game.
Tommy Tartaglia: Yes. 100%.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Now that you’ve run Tango Charlie for several years, going back, what would you have done differently?
Tommy Tartaglia: Oh my goodness. So, a lot of things I would have done. I would have taken a loan out from the beginning and kind of just gone all in. There was a time where my business partner and myself, we were both kind of going back overseas, and doing what we were doing, and then coming back. Trying to be in the military, and trying to be out of the military, and then working full-time, which that kind of foot half in the water and half out of the water, it never works for anybody. I don’t like the word side hustle. It frustrates me when I hear that, because I know the potential that I have as this small, funny t-shirt company that started out of a basement and started selling t-shirts out of the back of a car. What these other people that have far better, superior products than I have, and what they could do with that if they would just quit their damn job and go 100%.
I would have taken a bank loan from the beginning, and just gone all in, and I feel like we’d be in a much different position than we are right now. I’m very grateful for where we are right now. It’s been a lot of hard work, and it’s part of our journey, but my biggest recommendation would be just go all in.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Well, and it’s easy, like hindsight 20-20, and you go, “Yeah, it’s gonna work out, so just get in there faster.” But if you have validated it, if you have that confidence, then put your money where your mouth is and double down on it, and get there faster, reap the rewards. It is clear from talking to you, from working with you, from looking at the site, and seeing the designs, it’s tongue in cheek, and there’s a lot of your voice in there, and I’ve heard you say, “Hey, just be who you are.” So, talk to me about your view on brand and voice.
Tommy Tartaglia: Yeah, so we always talk about just owning it. Whoever you are, just own it. If you’re a nerd, then own being a nerd. Be the best nerd that’s out there. If you’re the world’s best CrossFitter, and you have a rippling six pack, and you haven’t touched a beer in three years because you want to be the CrossFit Games athlete, then dude, be that guy or be that girl. That’s awesome.
Who we are, identifying who we are was one of the toughest parts of starting the business, because we thought we were these tough veterans that are… We want to sell t-shirts that talk about beast mode, and being strong, and crushing your weakness. And we realized that’s not who we are. Maybe that’s who want to be, but I love… getting after it on a Friday night and having one too many tequilas, and showing up to the workout on Saturday morning in rough shape, and having fun, and just being… How do I say this? Being nice to everybody, but kind of knowing when it’s time to flip that switch and get after it.
So, knowing that we’ve been through 10, 12, 15 years in the military, and we’ve seen some really horrible things, and we can kind of get out and be joking, and have fun, and know how the other half of the world lives, was very important to us. People take things so seriously now, and CrossFit is one of them, so we’re always able to do the tongue-in-cheek jokes, and break balls when it comes down to it, so as long as you just own who you are, you’ll be successful. Don’t try to be somebody else.
Kurt Elster: It’s interesting. There are so many military folk who are so successful as entrepreneurs, and I’ve never been in the military, so I don’t know what it is about that, but it’s definitely a common story we hear. And then even in terms of what the brand does, it is often leaning on that gallows humor that gets you through. Brands like Violent Little Machine Shop, and Zero Foxtrot, like that Violent Little Machine Shop, oh my gosh, they have… As far down the rabbit hole of gallows humor as you can go, they have gone.
Yours, it almost sounds like yours is a reaction to that.
Tommy Tartaglia: Yeah. That’s exactly it. We spend the time overseas, or even here stateside. You’re away from your family, you’re miserable, you have people surrounding you that they might frustrate you. You don’t really know them that well. And as you kind of grow as a team, and as a… whether it’s a platoon or a squad or whatever, and you kind of shoot overseas and do what you need to do, you turn into a family. But there are times where I think my last deployment, I didn’t shower for 75 days, 80 days. You just, you’re miserable. You don’t know how to get through certain aspects, but you do. You get it. You figure it out.
And the thing that got us through, at least the guys that I was surrounded with, was humor. Everything was ball breaking, and everything was kind of a competition, so it was joking with each other, kind of pushing through those boundaries. You’re not sleeping for a couple days. Playing those games like that really helped us push through, so when we came back it was an easy push to say, “Yeah, we’ve done all that stuff. Let’s not be those tough guys. Let’s be those guys that joke around, because that’s just who we are.”
Kurt Elster: It’s about figuring out who you are, and then leaning into that, making the… Rather than trying to be something else for the brand, make that brand something about you, where you fit into it.
Tommy Tartaglia: Yeah. We say that you can’t learn that, right? If you’re passionate about something, and that’s just who you are, then do that. Launch that. If you want to sell knit koozies, then sell knit koozies, and if you’re passionate about that, that’s cool. You can learn Instagram, you can learn ads, you can learn email sequencing, and cash flow, and ROI. You can learn the back end of a business, right?
You can’t learn passion. You can’t learn about… You just can’t do that. But you can learn about all that other stuff, so figure out what makes you happy, and what your passion is. What cause you believe in. And just do that, and everything else will kind of fall in place. Hopefully, unless your product sucks, then it won’t. But more than likely, it will.
Kurt Elster: That’s good advice. When we started this call, I saw you’re in a warehouse. We talked about it. You’ve mentioned repeatedly that you used to run this out of your basement. How’d you make that decision where you go, “Man, we gotta move out of the house, and get a dedicated space for this.”
Tommy Tartaglia: Yeah, so we were shipping I think closer to a million dollars out of my basement a year, and it was a couple things, one of which is we have this conglomerate here in Upstate New York, where we’ve got companies like Tacticalories, that you’re familiar with.
Kurt Elster: I love Tacticalories.
Tommy Tartaglia: Oh, they’re awesome. Mixtape Coffee Company. Tango Charlie Apparel. RECON Rings. Driftpoint Media. We’ve got a team that we always will grab coffee together, kind of bounce ideas back and forth, or be on email strings or text message strings. And we kind of got together and we said, “Dude, we’re all doing this out of our basement. What are we doing, here?” And it was actually I think Casey from Tacticalories that just sent us as Craigslist ad and said, “Hey, let’s just go take a look at this place and see what happens.”
It was a combination between that, and I think the UPS guy was kind of just getting fed up with driving into the garage and trying to drop everything off into a sliding glass door. Once you start pushing all those products, it became an elongated time and motion study, and it was never really worth it. So, once we moved to the warehouse, we kind of pulled the trigger on that, everybody’s seen their sales jump since then because it’s a more collaborative approach. We’ve got three different companies in there, four different companies in here some days, and we’re able to have a meeting place, so I don’t need to say, “Hey, meet me at Starbucks.” Or, “Hey, I’ll have a meeting with you here.” Or, “Hey, let’s prep for this over here.” So, it’s really, really important for us to be here at the warehouse.
Kurt Elster: So this isn’t just a space for you. You’ve got a co-op going.
Tommy Tartaglia: Yeah, it’s kind of like a… Yeah, I guess it is a co-op.
Kurt Elster: Or incubator.
Tommy Tartaglia: It can be an incubator. It can be… Yeah. Yeah, I guess it is an incubator. I’ve never thought about it positively in those terms before.
Kurt Elster: Well, it seems cool. We certainly tried that. Our old office was huge, like way bigger than we needed, and it was divided up weirdly, so there’s just space we didn’t touch, so we had tried letting other people use it, and it never… No one ever really committed to using it. But it was a cool idea. I wished it had worked out. And our new space is just one big open space, so it wouldn’t work as well. Okay.
Tommy Tartaglia: Yeah. This works. It works pretty well for us. We’ve actually kind of pivoted a little bit since we’ve come in here. We had a couple companies reach out to us, and we actually started shipping for them. Driftpoint Media, Steve, my partner in RECON Rings, also owns a very, very, very small media company that just builds websites and goes through that. He said, “Why don’t we start shipping for people? They really don’t know what… They don’t know what they’re doing, and the same thing as when you started your company. Really didn’t know what they’re doing. Let’s just start shipping for them.”
So, since we had the warehouse, we had the extra space, we pulled some brands together, and now the guy that we pay to do all of our shipping does all of their shipping, as well, so it’s kind of… It comes back to that, I guess it is a co-op, the more I think about it.
Kurt Elster: It sounds like the big advantage there is synergy just kind of comes out of it.
Tommy Tartaglia: Yes. 100%. I think if you take a look at Casey from Tacticalories, and his webpage, and his creative design, you start to see a little of that flow over to Tango Charlie Apparel. And if you kind of look at RECON Rings and their design, you also start to see a little of that flow back and forth, and we all kind of pick up on what we’re doing with each other.
Kurt Elster: Cool. As we were saying, you’ve got another brand. Tango Charlie Apparel not good enough for you, now we gotta ad RECON Rings to the mix, too?
Tommy Tartaglia: Yeah, so this kind of… It was weird, because we, again, my last deployment overseas, there’s a problem, pain, and solution. I watched a kid jump off essentially an LAV, and he was wearing-
Kurt Elster: What’s an LAV?
Tommy Tartaglia: It’s a light-armored vehicle…
Kurt Elster: Oh, okay.
Tommy Tartaglia: So, essentially, it’s a tank. It’s a smaller tank. All my boys are gonna break my balls for that, for calling it a tank, because it’s definitely not, but kind of generalizing it to the masses.
Kurt Elster: You gotta dumb it down for me.
Tommy Tartaglia: It’s a wheeled tank, right? There’s no tracks on it. It’s smaller. It’s got a 25-millimeter cannon on it. But we watched a kid, actually one of our mechanics, jump off the vehicle, and kind of left his hand up there to brace himself, but unfortunately, he was wearing a wedding ring, which we weren’t supposed to be wearing. So, his finger stayed up there, right?
Kurt Elster: Oh my God!
Tommy Tartaglia: Yeah, it degloved his finger, so it was-
Kurt Elster: I knew it was gonna go to degloving. I was hoping you wouldn’t say degloving.
Tommy Tartaglia: Yeah. It was pretty… I mean it was… We’ve definitely seen rough, and we’ve seen worse overseas, but seeing that up close and personal was kind of like, “Man, what are we doing? Why are we… Instead of just telling somebody they can’t do something, why don’t we just come up with a better solution?”
So, I came back, and it was kind of always in the back of my head, and it took me meeting Steve to figure out, “Okay, man, how do we do this? How do we have a product that’s going to solve that problem for us?” And there was other products out there. There’s other silicone ring companies out there, but they sucked. We bought them, we tried them, we were wearing through them in like two months, or a month and a half. They were, again, super overpriced. They had just stupid, ridiculous designs on the outside of them, so Steve and I got together and I said, “Hey, man. Help me through this process.”
And what that essentially became was Steve taking my idea and running the show, and he runs a very, very tight ship. His brain works way differently than mine does, but he worked with me on the design, then we started testing the products. We got some samples made. We went to a couple different places and figured out, “Hey, is this gonna work?” We did some stretch tests. We did some break tests on it, or some tensile strength tests I think they were called. And we figured out, “Okay, cool. This is the ring. This is what we want. Let’s go for it.”
And it wasn’t anything like Tango Charlie, right? So, with us, we come up with an idea, we tweak it, we launch it. We might tweak it again and then relaunch it. It’s a t-shirt, right? This was a pretty big investment, and we wanted to make sure this was perfect. It’s not necessarily life or death, but somebody could lose a finger. Somebody could lose a pretty important part of their body if we didn’t get this right, so we made sure. It took us about a year to go through that back end, and then we launched the product with the help of Tango Charlie, and with the help of some of our other friends locally.
And I don’t want to say it blew up, but it just took off. And we got some local retail stores that started reaching out to us. “Hey, we heard your local, can we come take a look at the product?” They kind of picked up our product, so our footprint is a little bit smaller, but we’re… I don’t want to say we very grow very quickly. We get these rushes and spurts of retail stores that want to sell our product, and next thing you know, we’re in four or five different retailers locally, 10 or 15 down in Ohio, 20 or 30 in Maine for some reason. So, it grows, it goes through these spurts, and then it just grows really quickly, and it kind of settles down, and grows again.
But we’re watching, again, a lot of the companies that we started out with, and saying, “Hey, what are they doing right and what are they doing wrong with these rings?” And they’re still trying to innovate something that doesn’t need to be innovative at all. It’s done. What we did was we created a silicone ring, we made it plain and simple, we give it to you in a variety or a multitude of colors, and people are happy with it. It lasts them two years, three years, five years, and it’s done. And what other people are doing is they’re putting grooves, and holes, and they’re putting rings in this shape and that shape, and people are ripping through those rings in a month or two, and they’re getting frustrated, and then they’re coming over to us and saying, “You know what? Simple is better.” And that’s what we want to go with, so I gotta give Steve all the credit for that company. He helped… I shouldn’t say he helped me. I helped him bring that to fruition, and that has been a really fun ride, for sure.
Kurt Elster: With these non-traditional, non-metal, we’ll call them soft rings, they seem to always be made out of silicone. Yours is medical-grade silicone. Why not make them out of a… There’s more than one kind of rubber. We could make them out of some odd, proprietary stuff, like DuPont FKM, like they make a lot of really expensive watchbands out of. That sort of thing, as opposed to just silicone, which is really not very strong.
Tommy Tartaglia: And that’s kind of what we want, right? We want it to be strong, but we don’t want it to be too strong. We want it to bend, but we also want to have between an eight and a ten pound tensile break off point, because if it doesn’t-
Kurt Elster: Oh, so it doesn’t rip your finger off again. Right.
Tommy Tartaglia: Then it’s gonna take the finger off, so we’ve tested some different products, and we’re actually still in the process of testing some additional products that we kind of worked… We went out to SHOT Show this past month and had some fun out in Vegas, but we’re constantly looking to other products, and kind of testing them, and seeing that. There is some different polymers and elastomers that we have tested out, but none of them have the feel that we’re looking for, either. And I’ll make sure I get a couple rings down to you, as well.
When you wear it, you forget that you’re wearing it. It’s almost better that way. My wife has, it’s actually the one good call that I’ve ever made. She has a very nice wedding band, but she doesn’t wear it, because she wears the silicone ones, and she forgets that she’s wearing them. She’s just so much more comfortable when wearing one of these than her other ring. It’s non-conductive. You don’t feel it when you’re typing a thousand words per minute or whatever she’s doing half the time. It’s just there, and you don’t even really notice it, so it’s exactly kind of what we wanted when we created the ring.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, and that’s also the issue with wearing any kind of rubber accessory on your body is you don’t want to be aware of it. It’s like, “Ew,” and it can start to smell. Yeah, you gotta think through it. Yeah, I’ve got this big, chunky, gold wedding band, and definitely I don’t think about it until the summer, and then I’m like, “Definitely aware of this thing when it’s humid out.”
Tommy Tartaglia: Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, there’s a time and a place for our wedding… When we get all dialed up, and if I throw a tux on, I’ll make sure that I wear my gold ring, or if my wife is… She always says, “If I’m wearing heels, I’m gonna wear my ring. If I’m not wearing heels, I’m not putting that thing on.” So, there’s a time and a place for those bands, but when we go down to Costa Rica, Aruba or something, I don’t want to have to worry about, “Hey, are we gonna be able to lock this ring up in a safe in the hotel? Is that safe safe? Is the maid gonna come in and take it? Are we gonna lose it on a rainforest hike? Is it gonna be buried in the ocean when we go to Hawaii?”
If you lose one of our rings, it’s 20 bucks. Half the time, we’ll replace it if it breaks or something like that we’ll always replace it, but just give us a call. We’ll figure it out. And wouldn’t you rather lose a $20 ring than a $10,000 ring? Doesn’t that make sense to you? So, it’s always… That’s always helped us, too, is people will always shoot us messages, or tell us stories like, “Hey, I just want to let you know that your ring broke because I was working on a piece of machinery. It did its job. It saved my finger, so thank you.” And 90% of the time before Steve gets off the phone, I’m already looking the guy’s order number up and we’re already sending him another ring. We love hearing those stories.
Kurt Elster: So, one thing… Well, I’ll make a suggestion and then you can tell me if I’m wrong. On your product detail page for your silicone rings, why not have a paragraph describing that research you went through, where you say, “Hey, the risk with a metal ring is that under load they don’t break, which can result in injuries like degloving,” and you can link to the Wikipedia article about what that is, because it’s horrifying. You’ll sell more if you make people go on that journey with you, but it’s a genuine thing. You’re not manipulating them. That’s where the idea came from. And then you say, “So, we tested ours to make sure it had… It was strong enough that it’s not gonna fall apart, that it’s gonna be durable, but at the same time, intentionally weak enough to prevent injuries.”
Tommy Tartaglia: That’s something we’ll definitely tweak our product page with that, and kind of talk more about our research. For sure.
Kurt Elster: Yes! My arms just went up in the air, because I got a win for you right there.
Tommy Tartaglia: Absolutely.
Kurt Elster: Right there, copywriting. Biggest conversion rate optimization tactic you can use.
Tommy Tartaglia: And it’s free!
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Yeah. You just, can you sit down and type? There you go. Get to work. Okay, so having your attention split between multiple businesses, that’s always been an issue for me. I’ve got the entrepreneurial ADD. I think a lot of entrepreneurs do. So, with that, do you feel like any of your businesses suffer? If there’s anything negative about it? Or it helps because it scratches an itch? In my instance, I used to… We used to do all these goofy little side hustle projects that were fun. We called them pallet cleansers between big projects, because it was like a creative outlet.
But eventually they started to take their toll, where I’m like, “All right, these things are distractions,” and we either shut them down, gave them away, or sold them. What’s your feeling on it?
Tommy Tartaglia: So, both, right? There’s always gonna be a level of suffering and saying, “Hey, we didn’t get to focus on this.” But it’s also refreshing. I struggle with… I don’t know how to say this. The roller coaster ride of entrepreneurship, we’ve kind of spoken about that before, and it’s a ton of fun, but when you’re on that downslope and you haven’t sold anything in two months, or a month and a half, and you’re like, “Man, we’re barely breaking even. I don’t know how I’m gonna make payroll,” or anything like that, that’s typically when the other company’s on an upswing.
So, I enjoy managing or being a part of both companies. The other thing that I would suggest is a lot of entrepreneurs, they’ll say, “Hey, my business plan is here.” And they’ll point in their head. Or they’ll say, “Hey, we’re gonna do this,” and they’ll kind of play it day by day. The most growth that I’ve ever seen from either business is when we sat down as a team and set out a strategic plan. Once we set that strategic plan, we were able to essentially delegate all of the tasks, and kind of break it down. Hey, here’s your goal that we want to hit by the end of the quarter, or the end of the year, whichever it may be. Let’s break that down into five or ten different micro goals.
It forces me to be a better planner to have two different companies in the mix, so it’s almost forced me to be a better entrepreneur with both of those, but the squirrel effect is definitely there, where I’m kind of going back and forth, and I see something shiny, and I run over there. But it’s also, it has forced me to become a better person. For sure.
Kurt Elster: Interesting. Okay. Are there any, so really it’s having that constraint, where you’re acknowledging like, “Yeah, this is gonna have a constraint on my time and focus, so for it to work, I need to be really intentional about it.” When you sat down and put together that strategy, that strategic plan, were there any resources? How’d you learn how to do that? Or was it like, “All right, we know what we need to do, let’s just sit down and figure it out.”
Tommy Tartaglia: It was actually a combination. The time in the military we would go through, and it was all kinds of planning. We would do backwards planning, we would do five-paragraph orders, we’d just do all kinds of stuff, and I was an enlisted guy, so I really didn’t do a ton of the planning, but as I grew in the military, and as I kind of came up in ranks, I started to have to plan more, and more, and more. So, as my tail end in the military, as I was getting out, I was more a part of that planning process, so I kind of got to kind of dig in deep to that stuff.
But I think the other thing that really helped us was the… I think it was called the BestSelf, or the SELF Journal. They’re also on Shopify.
Kurt Elster: Right.
Tommy Tartaglia: I don’t know if you’ve ever had them on. If you haven’t, you should definitely have them on your show. They’re awesome, so I would kind of call them out a little bit, too. But having those books in front of me, and knowing, “Okay, cool. Here’s my three big wins for the week.” Or what was the biggest lesson I’d learned for this month? Or, “Hey, what are today’s targets? What’s the goal for this month?” And then kind of jumping into that daily stoic of, “Hey, today I’m grateful for,” or, “This morning I’m grateful for,” and kind of going through that really, really helped me start the day on the right note. And then once you’re organized, and you have everything written down, there’s no getting around it, right? You’ll always naturally flow like water. You’re gonna go towards those easy tasks, and not think, “Hey, we need to really acquire this many customers by this date. How do we go through that?”
You’re gonna say, “Oh, cool. I can just respond to these emails real quick and do this customer service stuff.” Because those are easy and it’s low-hanging fruit, when realistically, that’s the last thing you should be working on right now. You should really be focusing on today’s bigger targets, which might be profiting $3,000 today, or acquiring 35 new customers, or whatever it may be.
So, I would definitely give a shoutout to the SELF Journal, and BestSelf Co., because they’ve definitely helped me grow.
Kurt Elster: I will include the link to BestSelf in the show notes, because certainly I have heard about it more times than I can count, and I’ve not used BestSelf’s journal, specifically, but I did a five-minute journal, which is more about self care and well being, and it really… It had a very positive effect. I did it the same time as therapy, and really, absolutely, the power of just writing stuff down is powerful, so doing it in this context seems pretty, pretty brilliant. I’m definitely, my finger’s hovering on the buy now button here.
Tommy Tartaglia: Whenever I meet with somebody, or whenever somebody kind of comes out and asks me questions or anything like that, first I’ll premise with I’m not a consultant, nor do I ever claim to be one. But for some reason, people in the community have… I guess they maybe think I’m successful for some reason, but they’ve reached out and the first thing that they ask is what’s one thing that you would do, and I always just shove a book in their face. I’m like, “Here, take this.”
I have five or six of them on my desk at all times, and that’s… First of all, it’s the number one gift you can give somebody, because it’s gonna change their life. It’s very different than me grabbing a bottle of tequila and handing that over, or doing… This is meaningful, and it’s going to change the way you look at your life, so that’s usually the first thing that I do. I actually just gave one to a friend of mine a couple days ago, and he shot me a text this morning, was like, “Hey man, I didn’t think I would ever be able to get this much work done in a day, but when you actually look at it, I’m super productive now.” And it’s really amazing how your phone becomes the background now, and you’re not staring at Facebook, or Instagram, or kind of overanalyzing your Facebook ads. It’s just, “Hey, did they work? Cool. Next. What’s the next step? Oh, it’s 9:30? And we have to do this, this, and this? Perfect. Let’s do this, this, and this.”
It is definitely, definitely a tool that I would struggle without, for sure.
Kurt Elster: All right, so I’ll take it a step further, and now we’re gonna plug BestSelf. Going to their site, when I click shop now, there’s a ton of stuff it throws at me. What’s the one thing we should all buy?
Tommy Tartaglia: So, I’m a big fan of the limited edition box set, but I just use the BestSelf Journal. It’s just, there’s a quick start guide on it. It’s super easy. There’s a community. I’m not a part of the Facebook community, because sometimes, again, I’ll get paralysis by analysis, and I’ll be in too many different things. But it’s just a 13-week roadmap and a monthly calendar that breaks down, “Here’s what you want to accomplish in the next quarter, or the next six months, or whatever it is. Let’s get that on paper and let’s break that down into some smaller steps and see how it goes.”
If I was to ever become a consultant, and I wanted to make $300 an hour, I would essentially just not tell people about this book and just break that down for them. Because I honestly feel like that’s what people do, so that would kind of be my push on that. But yeah.
Kurt Elster: I’m writing down a show note right now. I’m saying how planning was game changing for Tommy’s success.
Tommy Tartaglia: Absolutely.
Kurt Elster: And how you can clone it. Well, so then going one step further, if you say, “All right, people, they identify you as successful, as a leader, they reach out to you, which is good.” That means you seem accessible, and approachable, and real. And they ask you questions, and your response is, “Take this book. It will change your life.” So, if you have the opportunity to talk to one of your heroes, to talk to a leader in a space, maybe that’s the thing we… If I had 10 seconds to talk to Bill Gates or whoever, the thing to ask is, “Just tell me the one book I should read.”
Tommy Tartaglia: Yeah. Yeah. I think if you look at guys like Tim Ferris, when he created that… I can’t remember the name of the book.
Kurt Elster: 4-Hour Workweek.
Tommy Tartaglia: I bought it. The one where he talked about all the people that he interviewed, and he-
Kurt Elster: Oh, shit. I forgot the name of it, but yeah, I’ve got that one around here somewhere.
Tommy Tartaglia: I instantly go to 4-Hour Workweek, right? That’s just in the back of my head. I’m like, “Oh yeah, it’s 4-Hour Workweek.” But the other one that he goes through that I sat through and read it, and I was like, “Okay, all of these famous, just people that have so much money they don’t know what to do with it, there’s a couple things that they do.” They read fucking books, right? Everyone, if you want to be better than you were yesterday, you need to start reading books. And it’s not, don’t read blogs, don’t do this, don’t do that. Grab a book and read it, and sit down and be present with that book.
The other thing is they wake up earlier than everybody else. You look at guys like Jocko Willink, or anybody else that wakes up at 4:00 in the morning, that gives them three more hours of uninterrupted productivity, so whatever you want to do with that three hours, if you want to workout and kind of set your day right in that direction, absolutely. I’m up in between 4:00 and 4:30 every morning, and usually at the gym before 5:00 in the morning, and that allows me at 6:00, I’m done. I don’t have to worry about anything else. I can just focus on work.
And I will go typically from 6:00 until 12:30, 6:00 until 1:00, and just head in the computer, getting work done, collaborating with Tacticalories and Mixtape Coffee Company, and the other guys that are here in the office with me, and we’ll kind of get all the work done that we need to get done. By 1:00, my day’s done. I can kind of step back into it and say, “Okay, it’s 2:00. I got a couple more tasks to do.” Or, “It’s 3:00, I gotta do this, this, and this.” But by 3:00, I’m at home playing with my son, hanging out, and kind of relaxing until I call it the 7:00 rush, but I put my son down in between 6:30 and 7:30, and my wife and I eat dinner together and we kind of unplug with no electronics, and then I’ll take 20 minutes or 30 minutes and grab that BestSelf Co. book again and say, “How am I gonna set my day up tomorrow?” And I’ll take 30 minutes with my computer, and my book, and I’ll say, “Cool. This is what tomorrow needs to look like. This is what direction we need to go in and how are we gonna go in that direction?” We’ll break those down.
But yeah, that’s what you need to do is just get up early and be present all day long, and kind of step away from social media. That’s the other big push that I see a lot of people aren’t concerning themselves with anymore. The big difference makers in the community, they don’t care. They’re not doing that. They’re not worried what other people are doing. They’re concerned about what they’re doing and how they’re gonna grow.
Kurt Elster: You had said, “I don’t know why people reach out to me.” Because you’re brilliant. You may not think of yourself that way, but you’ve got… No, you have tremendous emotional intelligence. You’re very, you’re clearly mindful and aware, and you’re operating with a lot of intentionality. One thing that came up, you’ve mentioned more than once, is sort of how screens can derail you, so it’s like the habit of the false productivity, the habit of, “Well, I’m gonna respond to these emails and do these customer things, and I’m gonna feel productive, but really my business is not moving forward. I’m treading water.” You brought that up. You said I’m not gonna let… Now you’re phone’s in the background. You said, “We gotta ignore social media.” And you said, “I unplug, we get away from devices when I want to have time with my wife.”
These are all incredible things, but the common thread there is, “Hey, phones may be bad.”
Tommy Tartaglia: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Right? I think that’s the realization you’ve come to. Talk to me about that.
Tommy Tartaglia: Yeah, so I’m in a weird spot, because I’m 35 years old, and I was around before phones, and then I was around after phones, so I’m not the 20-year-old kid who doesn’t, I guess 18 or 19-year-old kid who doesn’t remember what life was like without a cell phone, right? There’s a lot of those people that are like, “No, I’ve always had a cell phone. It’s just kind of who I am.” Or, “My parents have always had a cell phone.”
I was around when that Zack Morris phone got introduced, and I bought that first Sprint camera cell phone that was… I don’t know, probably the size of a coffee mug, that couldn’t fit in your pocket. But I remember what life was like before that, and what my relationships were like before that.
Kurt Elster: It was definitely different.
Tommy Tartaglia: Yeah. It’s a struggle to get back there, you know? You were a part of something, and you’re a part of a community. You’re talking with people, and when you’re going to a bar, you’re actually… You’re looking somebody in the eyes, and I don’t want to be the guy that’s 35 years old and talks like he’s 60, and is like, “I remember the days.” But those, you gotta set that aside, and you have to be present with the people that are there. And I think it makes people feel really uncomfortable, and that’s… I guess that’s where you’re gonna start to see that progress, is outside of your comfort zone.
I hate to read off of a Hallmark card, but it’s the truth. You don’t want to be able to just stare at your phone all day and not grow relationships with people. Some of the best things that have happened in my life are people that I’ve met in bars or restaurants and just talking to them. And those would have never happened if it wasn’t for me putting my cell phone in my pocket, or kind of turning it off on airplane mode, or doing whatever. So, there’s definitely a time and a place for that, but it’s an entrepreneurial curse. I sell a ton of t-shirts online, and a lot of them are done through Facebook and Instagram, but I don’t need to be on there. I don’t need to respond to every comment. I don’t need to be handling that. I have employees to do that.
And then, honestly on the weekends, it’s okay. If you lose a couple sales, that’s 100% okay. You don’t need to be there for that.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Have you read or heard of How to Break Up with Your Phone?
Tommy Tartaglia: No, I haven’t, but I should probably jump into that.
Kurt Elster: This was the… I knew it was an issue. This was the one that made me very aware of it, after… I think it was an interview on NPR, or This American Life, whatever. But it’s a book called How to Break Up with Your Phone, and the first half of it… The second half is, “Hey, here’s how to break up with your phone.” More importantly, the first half is like, “All right, here’s what’s going on, and here’s how these things have been intentionally designed to be psychologically addictive.” And it completely changes the way you see your phone, and apps, and social media.
But you’re right. When the first iPhone came out, 2007, and it didn’t have apps. There was no app store for what, a year? It’s very different between now and then, and I just turned 36, so we’re about the same age. Yeah, man, remember T9 texting?
Tommy Tartaglia: Yeah. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And that was the most important thing.
Tommy Tartaglia: You’re like, “Just call me, bro. It’s gonna take me 30 minutes to tell you where I am right now. Just give me a phone call.”
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Tommy Tartaglia: I’m very interested to scope out that book, because again, Steve, the other owner of RECON Rings and I were in Vegas two weeks ago, and it’s you look at your phone, and you kind of look at slot machines, and you walk around Vegas like, “It’s the same damn thing.”
Kurt Elster: Yes!
Tommy Tartaglia: This is a reward system, and there’s lights, and there’s shining things, and there’s notifications, and for me, we call it our freedom moment. What my freedom moment was, I think a year ago or a year and a half ago, when I turned all my notifications off on my phone. I don’t know how many emails. I’ll pull it up right now. I don’t know how many text messages or emails I have, because there’s no red… Well, I know I missed a call, but I don’t have 742 unread emails, or three text messages. I have to go in there and look at it, and I typically go in there… I don’t know, maybe once every two hours. Once every two and a half hours.
Because I don’t really need to, and there’s… That, for me, was freeing, because I don’t need to, “Oh, am I missing something… Or did this happen? Or is this going on over here?” It’s the same thing when you’re walking through Vegas. Well, let’s play another 50 bucks on this slot machine. It’s like, “Dude, I don’t need that. Am I really gonna win? I’ve got pretty poor luck. I don’t really think I’m gonna win anything, so I don’t really need to put that last 50 bucks into this, or pick up my phone and kind of scope out this.”
But yeah, that was my freedom moment, when I just turned off all notifications for that.
Kurt Elster: I like that, the phrase freedom moment. Tommy, you’re an interesting guy. I could easily do, now that I’ve discovered that you have gone down this road of productivity through mindfulness, we could do another hour just on that. And maybe we should. Reschedule, do another episode on that.
Tommy Tartaglia: Sure.
Kurt Elster: But as our final question, looking back, for new entrepreneurs, tell them where should they focus? Because it’s easy, especially early on, to not know what to care about, to not know what to give your attention, and you could just be going every month an inch in every direction, where it’s like, “Oh, should I be working on funnels? Or my upsell strategy? Or focusing on my conversion rate? Or trying to get my email welcome series going?” Where do you start? Where do you focus in those early days?
Tommy Tartaglia: Yeah, so we’ll kind of jump into it, and I’m gonna drop an F bomb again. I apologize. But we’re gonna jump into the be passionate about something, and go from there. You can learn everything else, but one of my biggest struggles was we call it paralysis by analysis when I started the business, was I was just frozen, because I couldn’t make a decision. I didn’t know, “Hey, should I be working on my conversion rate? It’s only 3.1%, and typically for our apparel brand, it should be at 4%. Or should I worry about sequencing my emails, or do this?” Just slow down, and just be passionate about something, and launch the product. Get the idea. Tweak it. Launch it. Tweak it again, and relaunch it.
And nobody’s gonna be mad at you if you create a product that not everyone loves. Just be okay with it, launch it, and then figure it out from there. And whether that’s a t-shirt, whether that’s a silicone wedding band, whether that’s whatever. Don’t create crap products by any means, but don’t get stuck in that paralysis by analysis that we always do, and we have a term, it’s actually upstairs. We say, “Fuck it. Ship it.”
Kurt Elster: Right!
Tommy Tartaglia: Like get it to the customer today. Don’t wait. Don’t figure out, “Well, is this, does it need to be this?” Or, “Hey, I didn’t know about…” Just get it to them, and if there’s an issue, they’ll reach out to you. Then, if there is an issue, prove how awesome of a person you are and how great your customer service it is. Solve that issue today and make that customer service experience and that interaction with your brand that much better.
Kurt Elster: I love it. Yeah. For the longest time, I had a sticker stuck to my monitor that said, “Fuck it, ship it.”
Tommy Tartaglia: That’s it.
Kurt Elster: And the point is not to just be like, “Ship garbage.”
Tommy Tartaglia: No, not at all.
Kurt Elster: It’s just don’t get caught up in, “Well, I have to make this perfect and better and just keep optimizing, optimizing, optimizing,” when no one is looking. You just, you need to get that product out there and work in public, because it is hard enough to get people to care at all, let alone to have them even notice these tiny things that ultimately you discover really only mattered to you.
Tommy Tartaglia: Yeah. Yeah. 100% agree with that.
Kurt Elster: Very good. Tommy, where could people go to learn more about you?
Tommy Tartaglia: Find us at RECON Rings, on Instagram @reconrings, @tangocharlieapparel. Follow Casey at Tacticalories and our boy Pete over at Mixtape Coffee Company, and we’ve always got something fun going on, so you’ll see some pretty good transference between the different brands, and it’s always a ton of fun.
Kurt Elster: I’ve got all of those in the show notes. Tommy, thank you.
Tommy Tartaglia: Awesome. Thank you very much.